LLMs and the Military
The news that LLMs will be gifted to the US Military is not good. LLMs fulfil their intended function – getting more useful information back from a search engine – instead of a million hits, if you are lucky you get an informative article which may be on point. But when it comes to life and death an LLM is not a reliable tool. Put simply, it do esn’t understand the meaning of a single word of English. Instead, it relies on word associations. As an example, here are two sentences talking about a movie set. We watched a movie set in Hawaii. We visited a movie set in Hawaii, and spoke to the cast. Notice how you read them differently, unconsciously inserting a “that was” in the first one. Because handling words happens unconsciously, many people forget about it, but unless a system is emulating a person’s unconscious mind, it will make a real mess of even small pieces of language. Admittedly, the communications are pretty basic in a warfighting environment, making i...
