What Can Language Models Actually Do?

This is the first of a five-part series I'm writing about redefining human creativity in the age of AI.

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I want to help save our idea of human creativity. Artificial intelligence can write, illustrate, design, code, and much more. But rather than eliminating the need for human creativity, these new powers can help us redefine and expand it. 

To start, we need to do a technological dissection of language models, defining what they can do well—and what they can’t. By doing so, we can isolate our own role in the creative process. 

If we can do that, we’ll be able to wield language models for creative work—and still call it creativity. To start, let’s talk about what language models can do.

The psychology and behavior of language models

The current generation of language models is called transformers, and in order to understand what they do, we need to take that word seriously. What kind of transformations can transformers do?

Mathematically, language models are recursive next-token predictors. They are given a sequence of text and predict the next bit of text in the sequence. This process runs over and over in a loop, building upon its previous outputs self-referentially until it reaches a stopping point. It’s sort of like a snowball rolling downhill and picking up more and more snow along the way.

But this question is best asked at a higher level than simply mathematical possibility. Instead, what are the inputs and outputs we observe from today’s language models? And what can we infer about how they think? 

In essence, we need to study LLMs’ behavior and psychology, rather than their biology and physics.

This is a sketch based on experience. It’s a framework I’ve built for the purposes of doing great creative work with AI.

A framework for what language models do

Language models transform text in the following ways:

• Compression: They compress a big prompt into a short response.
• Expansion: They expand a short prompt into a long response.
• Translation: They convert a prompt in one form into a response in another form.

These are manifestations of their outward behavior. From there, we can infer a property of their psychology—the underlying thinking process that creates their behavior:

• Remixing: They mix two or more texts (or learned representations of texts) together and interpolate between them.

I’m going to break down these elements in successive parts of this series over the next few weeks. None of these answers are final, so consider this a public exploration that’s open for critique. Today, I want to talk to you about the first operation: compression.