Otherwise, LLMs have most of the books memorised anyway: https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3...
By replacing the names with something unique, you'll get much more certainty.
So it might be there, by predcondiditioning latent space to the area of harry potter world, you make it so much more probable that the full spell list is regurgitated from online resources that were also read, while asking naive might get it sometimes, and sometimes not.
the books act like a hypnotic trigger, and may not represent a generalized skill. Hence why replacing with random words would help clarify. if you still get the origional spells, regurgitation confirmed, if it finds the spells, it could be doing what we think. An even better test would be to replace all spell references AND jumble chapters around. This way it cant even "know" where to "look" for the spell names from training.
full transcript: pastebin.com/sMcVkuwd
I mean, you can try, but it won't be a definitive answer as to whether that knowledge truly exists or doesn't exist as it is encoded into the NN. It could take a lot of context from the books themselves to get to it.
This is the LLM's magic trick that has everyone fooled into thinking they're intelligent - it can very convincingly cosplay an intelligent being by parroting an intelligent being's output. This is equivalent to making a recording of Elvis, playing it back, and believing that Elvis is actually alive inside of the playback device. And let's face it, if a time traveler brought a modern music playback device back hundreds of years and showed it to everyone, they WOULD think that. Why? Because they have not become accustomed to the technology and have no concept of how it could work. The same is true of LLMs - the technology was thrust on society so quickly that there was no time for people to adjust and understand its inner workings, so most people think it's actually doing something akin to intelligence. The truth is it's just as far from intelligence your music playback device is from having Elvis inside of it.
A music playback device's purpose is to allow you hear Elvis' voice. A good device does it well: you hear Elvis' voice (maybe with some imperfections). Whether a real Elvis is inside of it or not, doesn't matter - its purpose is fulfilled regardless. By your analogy, an LLM simply reproduces what an intelligent person would say on the matter. If it does its job more-less, it doesn't matter either, whether it's "truly intelligent" or not, its output is already useful. I think it's completely irrelevant in both cases to the question "how well does it do X?" If you think about it, 95% we know we learned from school/environment/parents, we didn't discover it ourselves via some kind of scientific method, we just parrot what other intelligent people said before us, mostly. Maybe human "intelligence" itself is 95% parroting/basic pattern matching from training data? (18 years of training during childhood!)
Shoot, I'd even go so far as to write a script that takes in a bunch of text, reorganizes sentences, and outputs them in a random order with the secrets. Kind of like a "Where's Waldo?", but for text
Just a few casual thoughts.
I'm actually thinking about coming up with some interesting coding exercises that I can run across all models. I know we already have benchmarks, however some of the recent work I've done has really shown huge weak points in every model I've run them on.
Pretty sure the books had to be included in its training material in full text. It's one of the most popular book series ever created, of course they would train on it. So "some" is an understatement in this case.
