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Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

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Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#241

Post by cozzyd »

yojo wrote: post #59
throw0101a wrote: post #35

> But he could understand so much more than he could say. If you asked him to point to the vacuum cleaner, he would. Perhaps worth noting that it is possible to teach infants (often starting at around 9 months) sign language so that they can more easily signal their desires. Some priority recommended words would probably be: * hungry/more * enough/all done (for when they're full) * drink (perhaps both milk/formula an…

FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/ I have friends who had much more success with it, but the value will largely depend on your child’s relative developmental strengths. A friend’s son with autism got literally years’ benefit out of the gestures before verbal speech caught up.

The gestures also help disambiguate some words. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between "Mama", "More" and "Milk" the way my toddler pronounces them, but her gestures make it clear...

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#242

Post by cozzyd »

intelkishan wrote: post #238
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that for some reason and by some unknown agency, somebody in 1068 could build something that was functionally equivalent to one of the contemporary LLMs of today (it would likely be mechanical and thus slower, but let's just ignore speed because that's mostly a substrate artifact). OK, time to train up our LLM. Oops. Printing not yet invented. Books are scarce, and frequently not copied. We have almost no inp…

A common counterargument is that organisms already have information stored in their DNA, which in turn has a noticeable impact on their behaviour. Plus the fact that they receive a large amount of sensory data which is often discounted in such debates.

Great, instead of using a corpus, just use videos from toddlers walking around with a go pro as training data for your AI model and see how far that gets you.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#243

Post by dsign »

jtr1 wrote: post #199
dsign wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. To that I’m going to add that the blood of our civilization is culture (sciences, technology, arts, traditions). The moment there is something better at it than humans, it’s our “horse-moment”.

Simplifying greatly, but 1. LLMs “create” these cultural artifacts by recombining their inputs (text, images, etc), all of which are cultural artifacts created by humans 2. Humans also create cultural artifacts by recombining other cultural artifacts. The difference is that they combine another input which we can’t really prove AI has: qualia, the individual experience of being in the world, the synthesis of touch an…

> The difference is that they combine another input which we can’t really prove AI has: qualia, the individual experience of being in the world, the synthesis of touch and sound and feeling and perspective.

I wish we could keep this as an immutable truth, but give some sick girls and boys in Silicon Valley a few more years and they will make true creatures. No, I think that we should be honest to ourselves and stop searching for what make us special (other than our history, and being first, that is). It's okay to be self-interested and say "we want to remain in control, AIs should not be, no matter how much (or if) better they are than us."

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#244

Post by blast »

voitvod wrote: post #160
LASR wrote: post #5

Often the "stochastic parrot" line is used as a reduction on what an LLM truly is. I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even consciousness itself is a next-token predictor. Where the industry is headed - multi-modal models. This really I think is the remaining frontier of LLM Human parity. I also have a 15 month old son. It's totally obvio…

I would have agreed until these recent podcasts that Chomsky did. Everyone is basically talking out their ass when it comes to language and linguistics. That becomes incredibly obvious listening to Chomsky on chatGPT. I was even so stupid to think Chomsky wasn't a fan of chatGPT because it somehow invalidated some of his language theories. Low and behold, no, Chomsky actually knows what he is talking about when it co…

What recent podcasts? Can you link to some?

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#245

Post by cozzyd »

Retr0id wrote: post #222
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the things that humans actually cannot fundamentally do, if anything?

That's a very large set of things. Calculating 1000000 digits of the decimal expansion of pi within an hour would be just one example.

To be super cheeky:

  wget https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/tpi-0.9-linux.tar.gz
  tar xvf  tpi-0.9-linux.tar.gz 
  time ./tpi -T 8 -o pi.txt 1M
  real 0m0.176s
  user 0m0.500s
  sys 0m0.049s

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#246

Post by Vecr »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #72
dekhn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll see! I came to this conclusion a long time ago but at the same time I do subjectively experience consciousness, which in itself is something a mystery in the material-reductionist philosophy.

It makes perfect sense if you can disprove your own existence

You can't disprove your existence, I'm pretty sure that does not make any sense. "I think therefore I am." No need for free will of any type there, and a currently existing computer could probably do the same thing.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#247

Post by Vecr »

ganzuul wrote: post #144

You are an evolutionary being, part of a much greater process than the process in your head. Your mind extends beyond your body and even if your mind was frozen in time like an LLM it would still be alive because it remains in a living environment. Like so the Earth is alive and the universe would not be complete without you. Rest easy, little bird. One day you will spread the wings of your soul and the wind will do…

> Like so the Earth is alive and the universe would not be complete without you.

That's a definitional argument, there is very little actual meaning there. The argument can't discriminate between a baby and a nuclear explosion destroying Manhattan.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#248

Post by mattigames »

Monkeys with anxiety find a way to make rocks and lighting do what only they could do before, the monkeys are severely shocked by this development, they fear how soon until they can make it can do everything only they can do as of now, as usual with every new anxiety source these monkeys like to project mysticism and philosophical ramifications into it.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#249

Post by [deleted] »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #46
Mattasher wrote: post #8

Humans have a long history of comparing ourselves, and the universe, to our latest technological advancement. We used to be glorified clocks (as was the universe), then we were automatons, then computers, then NPC's, and now AI's (in particular LLM's). Which BTW I don't think is a completely absurd comparison, see https://mattasher.substack.com/p/ais-killer-app

Except LLM's are built on neural networks. That are based on how neurons work. The first tech that actually copies aspects of us.

[deleted]

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#250

Post by dotforest »

schoen wrote: post #211
jtr1 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is that you need to ask how you are measuring when you say it seems more correct than anything that came before. You may just be describing the experience of swimming in the dominant paradigm

One attempt could be "it allows us to make better predictions about the mind". This article mentions excitement about neural networks overgeneralizing verb inflections, which human language learners also do. If neural networks lead to the discovery of new examples of human cognitive or perceptual errors or illusions, or to the discovery of new effective methods for learning, teaching, or psychotherapy, that could cou…

If the article is talking about the neural network in McClelland and Rumelhart’s Parallel Distributed Processing, there’s actually a paper by Steven Pinker and some other linguists drilling into it and finding that it doesn’t model children’s language acquisition nearly as closely or as well as M&R think it does.
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