Paper ID: 2308.07120

Position: Key Claims in LLM Research Have a Long Tail of Footnotes

Anna Rogers, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni

Much of the recent discourse within the ML community has been centered around Large Language Models (LLMs), their functionality and potential -- yet not only do we not have a working definition of LLMs, but much of this discourse relies on claims and assumptions that are worth re-examining. We contribute a definition of LLMs, critically examine five common claims regarding their properties (including 'emergent properties'), and conclude with suggestions for future research directions and their framing.

Submitted: Aug 14, 2023