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Saying Goodbye to GitHub

ersei.net

301–310 of 450 posts

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#301

I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. Some Open Source licenses can be used in proprietary code, (MIT, BSD etc) with little more than simple attribution. Those developers chose that license for a reason, and I'…

> I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. In essence, copyleft licenses are exactly that. They oblige the author of a derived work to publish the changes to all users under the same terms. The original authors tend to be users. So, a license which would grant this directly to the original authors woul…

Exactly. We all benefit from sharing contributions to the same code base. I use your library, you use mine, we fix each others bugs, add features, etc... The code gets better.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we’re now way past that now with LLMs now quickly taking on the role of a general reasoning engine. No we're not, and no they are not. An LLM doesn't reason, period. It mimics reasoning ability by stochastically chosing a sequence of tokens. Alot of the time these make sense. At other times, they don't make any sense. I recently asked an LLM: "Mike leaves the elevator at the 2nd floor. Jenny leaves at the 9…

GPT-4 reasons about a lot of gotcha logic puzzles correctly any pre GPT-4 opinions should be reconsidered, that is effectively two different epochs in the history of AI effectiveness and reasoning. > Me: Mike leaves the elevator at the 2nd floor. Jenny leaves at the 9th floor. Who left the elevator first? > GPT-4: Mike left the elevator first, as he got off at the 2nd floor, while Jenny left at the 9th floor. > Me: I…

That changes exactly nothing about the validity of my statement.

Yes, GPT-4 is better at this mimicry than GPT-3 or GPT-3.5. And GPT-3 was better at it than GPT-2. And all of them were better than my out-of-fun home-built Language Model projects that I trained on small But being better at mimicking reason, is still not reasoning. The model doesn't know what a coffeemug is, and it doesn't know what a football is. It also has no idea how elevators work. It can form sequences that make it look to us that it does and knows all these things, but in reality, it only knows that "then Jenny would have left first" is a more likely sequence of tokens at that point, given that the sequence before included "started at the 10th floor".

Bear in mind, this doesn't mean that this mimicry isn't useful. It is, tremendously so. I don't care how I get correct answers, I only care that I do.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#303
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to hate on you for a valid response. I think we're in a new enough situation that we can look beyond what's legal in a license. When many of us started working on open source projects, AI was a far-off concept. Speaking for myself, I thought we'd see steady improvement in code-completion tools, but I didn't think I'd see anything like GPT-4 in my lifetime. Licenses were written for humans working with code. W…

I agree that AI usage of code is somewhat murky with current licenses,which obviously don't mention it either way. Free software has a principle of "freedom to run, to do whatever you wish" (freedom 0), so arguably has said that training AI is OK. (We could quibble over the word Run, but the Gnu.org,and RMS clearly say "freedom 0 does not restrict how you use it." GPL code can be used by the military to develop nucle…

I largely agree with you, but I think there is one question that hasn't been addressed yet: Are the weights learned by an LLM a derivative work?

When a person learns from GPL code this question doesn't arise. The state of a person's brain is outside of copyright. But is the state of an LLM also outside of copyright or outside of the terms covered by the GPL? I'm not sure.

An LLM can not only emit source code derived from code published under the GPL, it can also potentially execute a program and could therefore be considered object code.

This isn't necessarily a problem as long as the model isn't distributed and does not include any AGPL code.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. In essence, copyleft licenses are exactly that. They oblige the author of a derived work to publish the changes to all users under the same terms. The original authors tend to be users. So, a license which would grant this directly to the original authors woul…

I'm not sure I agree with this as a general point of view. Speaking generally, I'm not sure that one can claim >> The original authors tend to be the users There are endless forks of say emacs,and I expect RMS is not s user of any of them. Of course RMS is free to inspect the code for all of them, separate out bug fixes from features, and retro apply it to his build. But I'm not seeing anything in any license that re…

It's like everyone here is a lawyer nitpicking the license as it exists today. But absolutely before the licenses existed Open Source was about those principles, to share code, to share bug fixes, to publish any improvements. So everyone would get better. To say the 'license' doesn't make this explicit it really missing the point.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#305
post #21

I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. Some Open Source licenses can be used in proprietary code, (MIT, BSD etc) with little more than simple attribution. Those developers chose that license for a reason, and I'…

