Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Talking About Large Language Models

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 158 posts

Re: Talking About Large Language Models

#81

Post by Zababa »

gillesjacobs wrote: post #59

I am NLP researcher who volunteers for peer review often and the anthropomorphisms in papers are indeed very common and very wrong. I have to ask authors to not ascribe cognition to their deep learning approaches in about a third of the papers I review. People do this because mirroring cognition to machine learning lends credence that their specific modeling mechanism mimicks human understanding and so is closer "to…

I'm not really sure about the context here, but I know that I tend to humanize AIs, for example interacting with ChatGPT like with a regular human being, because I'm being nice to him and he's being nice to me in return. I don't know if it's more like being nice to a human, or more like taking good care of your tools so they will take good care of you, but it just feels better for me.

Re: Talking About Large Language Models

#82

Post by goatlover »

Chirono wrote: post #73

This paper, and most other places i’ve seen it argued that language models can’t possibly be conscious, sentient, thinking etc, rely heavily on the idea that llms are ‘just’ doing statistical prediction of tokens. I personally find this utterly unconvincing. For a start, I’m not entirely sure that’s not what I’m doing in typing out this message. My brain is ‘just’ chemistry, so clearly can’t have beliefs or be consci…

> I personally find this utterly unconvincing. For a start, I’m not entirely sure that’s not what I’m doing in typing out this message. My brain is ‘just’ chemistry, so clearly can’t have beliefs or be conscious, right?

Your brain is part of an organism who's ancestors evolved to survive the real world, not by matching tokens. As such, language is a skill that helps humans survive and reproduce, not a tool used to mimic human language. Chemistry is the wrong level to evaluate cognition at.

Also, you can note the differences between how actual neurons work compared to language models as other posters have mentioned.

Re: Talking About Large Language Models

#83

Post by oneoneonetwo »

gillesjacobs wrote: post #80
oneoneonetwo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In science, if you don't know, you don't make the claim, that is basic positivism and the scientific method. Yes you're correct. So you can't make the claim that it's NOT cognition. That is my point. You also can't make the claim that it is cognition which was the OTHER point. Completely agree with your statement here. But it goes further then this, and your statement shows YOU don't understand science. >So basic i…

Let me falsify your claim immediately: the inputs of these models are nothing like the inputs a human receives, subword tokens do not even match up with lexical items (visually, textually and semantically). You seem to agree with me even though your interpretation of falsifiability is inverted: I am not asking that authors make a claim that their models do not mimick human intelligence. Like OP, I ask them that they…

It's an invalid falsification.

The input to chatGPT is a textual interface, the output is letters on a screen. That is the exact same interface as if I were chatting with a human over a chat app.

Your getting into the technicalities of intermediary inputs and outputs. Well sure... analog data seen by the nueral wetware of human brains IS obviously different from the textual digital data inputted into the ML model. There are very different filters and mechanisms at work here. For sure.

HOWEVER, we are looking for an isomorphism here. Similar to how a emulated playstation on a computer is very different then a physical playstation... an internal isomorphism STILL exists between hardware and the software emulating the hardware.

We do not know if such an isomorphism exists between chatGPT and the human brain. This isomorphism is basically the crystallized essence of what cognition is if we could define it. If one does exists it's not perfect... there are missing things. But it is niave to say that some form isomorphism isn't there AT ALL. It also niave to say that there is FOR SURE an isomorphism.

The most rational and scientific thing at this point is to speculate. Maybe what chatGPT is, is something vaguely isomorphic to cognition. Keyword: maybe.

It is NOT an unreasonable speculation GIVEN what we KNOW and DON'T KNOW.

Re: Talking About Large Language Models

#84

Post by Zababa »

nathan_compton wrote: post #2

This will hardly seem like a controversial opinion, but LLM are overhyped. Its certainly impressive to see the things people do with them, but they seem pretty cherry-picked to me. When I sat down with ChatGPT for a day to see if it could help me with literally any project I'm currently actually interested in doing it mostly failed or took so much prompting and fiddling that I'd rather have just written the code or d…

> This will hardly seem like a controversial opinion, but LLM are overhyped. Its certainly impressive to see the things people do with them, but they seem pretty cherry-picked to me. When I sat down with ChatGPT for a day to see if it could help me with literally any project I'm currently actually interested in doing it mostly failed or took so much prompting and fiddling that I'd rather have just written the code or done the reading myself.

> You have to be very credulous to think for even a second that anything like a human or even animal mentation is going on with these models unless your interaction with them is anything but glancing.

