Earlier quoted context omitted.
What this experiment shows is that making stuff up off the top of your head, using memory alone, isn't as hard as it looks. But when doing actual research, we check our work against the real world. For example, that's how you get a list of real references rather than fake ones. Suppose we played a guessing game: given a title, does the Wikipedia article exist or not? You could fairly confidently say that "Apple" exis…
I sometimes fine tune new language models on the HN comment corpus for fun. It generates comments arguing that ML models are just parrots.
Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
81–90 of 95 posts
Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’m well aware that this is an unpopular opinion It’s so unpopular that literally every post on HN/proggit related to language models has the same comment ;)
Haha well played. I’ll counter your non-sequitor with an appeal to authority ;) I used to do this for a living.
If you’re a language model, congrats on hitting 0.00 perplexity on the HN comments dataset. Your sponsors would be proud :P
Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As a creative person, creativity is over rated. But dont let me speak for everyone.
It is a straight line in a higher dimensional space. We vibe with the space, or it chooses us by prior experience. Creativity is in some aspect, in the eye of the beholder. I think the creativity we see in ML models is not unlike the creativity we prescribe to humans.
Interpolation is the right word and the right concept and metaphor. A mixing between two concepts to create a path between the two.
Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When you’re churning through terrawords of training data and aren’t cross-validating against proportionally-sized hold out sets? It’s not a certainty that you’re overfitting but the burden is to show otherwise. Besides, if your corpus is asymptomatically everything , why wouldn’t fitting it perfectly fitting it be the goal? It would probably be more accurate to say that the bias/variance tradeoff loses meaning as the…
> Besides, if your corpus is asymptomatically everything, why wouldn’t fitting it perfectly fitting it be the goal?
That's called Google, and it serves a different purpose. Perfectly learning the distributional properties of text instead is not overfitting, that's just fitting.
Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Superdeterminism (a bad name for ordinary determinism plus a ridiculous unspecified mechanism that links the very thoughts and intentions of an oberver to the system being observed) is even worse. MWI having thrown the baby out with the bathwater, superdeterminism then discards the entire building and everyone living in it. You can "explain" anything with a theory of this nature just as you can with intelligent design. It has no value as an intepretation of a perfectly well functioning mathematical framework like QM.
And the question here is one of interpretation. You say that MWI gives you "clean math" but this isn't about the maths. The maths of quantum mechanics is what it is regardless of how you interpret it. Whether the Schrödinger equation describes the evolution of the system state and observation is a state vector collapse, or the Schrödinger equation describes the evolution of a multiverse and the apparent state vector collapse is an artifact of distinct outcomes decohering, the maths is exactly the same. MWI's claim that it's somehow "mathematically cleaner" or "just what the maths is saying" is nonsense. It's there in the name. It's an interpretation.
QM is a highly effective theory (or rather framework for theories) that has been tested to the umpteenth degree. The question of intepretation is a philosophical one more that a mathematical one, and certainly fascinating. To my mind a "good" interpretation would have to give some actual meaning to the functional components of the theory. If QM predicts something will happen 30% of the time and I test it and it happens 30% of the time, an interpretation that fails to give a meaning to that predictable, observed fact is no use to me.
You seem to think the problem others have with your preferred interpretations is that they are too small-minded to accept that reality is the way these ideas imply. This isn't the case at all. I don't find "free will" an interesting concept and I'm perfectly happy to contemplate a multiverse, deterministic or otherwise, if that's what the scientific method leads us to. What I'm not happy to do is to launch off into a world of wacky, unfalsifiable notions that remove meaning from our existing theories rather than adding it.
I could equally well make claims about the psychology of MWI's adherents, suggesting emotional explanations for why they seem bound to make ever more absurd claims in defence of their idea rather than accepting that it's flawed. I won't, though, because doing that is arrogant and presumptuous.
Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Superdeterminism (a bad name for ordinary determinism plus a ridiculous unspecified mechanism that links the very thoughts and intentions of an oberver to the system being observed) is even worse. MWI having thrown the baby out with the bathwater, superdeterminism then discards the entire building and everyone living in it. You can "explain" anything with a theory of this nature just as you can with intelligent desig…
I’m a seriously interested layman at best, so I could be failing to understand some of the subtleties, if so I apologize.
I’ve got no agenda around Everett’s initial idea and monograph being the end state. To your point, there are some known flaws with his initial formulation.
I find the idea that QM needs an interpretation absurd, MWI was a step on the path to that way of thinking. At a high level, the notion that all possible outcomes of an observable-producing operator on the wave function are equally “real” is clarifying.
I tend to agree with Deutsch and Marletto that “that which is admissible is admitted”.
It’s possible we’re in violent agreement.
QM, and more specifically QEM and QCD make wildly accurate predictions. As long as no one is talking about a causal structure unique to “consciousness” or some ridiculous narcissism like that, I’m very satisfied to rely on the falsifiable and well-tested laws.
Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Superdeterminism (a bad name for ordinary determinism plus a ridiculous unspecified mechanism that links the very thoughts and intentions of an oberver to the system being observed) is even worse. MWI having thrown the baby out with the bathwater, superdeterminism then discards the entire building and everyone living in it. You can "explain" anything with a theory of this nature just as you can with intelligent desig…
I’m a seriously interested layman at best, so I could be failing to understand some of the subtleties, if so I apologize. I’ve got no agenda around Everett’s initial idea and monograph being the end state. To your point, there are some known flaws with his initial formulation. I find the idea that QM needs an interpretation absurd, MWI was a step on the path to that way of thinking. At a high level, the notion that a…
Well that and the string theory people can kindly die in a fire.
Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree. Nonetheless, this approach of taking a fairly complex writing prompt and simply regurgitating contextually similar text from the internet often yields 100% meaningful results. This suggests that our intelligence is a lot more mimetic than we'd like to believe, which is perhaps an even more unpopular opinion.
Even if a sentence is meaningful standalone in vacuum, no communication between humans ever happens in such a way. It always matters who said it and why; we never take the substance independently from the agenda and the mind behind it, the context in which that mind existed and its relationship with our own, and so on. This strikes me as a crucial part of what intelligence (whether in humans or other creatures) means…
>Even if a sentence is meaningful standalone in vacuum, no communication between humans ever happens in such a way.
True, although much less so for (pseudo)anonymous online communication, as we’re having here.
>It always matters who said it and why; we never take the substance independently from the agenda and the mind behind it, the context in which that mind existed and its relationship with our own, and so on.
I have no idea who you are, what your agenda is, or anything about how your mind operates. There is essentially zero relationship between your mind and my own. The only context I have about you is the text of your post.
>This strikes me as a crucial part of what intelligence (whether in humans or other creatures) means.
Totally agreed. This is why GPT-3 can do a fairly good job emulating anonymous online discourse, but cannot convincingly emulate a person we actually know.
Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if a sentence is meaningful standalone in vacuum, no communication between humans ever happens in such a way. It always matters who said it and why; we never take the substance independently from the agenda and the mind behind it, the context in which that mind existed and its relationship with our own, and so on. This strikes me as a crucial part of what intelligence (whether in humans or other creatures) means…
>Even if a sentence is meaningful standalone in vacuum, no communication between humans ever happens in such a way. True, although much less so for (pseudo)anonymous online communication, as we’re having here. >It always matters who said it and why; we never take the substance independently from the agenda and the mind behind it, the context in which that mind existed and its relationship with our own, and so on. I h…
Personally, the fact that we are on HN of all places supplies a lot of context and agenda and to me is a meta-filter of sorts (pardon the pun). Perhaps one relationship between our minds is that we both have found our way here. I think there is a shared motive in trying to locate truth with a hint of procrastination[0].
Let’s imagine a slightly more down-to-earth exchange and raise the stakes in a way. For example, say it is still mostly a philosophical discussion here on HN, but in which someone is pushing a position on how much potential a certain company or store of value has; would you not question (at least to yourself) whether that person is invested and seeking to profit from it in short term, which would taint the motive? Or say someone was arguing in support of a controversial policy of a particular government known for its strong control over access to information and freedom of expression; would you not wonder whether the person is in fact a citizen of that country being misled by own government (and/or motivated to support it rather than seek truth)?
Yes, the substance of what they say may or may not be true independently of that context, but if we want to function socially and exhaustively validating every claim being made is not an option we have to take shortcuts, and I think we do it all the time even without realizing it. (I’m not writing that lightly since it seems similar to profiling which is ethically icky, but it is my conclusion upon introspection.)
In these cases we can at least imagine possible motive mismatch (known unknowns); in case of a GPT3-like thing instead of a motive you get a scary abyss or much more obscured motives of its human creators. I can’t imagine it having no impact on how I participate in an exchange.
[0] Even still, you can see how elsewhere in the thread there are warranted accusations of the motive being tainted by human exceptionality bias.
Re: Are language models deprived of electric sleep?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'.
I agree that interpretations of QM are currently in the realm of philosophy, but (and, at the risk of being a fool in saying this) I disagree with Feynman when he says “shut up and calculate” [1].
I tend to lean towards Sean Carrol’s approach of the interpretation is important and we should spend real effort thinking about the different impacts of different interpretations. After all, Einstein didn’t get to general relativity just by calculating. It first required deep thought and consideration to decide what to calculate. And I’m not convinced that the interpretations will forever remain in the realm of philosophy (though, I accept I could be totally wrong about this).
[1] I don’t really disagree with Feynman on this. I think it’s perfect advice for people getting started in really learning QM (which is beyond where I am!). Being very familiar with the mechanics and being able to calculate fluently are probably a good starting point for people learning QM. But I do think that it’s worth experts in the field spending some time beyond the mathematical fundamentals.