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Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

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Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#61

Post by benreesman »

soraki_soladead wrote: post #53
moffkalast wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the brute force approach anyway. Even if you do take an inordinate amount of data to sample from you'll likely get something that's woefully impractical to operate, even if it produces vaguely human like responses. We do on the other hand know for a fact it's possible to run an instance of consciousness in a volume of about a liter that consumes like 20 watts (aka your average human brain), so there's somethin…

> GPT-3 already uses about twice as many parameters This isn't accurate. GPT-3 has 175B parameters. The human brain has ~175B cells (neurons, glia, etc.) The analog to GPT-3's parameter count would be synapses, not neurons, where even conservative estimates put the human brain at several orders of magnitude larger. It's likely that >90% of the 175B could be pruned with little change in performance. That changes the s…

OPT-6.7B is good, but not even close to GPT-3.

If you can get GPT-like performance out of a 17B model, you should publish that.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#62

Post by joshspankit »

boredemployee wrote: post #8

Just a side note, I was showing some friends gpt3 and asking some trivial questions, trying to impress them, when one of them asked me: "Is it any different from like asking google for the same information?" I mean, In a pure naive and practical point of view she wasn't that wrong.

I watched Google grow up, and for people who’s main experience is with the last decade or so, I’d say they have a very insightful view.

Yes, some have argued that Google can’t make content and from a technological standpoint that’s right, but here’s the fulcrum: from the perspective of “I asked a question and got a result that seems right though I’m not sure”, there’s shockingly little difference between GPT-3 generated content, and low-effort SEO-optimized content found on the first page of Google.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#63

Post by soraki_soladead »

benreesman wrote: post #61
soraki_soladead wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-3 already uses about twice as many parameters This isn't accurate. GPT-3 has 175B parameters. The human brain has ~175B cells (neurons, glia, etc.) The analog to GPT-3's parameter count would be synapses, not neurons, where even conservative estimates put the human brain at several orders of magnitude larger. It's likely that >90% of the 175B could be pruned with little change in performance. That changes the s…

OPT-6.7B is good, but not even close to GPT-3. If you can get GPT-like performance out of a 17B model, you should publish that.

I’m referring to post-training pruning not smaller models. This is already well-studied but it’s not as useful as it could be on current hardware. (Deep learning currently works better with the extra parameters at training time).

Retrieval models (again, lots of published examples: RETRO, etc.) that externalize their data will bring the sizes down by about that order as well.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#64

Post by moffkalast »

kadonoishi wrote: post #60
moffkalast wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the brute force approach anyway. Even if you do take an inordinate amount of data to sample from you'll likely get something that's woefully impractical to operate, even if it produces vaguely human like responses. We do on the other hand know for a fact it's possible to run an instance of consciousness in a volume of about a liter that consumes like 20 watts (aka your average human brain), so there's somethin…

Is evolution not brute-force?

Naturally, but it takes a few billion years. Not sure about you but I don't really feel like waiting.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#65

Post by omnicognate »

benreesman wrote: post #55
omnicognate wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worl…

Hey if you’ve got David Deutsch dead to rights you should book a meeting and have him hand you his Fellowship in the Royal Society. I’m not a physicist but I am an interested layman, I’m pretty sure I’ll catch wind of the Nobel Prize you’d win for proving him wrong about everything.

This isn't some unique insight of mine. There's a section about it in the wikipedia page for MWI, which I linked in my comment. Everett himself referenced the problem and attempted, unconvincingly, to argue around it in his original paper.

The mystery to me is why the obvious flaw in the idea hasn't killed it dead for so many smart people, such as David Deutsch. Instead they engage in bizarre logical contortions to try and recover the Born probabilities and some shadow of a meaning for them. If you think there's some actual merit in their attempts, listed at the wiki link I pasted, I'm all ears.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#66

Post by trention »

Veedrac wrote: post #42
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.

>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.

No, the "popularity" of that sentiment exists because of their "effectiveness". That sentiment was existing and being voiced 10 years ago.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#67

Post by paskozdilar »

tehsauce wrote: post #13
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…

Worth noting that in the limit the distribution P(human did/said A | context B) is a complete definition of human behavior. If you could model this perfectly, that would be a perfect model of a human ie identical.

Exactly.

And the real problem is the way humans decide sentience in the first place - by how much the machinery acts as if it were sentient. There is no other information - just our perception. If we imagine two agents, A and B, one sentient and one insentient, but both acting identically, we theoretically couldn't decide which one is which.

So whether or not there is sentience in a machine then becomes a question as unanswerable as whether there is something that exists outside the universe we can perceive. We cannot know what we cannot possibly perceive.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#68

Post by trention »

the8472 wrote: post #48
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…

>The fraction of samples being verbatim reurgitations is low

Copilot spitting out a function out of its training data with changed variable names to match those in your file(s) - and no one is actually testing what proportions of results those are - is still regurgitation.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#69

Post by legalcorrection »

benreesman wrote: post #57
legalcorrection wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. Pure behaviorism is just willful blindness. Consciousness is a real phenomenon, as any person not philosophically committed to denying its existence can tell you. It's front and center of our experience of human cognition. It would be quite strange for it to serve no function in the human mind. Yeah, it's hard to quantify and isolate and experiment on, but that just speaks to either current limit…

You strongly disagree that other intelligent, social, creative animals are built along similar lines to Homo sapiens? You really think that we’re a special case, that a difference in degree has become a difference in kind? I personally experience a feeling that I’m conscious subjectively, but I have no evidence that I’m any more or less motivated by pleasure or pain or community than a dolphin is. Where do we draw th…

I don't mean to suggest that animals don't also have consciousness, or that it's not important to explaining their behavior too.

Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?

#70

Post by benreesman »

omnicognate wrote: post #65
benreesman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey if you’ve got David Deutsch dead to rights you should book a meeting and have him hand you his Fellowship in the Royal Society. I’m not a physicist but I am an interested layman, I’m pretty sure I’ll catch wind of the Nobel Prize you’d win for proving him wrong about everything.

This isn't some unique insight of mine. There's a section about it in the wikipedia page for MWI, which I linked in my comment. Everett himself referenced the problem and attempted, unconvincingly, to argue around it in his original paper. The mystery to me is why the obvious flaw in the idea hasn't killed it dead for so many smart people, such as David Deutsch. Instead they engage in bizarre logical contortions to t…

Right, it’s well known that if you’re committed to getting probabilities out of amplitudes things go off the rails. Everett himself couldn’t go the full way.

Fully deterministic, you see the part of the wave function that you see. You’re entangled with the apparatus.

Deutsch, and his protege Marletto go the whole way: no free will, no arrow of time, no subjective human experience at all.

Now? No measurement problem. No interpretations of collapse.

These people have decided that the subjective experience of observing an experiment is of secondary importance to clean math.

I appreciate that “you and I don’t exist in any way we’d recognize it” is a big pill to swallow, but I find the idea that humans looking in microscopes mutates the universe a bigger pill.

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