A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs

We're talking about a step that updates weights based on say between 10k and 1M tokens.

If you don't periodically clean the context, an LLM effectively goes insane in terms of outputs.

If the LLM were fully controlling a physical system (like a robot body) that contained it the resulting insanity of an ever-growing, never cleaned context would likely result in some sort of death-like event.

Very few animals fail to eventually die even with as much sleep as they want.

But before death, there is a loss of cognitive function from sleep deprivation, and we observe this too with AI whose context windows get too full.

While we don't know very much about sleep, my understanding is that we do have a long list of things that we do during it, we just don't really understand if sleep is necessary for each of them or simply a convenient opportunity for it.

There's lots of things biology does in response to easy-to-detect proxy signals instead of the real thing they care about: Our sensation of needing to breathe more is based on too much carbonic acid in our blood, not lack of oxygen, which is why in general nobody is allowed in an elevator with a liquid nitrogen dewar; Our natural distaste for incest is based on who we grew up with, not our actual DNA; Get too cold and some people suddenly feel warm and want to (and some do) take all their clothes off even though that would just make them hypothermic even faster.

Being asleep may trigger the things we need to get done, but that doesn't mean sleep is *fundamentally* necessary for the things we need to get done. It could be just that it happens to be the way our biochemistry is wired, and we may find some other way to trigger those things.

The quotation given by djeastm would by my guess for what a dream is, and why we have them. But we don't spend all our time asleep, dreaming. And I'd be the first to say that my guess isn't worth much, as I'm not a brain scientist.

This just obscures the conversation IMO. We know a great deal of functions that sleeping performs. We don't know everything. For some reason this prevents us for using this word in a computing context? What do you think about sleep(1) in Unix?

Also..

> Does their LLM "die" if it can't perform the function described?

what "death" means in the context of a computer program?

Also, there's different kinds/stages of sleep, which probably perform different functions.

For instance, REM may do something like the GP describes, consolidating memories and processing learning. Deep sleep may do something else (I vaguely recall some stage of sleep is used by neurons to clear certain waste products).

Meaning: it might just provide a big advantage.

I don't want to overextend and assume that any advantage extends to LLMs. That rest-and-recuperate advantage might also extend to LLM-based AIs. Or maybe not, and the rest-and-recuperate is mainly useful for biology-based organisms. But there is some logic to it.

> The function of sleep in animals is largely obscure.

In my understanding, it's well-understood that sleep is used to consolidate and store long-term memories (amongst other functions, like cell and muscle repair). They've found this memory-consolidation-during-sleep even in relatively simple animals like bees.

So, whether the LLM "dies" in any sense may or may not be important for what "sleep" is defined to be in this article. It's quite possible that sleep also affects endocrine system in animals or hormones etc... and that's what's causing death, not necessarily anything to do with how brain functions.

It dies in terms of usefulness if it can't stay up to date with new knowledge. That is, it will no longer be used and thus effectively die off.

That turns out to be un-settled science. No human has ever died from lack of sleep.

People point to “fatal familial insomnia” as a counterexample. But they die to the disease, not the lack of sleep.

In a series of controlled experiments, rats and fruit flies did die from lack of sleep. But no one has yet proven that it holds true for vertebrates except for rats.

In other words, it could be true that “among vertebrates, only rats die of sleep deprivation.”

So “if an animal can’t sleep, it will eventually die” is actually quite hard to prove, and depending on how you look at it, somewhat easy to disprove by the fact that rats and fruit flies were so difficult to kill from sleep depravation alone.

Personally I’m skeptical of the rat study too. Claude amends this:

> What they did not establish: the mechanism. On autopsy, “no anatomical cause of death was identified.” The rats showed weight loss despite eating more, body temperature problems, and skin lesions, but nothing that pointed to a clean cause. So no, they could not say a rat “died from sleep deprivation alone” in the sense of identifying what sleep loss did to the body to kill it. They showed a strong association under tight controls, not a proven causal pathway.

"Sleep" is just used in their context to describe a non-interactive mode and they didn't lean heavily into zoomorphic - I think you mean - parallels.

You're grinding an axe on a single term. What is your broader hangup with them using the term "sleep"?

> Does their LLM "die" if it can't perform the function described?

We're reaching an age where LMGTFY should now be Let Me LLM That For You. Have you tried asking an LLM this question about the article? I believe it answers it very well.