No need to hate on you for a valid response. I think we're in a new enough situation that we can look beyond what's legal in a license. When many of us started working on open source projects, AI was a far-off concept. Speaking for myself, I thought we'd see steady improvement in code-completion tools, but I didn't think I'd see anything like GPT-4 in my lifetime. Licenses were written for humans working with code. W…

Yes. People here seem to be forgetting that Open Source was a community driven ideal first. The License came later as "protection". Corporations were stealing code and there was no recourse. The variety of open source licenses were created to provide a framework for the community, to fight off stealing, to keep it open. So GPT is very much 'laundering' the code just like criminals 'launder' money.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#306
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty ironic that the argument that LLMs are stochastic parrots actually sounds like the actual parrot. I think we’re now way past that now with LLMs now quickly taking on the role of a general reasoning engine.

Since ChatGPT I've become much more aware of my own thoughts and written text. I'm now often wondering whether I'm just regurgitating the most frequently used next word or phrase or whether it could actually be described as original. Especially, for things like reacting with short answers to chat messages, I am confident that these are only reactionary answers without alternatives, which could have come from ChatGPT…

LLMs may be an approximation of our knowledge, but understand that there’s more to reasoning than a language model. GPT understands how tokens relate to each other, but humans understand how objects, places, and abstract concepts relate to each other as well. We have a little further to go for AGI.

I do believe that GPT4 is a really good approximation of our language though, and feel similarly to you when I respond off the cuff.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4 reasons about a lot of gotcha logic puzzles correctly any pre GPT-4 opinions should be reconsidered, that is effectively two different epochs in the history of AI effectiveness and reasoning. > Me: Mike leaves the elevator at the 2nd floor. Jenny leaves at the 9th floor. Who left the elevator first? > GPT-4: Mike left the elevator first, as he got off at the 2nd floor, while Jenny left at the 9th floor. > Me: I…

That changes exactly nothing about the validity of my statement. Yes, GPT-4 is better at this mimicry than GPT-3 or GPT-3.5. And GPT-3 was better at it than GPT-2. And all of them were better than my out-of-fun home-built Language Model projects that I trained on small But being better at mimicking reason, is still not reasoning. The model doesn't know what a coffeemug is, and it doesn't know what a football is. It a…

I agree about the utility part.

However, I don't really accept the idea that this isn't reasoning, but I'm not entirely sold either way.

I'd say if it mimics something well enough then eventually it's just doing the thing, which is the same side of the argument I fall on with Searle's Chinese Room Argument. If you can't discern a difference, is there a difference?

So far GPT-4 can produce better work than like 50% of humans and better responses to brain teaser questions than most of them too, I'm at least just in a bubble and so I don't run into people that stupid that often. So it's easier for me to see the gaps still.

Re: Saying Goodbye to GitHub

#310
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty ironic that the argument that LLMs are stochastic parrots actually sounds like the actual parrot. I think we’re now way past that now with LLMs now quickly taking on the role of a general reasoning engine.

> I think we’re now way past that now with LLMs now quickly taking on the role of a general reasoning engine. No we're not, and no they are not. An LLM doesn't reason, period. It mimics reasoning ability by stochastically chosing a sequence of tokens. Alot of the time these make sense. At other times, they don't make any sense. I recently asked an LLM: "Mike leaves the elevator at the 2nd floor. Jenny leaves at the 9…

> but the fact that they can also spew such complete illogical nonsense shows that they are not "reasoning" about things

Have you ever seen the proof that 2=1 ? It looks convincing, but it's illogical because it has a subtle flaw. Are the people who can't spot the flaw just "looking like they are reasoning", but really they just lack the ability to reason? Are witnesses who unintentionally make up memories in court cases lacking reasoning? Are children lacking reasoning when you ask them why they drew all over the walls and they make up BS?

You can't just spout that an LLM lacks reasoning without first strictly defining what it means to reason. Everybody keeps going on and on about how an LLM can't possibly be intelligent/reasoning/thinking/sentient etc. All of these are extremely vague and fuzzy words that have no unambiguous definition. Until we can come up with hard metrics that define these terms, nobody is correct when they spout their own nonsense that somehow proves the LLM doesn't fit into their specific definition of fill in the blank.

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