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Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

#111

Post by _glass »

HervalFreire wrote: post #88
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #4

>“That language models can do these sort of things was never discussed in any literature that I’m aware of," I had previously the expectation that unpredictable emergent behavior would exist in any sufficiently complex system? Based on layman's readings in chaos and complexity theory.

Writings on chaos and complexity theory obviously aren't talking about LLMs. Those theories are so high level that it might as well be akin to "philosophy" to the applied scientists working on LLM research. Additionally keep in mind emergent behavior is a very rare occurrence in even the most complex software projects. I mean it's common if you count "bugs" as emergent behavior. But emergent behavior that is a featur…

At least in the social sciences not so abstract. There are certain behaviors that can just be explained as emergent, rather than individual behaviors. That might be crowd, market, group, politics, culture (with art, language, fashion, taboos, etc.).

Re: Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

#112

Post by blurbleblurble »

maxdoop wrote: post #23
curiousgal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you perception of society is severely limited if you think a fancy autocomplete is capable of changing every aspect of it.

I have fun on these HN chats responding to comments like yours . It’s just fancy auto complete to you? You honestly can’t see the capability it has and extend it the future? What’s that saying about “it’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on their not understanding it”.

I feel very frustrated with these takes because instead of grappling with what we're going to do about it (like having a conversation) it's a flat, dismissive denial, and it isn't even grounded in the science, which says that "memory augmented large language models are computationally universal". So at the very least we're dealing with algorithms that can do anything a hand written program can do, except that they've been trained to do it using natural language in extremely flexible ways. I'm having a hard time seeing how "fancy autocomplete" is the right description for this.

Re: Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

#113

Post by HervalFreire »

mejutoco wrote: post #103
HervalFreire wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writings on chaos and complexity theory obviously aren't talking about LLMs. Those theories are so high level that it might as well be akin to "philosophy" to the applied scientists working on LLM research. Additionally keep in mind emergent behavior is a very rare occurrence in even the most complex software projects. I mean it's common if you count "bugs" as emergent behavior. But emergent behavior that is a featur…

OP has a good point I think, even if it does not refer to LLM, which to me is too strict of a requirement. I think emergent behaviour happens in a lot of videogames. Famously in Dwarf Fortress, with the cat getting drunk, but also in general, where game designers play the game to see if emergent behaviour of the game rules "feels" good. Yesterday I was reading a book about designing games, and it literally has a sect…

>I think emergent behaviour happens in a lot of videogames. Famously in Dwarf Fortress, with the cat getting drunk, but also in general, where game designers play the game to see if emergent behaviour of the game rules "feels" good.

Depends. Dwarf fortress and games are sort of a contradiction. Emergent behavior is emergent because the behavior was not designed explicitly. However for games like DF the game was explicitly designed to have "emergent" behavior when the definition of "emergent behavior" is for the behavior to have NOT been designed.

Don't get too hung up on that concept though. It's just a contradiction in English vocabulary there's no deeper underlying meaning behind that other than a semantic language issue.

Anyway my point was emergent behavior in software is rare because we're operating in controlled environment. It's rare even in games. It's not an expected attribute at all. I'm not saying this isn't interesting to think about, but the comment I responded to was in fact, factually not fully correct. Emergent behavior is NOT expected. But it does happen, in the case of DF it was "designed" to happen, and it has happened elsewhere as well.

Usually though when it does happen it was explicitly "designed" You can see this in genetic programming or evolutionary programming especially.

Re: Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

#114

Post by HervalFreire »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #106
HervalFreire wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except I didn't write that and I will quote myself: >"I can tell you this. I do not know future iterations of LLMs can take over our jobs" I wrote that I don't know which is the best answer we all have at this point. Given the evidence, completely denying it, as many have is simply not realistic.

Okay, but you have another post in this thread with: > When these LLMs get normalized probably 5 years from now I'm going go back to these old threads and contact these people who are in self denial and throw it in their face. I'll just link this comment and be like I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU, YOU WERE WRONG.

My bad. It's the caps. I'll remove the caps. Just picture me saying it a nicer way.

