This work is intended as a voice in the discussion over previous claims that a pretrained large language model (LLM) based on the Transformer model architecture can be sentient. Such claims have been made concerning the LaMDA model and also concerning the current wave of LLM-powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT. This claim, if confirmed, would have serious ramifications in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community due to wide-spread use of similar models. However, here we take the position that such a large language model cannot be sentient, or conscious, and that LaMDA in particular exhibits no advances over other similar models that would qualify it. We justify this by analysing the Transformer architecture through Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. We see the claims of sentience as part of a wider tendency to use anthropomorphic language in NLP reporting. Regardless of the veracity of the claims, we consider this an opportune moment to take stock of progress in language modelling and consider the ethical implications of the task. In order to make this work helpful for readers outside the NLP community, we also present the necessary background in language modelling.

Despite the remarkable progress in the development of predictive models for healthcare, applying these algorithms on a large scale has been challenging. Algorithms trained on a particular task, based on specific data formats available in a set of medical records, tend to not generalize well to other tasks or databases in which the data fields may differ. To address this challenge, we propose General Healthcare Predictive Framework (GenHPF), which is applicable to any EHR with minimal preprocessing for multiple prediction tasks. GenHPF resolves heterogeneity in medical codes and schemas by converting EHRs into a hierarchical textual representation while incorporating as many features as possible. To evaluate the efficacy of GenHPF, we conduct multi-task learning experiments with single-source and multi-source settings, on three publicly available EHR datasets with different schemas for 12 clinically meaningful prediction tasks. Our framework significantly outperforms baseline models that utilize domain knowledge in multi-source learning, improving average AUROC by 1.2%P in pooled learning and 2.6%P in transfer learning while also showing comparable results when trained on a single EHR dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that self-supervised pretraining using multi-source datasets is effective when combined with GenHPF, resulting in a 0.6%P AUROC improvement compared to models without pretraining. By eliminating the need for preprocessing and feature engineering, we believe that this work offers a solid framework for multi-task and multi-source learning that can be leveraged to speed up the scaling and usage of predictive algorithms in healthcare.

This study presents German FinBERT, a novel pre-trained German language model tailored for financial textual data. The model is trained through a comprehensive pre-training process, leveraging a substantial corpus comprising financial reports, ad-hoc announcements and news related to German companies. The corpus size is comparable to the data sets commonly used for training standard BERT models. I evaluate the performance of German FinBERT on downstream tasks, specifically sentiment prediction, topic recognition and question answering against generic German language models. My results demonstrate improved performance on finance-specific data, indicating the efficacy of German FinBERT in capturing domain-specific nuances. The presented findings suggest that German FinBERT holds promise as a valuable tool for financial text analysis, potentially benefiting various applications in the financial domain.

This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. Shortly after ChatGPT's release last year, a cadre of critics captured headlines and made noise on social media claiming that A.I. would soon kill us. As wondrous as a computer speaking in natural language might be, it could use that intelligence to level the planet. The thinking went mainstream via letters calling for research pauses and 60 Minutes interviews amplifying existential concerns. Leaders like Barack Obama publicly worried about A.I. autonomously hacking the financial system--or worse.

Can AI tell you if you will need an umbrella? AI can predict the weather 10 days ahead more accurately than current state-of-the-art simulations, says AI firm Google DeepMind – but meteorologists have warned against abandoning weather models based in real physical principles and just relying on patterns in data, while pointing out shortcomings in the AI approach. Existing weather forecasts are based on mathematical models, which use physics and powerful supercomputers to deterministically predict what will happen in the future. These models have slowly become more accurate by adding finer detail, which in turn requires more computation and therefore ever more powerful computers and higher energy demands. Rémi Lam at Google DeepMind and his colleagues have taken a different approach.

In September, researchers at Google's DeepMind AI unit in London were paying unusual attention to the weather across the pond. Hurricane Lee was at least 10 days out from landfall--eons in forecasting terms--and official forecasts were still waffling between the storm landing on major Northeast cities or missing them entirely. DeepMind's own experimental software had made a very specific prognosis of landfall much farther north. "We were riveted to our seats," says research scientist Rémi Lam. A week and a half later, on September 16, Lee struck land right where DeepMind's software, called GraphCast, had predicted days earlier: Long Island, Nova Scotia--far from major population centers.

