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Language models can explain neurons in language models

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Re: Language models can explain neurons in language models

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to look that far ahead. Apparently, people are already using ChatGPT to compile custom diet plans for themselves, and they expect it to take into account the information they supply regarding their allergies etc. But, yes, those are also good examples of what we shouldn't be doing, but are going to do anyway.

Those cases sound like Darwin Awards mediated by high technology

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Re: Language models can explain neurons in language models

#182
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no evidence that intelligence runs on neurons. Yes, there are neurons in brains, but there's also lots of other stuff in there too. And there are creatures that exhibit intelligent properties even though they have hardly any neurons at all. (An individual ant has only something like 250000 neurons, and yet they're the only creatures beside humans that managed to create a civilization.)

This is not a good take. Yes there is a lot more going on in brains than just neuronal activity, we don’t understand most of it. But understanding neurons and their connections is necessary (but not sufficient) to understanding what we consider intelligence. Also, 250k is a lot of neurons! Individual ants, as well as fruit flies which have even fewer neurons, show behavior we may consider intelligent. Source: I am no…

What's the argument that understanding neurons is necessary?

Perhaps intelligence is like a black box input to our bodies (call it the "soul", even though this isn't testable and therefore not a hypothesis). The mind therefore wouldn't play any more of a role in intelligence than the eye. And I'm not sure people would say the eye is necessary for understanding intelligence.

Now, I'm not really in a position to argue for such a thing, even if I believe it, but I'm curious what argument you might have against it.

Re: Language models can explain neurons in language models

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know that complex arrangements of neurons are triggered based on input and generating output that appears to have some intelligence to many humans. The more interesting question is why are intelligence/beauty/consciousness emergent properties that exist in our minds.

There is no evidence that intelligence runs on neurons. Yes, there are neurons in brains, but there's also lots of other stuff in there too. And there are creatures that exhibit intelligent properties even though they have hardly any neurons at all. (An individual ant has only something like 250000 neurons, and yet they're the only creatures beside humans that managed to create a civilization.)

What else would intelligence run on?

Re: Language models can explain neurons in language models

#184
post #87

To me the value here is not that GPT4 has some special insight into explaining the behavior of GPT2 neurons (they say it's comparable to "human contractors" - but human performance on this task is also quite poor). The value is that you can just run this on every neuron if you're willing to spend the compute, and having a very fuzzy, flawed map of every neuron in a model is still pretty useful as a research tool. But…

They also mention they got a score above 0.8 for 1000 neurons out of GPT2 (which has 1.5B (?)).

I thought they had only applied the technique to 307,200 neurons. 1,000 / 307,200 = 0.33% is still low, but considering that not all neurons would be useful since they are initialized randomly, it's not too bad.

Re: Language models can explain neurons in language models

#185
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way a civilization?

I'll repost a comment via Reddit that I think makes this case [0]: Ants have developed architecture, with plumbing, ventilation, nurseries for rearing the young, and paved thoroughfares. Ants practice agriculture, including animal husbandry. Ants have social stratification that differs from but is comparable to that of human cultures, with division of labor into worker, soldier, and other specialties that do not have…

I think you can call ant societies civilizations, but the same time you can call a multi cellular organism a civilization, too. Usually, those also come from the same genetic seed similar to (most) ant colonies. But more importantly, you have various types of cooperation and specialization in multi cellular life. Airways are "ventillation", chitin using or keratinated tissues are "architecture", and there is even "animal husbandry" in the form of bacterial colonies living in organs.

Re: Language models can explain neurons in language models

#186
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll repost a comment via Reddit that I think makes this case [0]: Ants have developed architecture, with plumbing, ventilation, nurseries for rearing the young, and paved thoroughfares. Ants practice agriculture, including animal husbandry. Ants have social stratification that differs from but is comparable to that of human cultures, with division of labor into worker, soldier, and other specialties that do not have…

To be honest, this description is leaning heavily on the associations we have with individual words used. Ant "architecture" isn't like our architecture. Ant "plumbing" and "ventilation" have little in common with the kind of plumbing and ventilation we use in buildings. "Nurseries", "rearing the young", that's just stretching the analogy to the point of breaking. "Agriculture", "animal husbandry" - I don't even know…

Nobody is saying that an ant might be the next Frank Lloyd Wright.

They're saying they accomplish incredible things for the size of their brain, which is absolutely and unequivocally true.

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise".

Re: Language models can explain neurons in language models

#187
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll repost a comment via Reddit that I think makes this case [0]: Ants have developed architecture, with plumbing, ventilation, nurseries for rearing the young, and paved thoroughfares. Ants practice agriculture, including animal husbandry. Ants have social stratification that differs from but is comparable to that of human cultures, with division of labor into worker, soldier, and other specialties that do not have…

To be honest, this description is leaning heavily on the associations we have with individual words used. Ant "architecture" isn't like our architecture. Ant "plumbing" and "ventilation" have little in common with the kind of plumbing and ventilation we use in buildings. "Nurseries", "rearing the young", that's just stretching the analogy to the point of breaking. "Agriculture", "animal husbandry" - I don't even know…

> There's a vast difference in complexity between what ants do, and what humans do.

Interesting parallell with intelligence/sentience/sapience. Despite the means, isn't the end result what you have to judge? The end result looks like a rudimentary civilization. How much back in time would we have to go back to find more sophistication in ant societies than humans?

Re: Language models can explain neurons in language models

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know that complex arrangements of neurons are triggered based on input and generating output that appears to have some intelligence to many humans. The more interesting question is why are intelligence/beauty/consciousness emergent properties that exist in our minds.

Nature created humans to understand nature. We created GPT4 to understand ourselves.

That's beautiful until you think about it.

Humans so far have done a great job at destroying nature faster than any other kind could.

And GPT4 was created for profit.

Re: Language models can explain neurons in language models

#190
post #89

Of note: "... our technique works poorly for larger models, possibly because later layers are harder to explain." And even for GPT-2, which is what they used for the paper: "... the vast majority of our explanations score poorly ..." Which is to say, we still have no clue as to what's going on inside GPT-4 or even GPT-3, which I think is the question many want an answer to. This may be the first step towards that, bu…

I suspect that there's a sweet spot that combines a collection of several "neurons" and a human-readable explanation given a certain kind of prompt. However, this "three-body problem" will probably need some serious analytical capability to understand at scale
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