Are language models deprived of electric sleep? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#41

Post by sitkack » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

boredemployee wrote: post #34

skybrian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course it's different. Google can point you to a real Wikipedia article while GPT-3 will generate links to fake ones (or you could ask it to generate a fake article.) It's the difference between truth and fiction. Or at least, a first-level approximation. Wikipedia articles can be wrong.

Well google also can point me to fake links with no real content at all as well. But I get your point.

At the level of abstraction I believe your friend was talking about, yes, this is effectively a condensed model of "The Internet" and the results returned by Google.

For those saying it can generate new things, well it is interpolating between existing data points in the corpus, but mushed through a bunch of math.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#42

Post by Veedrac » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #2

I’m well aware that this is an unpopular opinion. When your game plan is take a multi-head attention transformer and overfit it on as much of the Internet as we have A100s to fit it on, you’re going to get a distribution, and if you sample from it, it’s going to sound like the Internet. People read too much into this. The technology is obviously powerful borderline dangerous, but it’s still just maximizing P(this-sen…

1. They aren't overfit.

2. It was far from obvious a priori that this could work at all.

The existence of the sentiment ‘lol you trained a big model on X so obviously it produces a good probability distribution on X’ only exists because big models proved to be extraordinarily more effective than anyone expected.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#43

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #32

This is the Copenhagen Business School (one of the largest universities in Denmark) library homepage and presumably the library blog. Which makes it weird that the author uses "I", when the author name is not shown.

As a blog editor, I can definitely see a scenario where submissions are made by those unaware of details about the final form - especially when students (likely early in their publishing career) are involved.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#44

Post by masswerk » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #32

This is the Copenhagen Business School (one of the largest universities in Denmark) library homepage and presumably the library blog. Which makes it weird that the author uses "I", when the author name is not shown.

From the comments section we learn that the author is Thomas Basbøll, the same person mentioned in the prompt, "What about Thomas Basbøll? Didn't he play a part in this process?" in step 8. As this is obviously some kind of inside joke, I guess, we are supposed to know already and regulars to the blog will know.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#45

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #2

I’m well aware that this is an unpopular opinion. When your game plan is take a multi-head attention transformer and overfit it on as much of the Internet as we have A100s to fit it on, you’re going to get a distribution, and if you sample from it, it’s going to sound like the Internet. People read too much into this. The technology is obviously powerful borderline dangerous, but it’s still just maximizing P(this-sen…

[deleted]

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#46

Post by omnicognate » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

alar44 wrote: post #12

benreesman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High-energy physicists are about as serious as it gets, but they’re still dragging their feet around many worlds because it has uncomfortable implications for consciousness and free will. Homo Sapiens has a serious agenda around being something other than the smartest chimpanzee.

No, they're "dragging their feet" because it's impossible to test, it's unfalsifiable.

And because if every outcome happens the probabilities of those outcomes are meaningless, and those probabilities are the predictive content of a quantum mechanical theory. It's an "interpretation" that requires you to ditch the entire value of the thing you're "interpreting". You don't need to know anything about QM other than that it has been empirically tested and is probabilistic in nature to reject the many worlds interpretation on this basis.

Each time I mention this online I state it more confidently, in the hope that some day someone will Cunningham's law me and change my mind. If I haven't committed some gross misunderstanding it's disappointing that so many physicists fall for such obvious bunk. I've already seen the attempted arguments listed at [1] and none of them are remotely convincing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation#Pro...

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#47

Post by IdealeZahlen » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #37

IdealeZahlen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's math;not physics. You need experiments in physics.

Can you explain the experiments and physics that justifies physicists beliefs in the Copenhagen interpretation of QM?

Experiments justify 'predictions' of certain mathematical models, not 'interpretations'. As for a belief in interpretations, it's more of a philsophy, and Feynman said just 'shut up and calculate'.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#48

Post by the8472 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #2

I’m well aware that this is an unpopular opinion. When your game plan is take a multi-head attention transformer and overfit it on as much of the Internet as we have A100s to fit it on, you’re going to get a distribution, and if you sample from it, it’s going to sound like the Internet. People read too much into this. The technology is obviously powerful borderline dangerous, but it’s still just maximizing P(this-sen…

Part of the evaluation procedures for the models like these is checking whether the output they produce is present in the training set. The fraction of samples being verbatim reurgitations is low unless you prompt-engineer your way to that, copilot being able to recite the fast inverse square root function being a common example. But the ability to recite some samples is not proof of inability to create novel outputs.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#49

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:38 PM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #2

I’m well aware that this is an unpopular opinion. When your game plan is take a multi-head attention transformer and overfit it on as much of the Internet as we have A100s to fit it on, you’re going to get a distribution, and if you sample from it, it’s going to sound like the Internet. People read too much into this. The technology is obviously powerful borderline dangerous, but it’s still just maximizing P(this-sen…

[deleted]

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#50

Post by skybrian » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #41

boredemployee wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well google also can point me to fake links with no real content at all as well. But I get your point.

At the level of abstraction I believe your friend was talking about, yes, this is effectively a condensed model of "The Internet" and the results returned by Google. For those saying it can generate new things, well it is interpolating between existing data points in the corpus, but mushed through a bunch of math.

Yes, but also, mixing together different articles on the Internet by different authors results in a complicated mixture of truth and fiction. What you get back depends on the query and some amount of randomness (depending on settings).

By not mixing the articles together, a search engine lets you see where the information came from.

These are both useful things to do, but one is more useful for fiction and the other for nonfiction.

I'm not sure "interpolation" is the right word, though, for these mixtures. Transformer output seems more creative than that.