I've used ChatGPT, and I'd say it's right now as useful as a google search, which is already a lot. Most humans would be absolutely unable to help me (and probably you) for your projects because they aren't specialized in that area. That's not even talking about animals. I love my cats but they've never really helped me when programming.

Re: Talking About Large Language Models

#85

Post by Chirono »

goatlover wrote: post #82
Chirono wrote: post #73

This paper, and most other places i’ve seen it argued that language models can’t possibly be conscious, sentient, thinking etc, rely heavily on the idea that llms are ‘just’ doing statistical prediction of tokens. I personally find this utterly unconvincing. For a start, I’m not entirely sure that’s not what I’m doing in typing out this message. My brain is ‘just’ chemistry, so clearly can’t have beliefs or be consci…

> I personally find this utterly unconvincing. For a start, I’m not entirely sure that’s not what I’m doing in typing out this message. My brain is ‘just’ chemistry, so clearly can’t have beliefs or be conscious, right? Your brain is part of an organism who's ancestors evolved to survive the real world, not by matching tokens. As such, language is a skill that helps humans survive and reproduce, not a tool used to mi…

Of course they’re different. But so what? That’s not exactly proof of anything, unless you’re suggestion biological neurons are the only configuration in the universe capable of thought? Maybe that’s true, but it seems unlikely to me.

The pressure of natural selection can lead to the phenomenon of consciousness. Why not the process of training llms? Perhaps developing the machine equivalent of consciousness helps that particular configuration of weights survive the otherwise destructive process of gradient descent.

Re: Talking About Large Language Models

#86

Post by [deleted] »

gillesjacobs wrote: post #59

I am NLP researcher who volunteers for peer review often and the anthropomorphisms in papers are indeed very common and very wrong. I have to ask authors to not ascribe cognition to their deep learning approaches in about a third of the papers I review. People do this because mirroring cognition to machine learning lends credence that their specific modeling mechanism mimicks human understanding and so is closer "to…

[deleted]

Re: Talking About Large Language Models

#87

Post by goatlover »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #67
goatlover wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there isn't a precise definition, but clearly for humans thinking and knowing is related to having bodies that need to survive in the world with other humans and organisms, which involves communication and references to external and internal things (how your body feels and what not). This is different from pattern matching tokens, even if it reproduces a lot of the same results, because human language creates a…

>This is different from pattern matching tokens But is it different in essential ways? This is not so clear. Humans developed the capacity to learn, think, and communicate in service to optimizing an objective function, namely fitness in various environments. But there is an analogous process going on with LLMs; they are constructed such that they maximize an objective function, namely predict the next token. But it…

In that case, humans and LLMs are optimizing for different things. One would be environmental fitness, with language as a strategy to use in that environment, so language is about the environment, including humans themselves. Whereas the other is a model of the language humans have used. The model is being optimized for the language, whereas humans are being optimized to use the language in an environment alongside other strategies.

The fundamental difference is that the LLM is not about the environment the language(s) were created for, but rather just the language use itself.

Re: Talking About Large Language Models

#88

Post by antonvs »

oneoneonetwo wrote: post #78
gillesjacobs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Quoted post unavailable.

You’re looking for someone to argue with, but your arguments are trivial and meritless. You’re not a scientist and never have been. The fact that you’re posting with a throwaway account created an hour ago says it all. HN should not allow people like you to post.

Re: Talking About Large Language Models

#89

Post by seanmcdirmid »

pavlov wrote: post #77
oneoneonetwo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In science, if you don't know, you don't make the claim, that is basic positivism and the scientific method. Yes you're correct. So you can't make the claim that it's NOT cognition. That is my point. You also can't make the claim that it is cognition which was the OTHER point. Completely agree with your statement here. But it goes further then this, and your statement shows YOU don't understand science. >So basic i…

Were the pyramids of Giza built by aliens? Well, it sure looks that way if you focus exclusively on evidence that’s open to your preferred interpretation… And as for the all opposing evidence, nobody can disprove that it’s just the aliens trying to hide their tracks. Machine cognition is a similarly extraordinary claim that’s going to need a lot more evidence than a just-right sequence of inputs and outputs.

Isn’t it easy enough to just disprove that a system isn’t cognitive rather than proving that is? Otherwise…cognition is not a claim that can be evaluated by science at all.

Also, you can simply ask ChatGPT “A story about pyramids of Giza being built by aliens”, and it comes up with a reasonable story. This stuff is scary.

Post reply on HN