Ellie Pavlick stands in Brown University’s Computer History Museum. Her work on how large language models understand concepts often merges philosoph

Does AI Know What an Apple Is? She Aims to Find Out.

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2024-04-26 00:30:03

Ellie Pavlick stands in Brown University’s Computer History Museum. Her work on how large language models understand concepts often merges philosophy with science.

Start talking to Ellie Pavlick about her work — looking for evidence of understanding within large language models (LLMs) — and she might sound as if she’s poking fun at it. The phrase “hand-wavy” is a favorite, and if she mentions “meaning” or “reasoning,” it’ll often come with conspicuous air quotes. This is just Pavlick’s way of keeping herself honest. As a computer scientist studying language models at Brown University and Google DeepMind, she knows that embracing natural language’s inherent mushiness is the only way to take it seriously. “This is a scientific discipline — and it’s a little squishy,” she said.

Precision and nuance have coexisted in Pavlick’s world since adolescence, when she enjoyed math and science “but always identified as more of a creative type.” As an undergraduate, she earned degrees in economics and saxophone performance before pursuing a doctorate in computer science, a field where she still feels like an outsider. “There are a lot of people who [think] intelligent systems will look a lot like computer code: neat and conveniently like a lot of systems [we’re] good at understanding,” she said. “I just believe the answers are complicated. If I have a solution that’s simple, I’m pretty sure it’s wrong. And I don’t want to be wrong.”