GUI testing checks if a software system behaves as expected when users interact with its graphical interface, e.g., testing specific functionality or validating relevant use case scenarios. Currently, deciding what to test at this high level is a manual task since automated GUI testing tools target lower level adequacy metrics such as structural code coverage or activity coverage. We propose DroidAgent, an autonomous GUI testing agent for Android, for semantic, intent-driven automation of GUI testing. It is based on Large Language Models and support mechanisms such as long- and short-term memory. Given an Android app, DroidAgent sets relevant task goals and subsequently tries to achieve them by interacting with the app. Our empirical evaluation of DroidAgent using 15 apps from the Themis benchmark shows that it can set up and perform realistic tasks, with a higher level of autonomy. For example, when testing a messaging app, DroidAgent created a second account and added a first account as a friend, testing a realistic use case, without human intervention. On average, DroidAgent achieved 61% activity coverage, compared to 51% for current state-of-the-art GUI testing techniques. Further, manual analysis shows that 317 out of the 374 autonomously created tasks are realistic and relevant to app functionalities, and also that DroidAgent interacts deeply with the apps and covers more features.

Curated datasets for healthcare are often limited due to the need of human annotations from experts. In this paper, we present MedEval, a multi-level, multi-task, and multi-domain medical benchmark to facilitate the development of language models for healthcare. MedEval is comprehensive and consists of data from several healthcare systems and spans 35 human body regions from 8 examination modalities. With 22,779 collected sentences and 21,228 reports, we provide expert annotations at multiple levels, offering a granular potential usage of the data and supporting a wide range of tasks. Moreover, we systematically evaluated 10 generic and domain-specific language models under zero-shot and finetuning settings, from domain-adapted baselines in healthcare to general-purposed state-of-the-art large language models (e.g., ChatGPT). Our evaluations reveal varying effectiveness of the two categories of language models across different tasks, from which we notice the importance of instruction tuning for few-shot usage of large language models. Our investigation paves the way toward benchmarking language models for healthcare and provides valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of adopting large language models in medical domains, informing their practical applications and future advancements.

In the current user-server interaction paradigm of prompted generation with large language models (LLM) on cloud, the server fully controls the generation process, which leaves zero options for users who want to keep the generated text to themselves. We propose LatticeGen, a cooperative framework in which the server still handles most of the computation while the user controls the sampling operation. The key idea is that the true generated sequence is mixed with noise tokens by the user and hidden in a noised lattice. Considering potential attacks from a hypothetically malicious server and how the user can defend against it, we propose the repeated beam-search attack and the mixing noise scheme. In our experiments we apply LatticeGen to protect both prompt and generation. It is shown that while the noised lattice degrades generation quality, LatticeGen successfully protects the true generation to a remarkable degree under strong attacks (more than 50% of the semantic remains hidden as measured by BERTScore).

Genomic (DNA) sequences encode an enormous amount of information for gene regulation and protein synthesis. Similar to natural language models, researchers have proposed foundation models in genomics to learn generalizable features from unlabeled genome data that can then be fine-tuned for downstream tasks such as identifying regulatory elements. Due to the quadratic scaling of attention, previous Transformer-based genomic models have used 512 to 4k tokens as context (<0.001% of the human genome), significantly limiting the modeling of long-range interactions in DNA. In addition, these methods rely on tokenizers or fixed k-mers to aggregate meaningful DNA units, losing single nucleotide resolution where subtle genetic variations can completely alter protein function via single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Recently, Hyena, a large language model based on implicit convolutions was shown to match attention in quality while allowing longer context lengths and lower time complexity. Leveraging Hyena's new long-range capabilities, we present HyenaDNA, a genomic foundation model pretrained on the human reference genome with context lengths of up to 1 million tokens at the single nucleotide-level - an up to 500x increase over previous dense attention-based models. HyenaDNA scales sub-quadratically in sequence length (training up to 160x faster than Transformer), uses single nucleotide tokens, and has full global context at each layer. We explore what longer context enables - including the first use of in-context learning in genomics. On fine-tuned benchmarks from the Nucleotide Transformer, HyenaDNA reaches state-of-the-art (SotA) on 12 of 18 datasets using a model with orders of magnitude less parameters and pretraining data. On the GenomicBenchmarks, HyenaDNA surpasses SotA on 7 of 8 datasets on average by +10 accuracy points. Code at https://github.com/HazyResearch/hyena-dna.