In the second part of the essay the writer mentions the statisticians fallacy.
"Adding more hyperparameters leads to overfitting."
This is not true with large neural networks anymore and is part of the magic.
The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam
131–140 of 148 posts
Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam
#132I can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time: on one hand, yes, there's certainly a lot of Kool-Aid being drank by the AI folks. Even on HN, I constantly argue with people that genuinely think LLMs are some kind of magical black box that contain "knowledge" or "intelligence" or "meaning" when in reality, it's just a very fancy Markov chain. And on the other hand, I think that language interfaces are probably the n…
>it's just a very fancy Markov chain Could you provide an argument for why an LLM is a fancy markov chain that does not apply equally well to a human?
The rare humans who don't speak any language (or animals, for that matter) can still think, which shows that thought is more than manipulating language constructs.
Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam
#133Are compilers a scam as well? There exists a program every problem you have, you just have to find the code.
Not at the moment. but there was a time that some thought that we should be able to produce a general purpose programming language, to solve every problem. One size fits all. It took more than 40 years to realize that was never going to be. There's a joke about that in commit strip: https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...
Your claim doesn't make any sense. The stored program electronic computers are a realisation of the concept from Turing, but Turing's work is based on Kurt Gödel's work, and the whole point of what Gödel showed was that no, you can't do that.
There's a period of maybe a couple of decades at the start of the 20th century where Whitehead and Russell have used logic to prove that 1 + 1 = 2, and it seems like maybe all of mathematics can be placed on a firm foundation, and then Gödel shows that oops, no, actually a logical system can't prove some true things, or, it can contradict itself. No firm foundations for us.
Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at the moment. but there was a time that some thought that we should be able to produce a general purpose programming language, to solve every problem. One size fits all. It took more than 40 years to realize that was never going to be. There's a joke about that in commit strip: https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...
Your claim doesn't make any sense. The stored program electronic computers are a realisation of the concept from Turing, but Turing's work is based on Kurt Gödel's work, and the whole point of what Gödel showed was that no, you can't do that. There's a period of maybe a couple of decades at the start of the 20th century where Whitehead and Russell have used logic to prove that 1 + 1 = 2, and it seems like maybe all o…
Oh yes the the incompleteness theorem. Sorry.
I meant to say "one single ruling programming language to solve every Turing programming problem".
For example Java will be the ultimate ruling programming language, having a CPU that would directly run java byte code.
Nope.
Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam
#135In my opinion it's a weak take that only got so upvoted and commented on hacker news because it has the existential and universal logical quantifier symbols in the title and also because it uses the chiasmus rhetoric device both in the title and at the end of the article. The argument is that several technologies don't work 'out of the box' and you have to tweak their settings for each problem that you face, and that…
Yes. I initially thought that the post makes a subtle point along the lines of
"if you can show that a system can solve all problems in a domain for a parameter choice, that doesn't mean it can solve all problems in the domain for the same parameter choice".
However, this is clearly trivially true, and it and doesn't mean that it may not be advantageous to map a problem from problem space to system parameter space. Hence, I fail to see how this would be a scam in general.
Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam
#136>>> Build a system that solves problems, but with an important user-facing control. ... >>> Convince the user that it is their job to find a instantiation or setting of this control to make the system work for their tasks. By golly, you just described playing the cello.
I swear to God, I have suffered more playing cello than dealing with pointers in C
Playing Cello is a profession, not a Hobby. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking: I need to play some Cello. It is only needed as part of an orchestra. Whatever else you learned about this is mostly an invention of the media.
Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam
#137In my opinion it's a weak take that only got so upvoted and commented on hacker news because it has the existential and universal logical quantifier symbols in the title and also because it uses the chiasmus rhetoric device both in the title and at the end of the article. The argument is that several technologies don't work 'out of the box' and you have to tweak their settings for each problem that you face, and that…
> The argument is that several technologies don't work 'out of the box' and you have to tweak their settings for each problem that you face, and that this means it's a scam.
That's not what the argument is. The operative keyword in the argument is the word "sell", not the quantifiers themselves. If you're not "selling" it under that premise and you're open about the nuance, then it's not a scam.
Intentional or not, your representation of the argument is a scarecrow.
You might argue that this is semantics, but it's not. It's literally the point that is driving real execs desire to replace actual humans with GPT, right now.
Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam
#138In my opinion it's a weak take that only got so upvoted and commented on hacker news because it has the existential and universal logical quantifier symbols in the title and also because it uses the chiasmus rhetoric device both in the title and at the end of the article. The argument is that several technologies don't work 'out of the box' and you have to tweak their settings for each problem that you face, and that…
Upvotes don't necessarily mean "I agree", they might mean "I want more of this"
Or even "this is a good discussion topic"
Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're one of the people that will be yelling to everyone else in a potential future "We're only seemingly oppressed! It's just a parlor trick that they've turned most of humanity into paperclips, sci-fi authors wrote about this already!" I don't think GPT-4 is magic, but unless the unicorn is literally an exact replica of something from it's training set, it clearly has "knowledge", and it's weird that you'd try to…
Do you think the card catalog down at the local library is sentient? Maybe that's not enough data, though! Is the card catalog for NY Public Library sentient? Maybe that's still too local. Is Google sentient? Everyone with a clue would admit these are all examples of "knowledge" It's the same parlor trick, with fancier algos. It's not intelligence. It won't produce a human-level AI. Period.
It's not the amount of data, it's what it does with that data. Try typing "Tell me a story about a unicorn arguing with people on Hacker News" into a card catalog and tell me how good it is at storytelling. Typing that into GPT-4 might not win any literary awards, but it obviously understands what you meant and does a passable job.
Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're one of the people that will be yelling to everyone else in a potential future "We're only seemingly oppressed! It's just a parlor trick that they've turned most of humanity into paperclips, sci-fi authors wrote about this already!" I don't think GPT-4 is magic, but unless the unicorn is literally an exact replica of something from it's training set, it clearly has "knowledge", and it's weird that you'd try to…
> but unless the unicorn is literally an exact replica of something from it's training set, it clearly has "knowledge", and it's weird that you'd try to deny that Speaking of weird, that's a very weird definition of knowledge. Because in that case, then almost any data transformation operation implies knowledge. MS Word thesaurus? Knowledge. Search and replace? Knowledge. Markov chain[1]? Knowledge. [1] http://www2.h…
Knowledge is one of those vague words like conciousness that has people arguing past one another. However, yes, an interactive thesaurus has "knowledge" of a very limited sort. And LLMs have much more "knowledge", and are able to synthesize novel things from that knowledge.
You can argue "it's only seemingly got knowledge!" all you want, as everyone else enjoys increasingly capable AI.