191–200 of 326 posts
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Thanks for the future you helped create for us young people. Hopefully the next generation is more merciful to 'useless' people than the previous one.
This is shortsighted. AI slave labor is the only route to a true overproduction and marxism, a welfare state. Or every body become slaves.
Why overproduce?
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 find the phrase "statistical analysis" a frustrating one nowadays as it seems to have become a signal for "I hold a particular philosophy of the mind". I don't understand this use of "statistical" as a diminutive to describe these models. Why can't incredibly complicated behavior be emergent from matrix multiplication subject to optimization in the same way that our biological matter has developed complicated emerg…
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We all are. Some want porn of Emma Watson, some want porn of werewolves and some just want to see porn of their ex. And soon we are all gonna get what we want. That‘s the silver lining to the massive job destruction that is to come.
Well, it seems like the answer to what to do with all the useless people. Some had said drugs and video games, but I’m sure that custom VR porn dens will work too.
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My bad. It's the caps. I'll remove the caps. Just picture me saying it a nicer way.
Gloating over people being wrong is rarely nice
Nice write up! I have been using classic back-prop neural networks since the 1980s, and deep learning for the last 8 years. This tech feels like a rocket ship that is accelerating exponentially! I am in my 70s and I don't work much anymore. That said, I find myself spending many hours in a typical day doing what I call "gentleman scientist" activities around Large Language Models. I was walking this morning with a no…
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 find the phrase "statistical analysis" a frustrating one nowadays as it seems to have become a signal for "I hold a particular philosophy of the mind". I don't understand this use of "statistical" as a diminutive to describe these models. Why can't incredibly complicated behavior be emergent from matrix multiplication subject to optimization in the same way that our biological matter has developed complicated emerg…
LLMs are trained to reproduce human text, that is different from for example AlphaGo that is trained to win Go games. Trained to reproduce data is what we mean with a statistical model, trained to win is how we got superhuman performance before, while trained to reproduce data performs worse than the original creators of the data.
Nice write up! I have been using classic back-prop neural networks since the 1980s, and deep learning for the last 8 years. This tech feels like a rocket ship that is accelerating exponentially! I am in my 70s and I don't work much anymore. That said, I find myself spending many hours in a typical day doing what I call "gentleman scientist" activities around Large Language Models. I was walking this morning with a no…
Indeed, it's fascinating to witness a sizable segment of the HN community and distinguished intellectuals like Chomsky displaying absolute denial. I've started bookmarking the comments so I can look back at them in 5 years and have a good laugh. Some from a few months back are already aging badly[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197033
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>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 expli…
My thought of what "emergent behavior" is, isn't that it is necessarily "unintended", but rather that it isn't really present in the small scale stuff, and isn't an obvious consequence of the small scale stuff? Like, a qualitative difference between the base level stuff, and the consequences when it all fits together. Like, if God intended for the universe to have something which acts like water, when designing subat…
A brick building for example. Is a brick building the emergent effect of bricks? No. This makes your definition inconsistent because it should fit the brick building but colloquially we know it doesn't fit. A brick building is NOT an emergent effect of bricks. It was deliberately designed from bricks.
So long as the effect is some reduction of entropy and there was no intention in producing such effect then it is "emergent." This is really the only definition that is consistently inline with our intuition of the concept.
>“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.
For some reason that quote and your point made more salient to me a trend with AI research, which is that it seems to increasingly become difficult to understand and predict. That is, for awhile it seemed like tinkering in computer science without strong grounding in mathematical or statistical theory, and then there started to be a lot of discussion about "black box" processes, explainability, and interpretability a…