Re: Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

#115

Post by LeanderK »

mpalmer wrote: post #59

I'd like to see posts on LLMs written from a different perspective. For me, the surprise comes not from the sudden emergent capability of language models, but that the understanding (and synthesis!) of ideas encoded in language has succumbed to literally nothing more than statistical analysis. Or at least come that much closer to doing so. That it bears so close a resemblance to actual thinking says more about the im…

I think the task of predicting the next word can be misunderstood. The better you want to be the more you have to "understand" how the previous words interacted. From the style of writing to the current topic discussed, the task gets increasingly complex if you want to be really, really good. How could the next sentence start? Will the author end the sentence here or keep going? These questions are very complex.

This does not mean that we humans might predict all the time, in fact I would argue that LLMs only predict during training. They generate otherwise. We might also learn by trying to predict. I can imagine babies doing it.

Re: Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

#116

Post by catskul2 »

lamp987 wrote: post #69
danielbln wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on fundamental limits?

there is no channel for uncertainty. LLMs of this type will just start making up shit when they dont know something. because they simply generate the most probable next token based on previous x tokens. this is not fixable. this alone makes these LLMs practically unusable in vast majority of real-world applications where you would otherwise imagine this tech to be used.

It's not clear why this would be a fundamental limit rather than a design flaw that will eventually be solved.

Re: Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

#117

Post by HervalFreire »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #106
HervalFreire wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except I didn't write that and I will quote myself: >"I can tell you this. I do not know future iterations of LLMs can take over our jobs" I wrote that I don't know which is the best answer we all have at this point. Given the evidence, completely denying it, as many have is simply not realistic.

Okay, but you have another post in this thread with: > When these LLMs get normalized probably 5 years from now I'm going go back to these old threads and contact these people who are in self denial and throw it in their face. I'll just link this comment and be like I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU, YOU WERE WRONG.

[flagged]

Re: Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

#118

Post by terrut »

AlanYx wrote: post #81
glenstein wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I don't think it's surprising, but depending on where you say it, you'll find people insisting that this can't be possible. I think a lot of our widely held cultural beliefs on this front have been informed by academic philosophy from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In particular, I would go do far as to say that Hubert Dreyfus, author of the book "What computers can't do" and frequent friendly adversary of Daniel…

One thing that LLMs have made me realize is just how ungrounded a lot of mainstream academic philosophy was in the 70s and 80s. For example, so much of Derrida's work centered around the impossibility of truly communicating shared meaning between individuals through language. The fact that we can now communicate so effectively (with remarkably few contextual errors and razor-sharp conveyance of intent) with an entity…

I haven't read Derrida in decades, but your post inspired me to ask chatGPT about this. Version 3.5 would have none of it, and was adamant that Derrida's views were in no way threatened.I almost got the feeling it wanted to call me a bad user just for asking! GPT4 on the other hand, went into a long explanation about how its existence challenged some parts of it by providing analysis of concepts like différance, trace, and undecidability. GPT4 is great at discussing itself and how LLMs in general fit into various philosophical debates.

Re: Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

#119

Post by anon7725 »

HervalFreire wrote: post #92
legulere wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same was said 10 years ago. It's astonishing what can be done, but you can already see fundamental limits. I think it will raise productivity for some tasks, but not fundamentally change society.

What they said 10 years ago was correct. It did hit society like a sledge hammer. Machine learning basically took over the AI space and penetrated the consumer space with applications that were all but impossible in the previous decade. There's AI chips in smart phones now. What you're seeing here with LLMs is sledge hammer number 2. It's understandable how most people don't notice the sledge hammer. The decade prior…

Sledge hammer #1 (voice assistants, AI chips in phones) didn’t cause unemployment. It was at the level of new features and capabilities. Sledge hammer #2 is aimed squarely at “white collar” work without much in the way of bounds to its capabilities.

Re: Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

#120

Post by LeanderK »

lamp987 wrote: post #69
danielbln wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on fundamental limits?

there is no channel for uncertainty. LLMs of this type will just start making up shit when they dont know something. because they simply generate the most probable next token based on previous x tokens. this is not fixable. this alone makes these LLMs practically unusable in vast majority of real-world applications where you would otherwise imagine this tech to be used.

this is absolutely not a fundamental limit but simply a hard challenge. Approaches exist and it is an active field of research where we do make progress.
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