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Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

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Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#251

Post by bennyelv »

smoldesu wrote: post #230
naasking wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can mimic human behavior but doesn't have an internal life, feelings, emotions, and isn't conscious I'm curious how you know this. Certainly an LLM doesn't have human internal life, but to claim it has no internal life exceeds our state of knowledge on these topics. We simply lack a mechanistic model of qualia from which we can draw such conclusions.

An LLM is math. It outputs text. Those things aren't alive, and both the software and hardware used to facilitate it is artificial. Once you get that out of the way, sure, I guess it could be "alive" per the same loose definition that any electrical system can exist in an actuated state. It's software, though. I don't think it's profound or overly confident to say that we very clearly know these systems are inanimate…

A few counterpoints to offer...

>An LLM is math

Isn't everything math? Math is what we use to describe and model the nature of our reality.

>Those things aren't alive

We don't have a universal definition of alive, or at least I'm not aware of one that isn't purely philosophical or artistic. We therefore can't actually determine what is and isn't alive with much confidence.

>both the software and hardware used to facilitate it is artificial

Define artificial? We're made of exactly the same stuff. Complex chemical elements that were created from more basic ones in collapsing stars, arranged in a particular configuration with electricity flowing through it all and providing some kind of coordination. We're definitely a bit more "squishy", I'll give you that.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#252

Post by _nalply »

I am a father and this story touches me a lot. I have two boys not toddlers anymore. Both go to school. The older one told me laughingly: "That's funny, there's no Father Nature, but Mother Nature!". The younger one learnt yesterday not to touch a cake even if I didn't lock it away. I said: "Tomorrow this cake is for you and for your brother. If you eat it today, you won't have cake tomorrow."

This said, there's an important difference between LLMs and humans: Humans have instincts. The most important ones seem to be the set of instincts concerning an immaterial will for life and a readiness to overcome deadly obstacles. In other words: LLMs don't have the primitive experience of what is life.

This might change in future. A startup might put neural networks into soft robots and then in a survival situation. Robots that don't emerge functioning are wiped, repaired and put back. In other words, they establish an evolutional situation. After careful enough iterations of curation they have things that "understand" life or at least better than current LLM instantiations.

EDIT: typo

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#253

Post by gniv »

> A toddler has a life, and learns language to describe it. An L.L.M. learns language but has no life of its own to describe.

That's an interesting insight that seems true for now. Are there attempts to create LLMs that "have a life"?

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#254

Post by dotforest »

xigency wrote: post #56

Regarding dismissals of LLM’s on ‘technical’ grounds: Consciousness is first a word and second a concept. And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better than billions of humans worldwide. The software folks have made even more progress than sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists to be able to create an artificial language cortex before we understand our biological mind comprehens…

“And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better than billions of humans worldwide.”

I think the whole point the article is making, though, is that overvaluing LLMs and their supposed intelligence because they excel at this one axis of cognition (if you’re spicy) or mashed-up language ability (if you’re a skeptic) doesn’t make sense when you consider children, who are not remotely capable of what LLMs can do, but are clearly cognizant and sentient. The whole point is that those people—whether they can write an essay or not, whether they can use the word “consciousness” or not—are still fundamentally alive because we share a grounded, lived, multi-sensory, social reality.

And ChatGPT does not, not in the same way. Anything that it expresses now is only a mimicry of that. And if it eventually does have its own experiences through embodied AI, I’d be interested to see what it produces from its own “life” so to speak, but LLMs do not have that.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#255

Post by rcbdev »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #190
esafak wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, you can invent your own sign language because your child won't need to use it with other people.

plus you can use it as a battle language for your clan

Exactly! Using a pre-made sign language is missing the point entirely...

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#256

Post by ImHereToVote »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #165
martindbp wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh... Everyone knows artificial neurons are not like biological neurons. The network is the important part, which really is analogous to the brain, while what came before (SVMs and random forests) are nothing like it.

> Everyone knows artificial neurons are not like biological neurons. Not, apparently, the person I was replying to!

I'm him, and I didn't say that. ANNs didn't arise in a vacuum and they aren't called neural networks for the fun of it.

https://www.ibm.com/topics/neural-networks#:~:text=Their%20n....

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#257

Post by ImHereToVote »

famouswaffles wrote: post #184
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sigh Neural networks are not based on how neurons work. They do not copy aspects of us. They call them neural networks because they are sort of conceptually like networks of neurons in the brain but they’re so different as to make false the statement that they are based on neurons.

They are though. They quite literally are. Saying otherwise is like saying planes weren't based on how birds work when Wright brothers spent a lot of time in the 1800s studying birds. Both Humans and GPT are neural networks. Who cares that GPT doesn't have feathers or flap its wings? That's not the question to care bout. We are interested in whether GPT flies. You can sigh to Kingdom come and nothing will change that…

There are drones with feathers now however. The spring in feather flaps help conserve energy, but only in flapping wings obviously.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#259

Post by jjeaff »

brainbag wrote: post #96
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…

I had heard about this before my son was born. We didn't try to teach him anything, anytime we remembered (which was sporadic) we just used the gestures when talking to him. I was amazed at how quickly he picked up on it, and he was able to communicate his needs to us months before he was able to verbalize. It took very minimal effort on our part, and was very rewarding for him; certainly a lot better than him crying…

I love seeing how language develops in my kids and how they start to invent ways to communicate. Our first, she would say "hold you" when she wanted to be picked up, which she learned from us saying "do you want me to hold you?" My 2 year old now says "huggy" when he wants to be picked up.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#260

Post by lordnacho »

smoldesu wrote: post #230
naasking wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can mimic human behavior but doesn't have an internal life, feelings, emotions, and isn't conscious I'm curious how you know this. Certainly an LLM doesn't have human internal life, but to claim it has no internal life exceeds our state of knowledge on these topics. We simply lack a mechanistic model of qualia from which we can draw such conclusions.

An LLM is math. It outputs text. Those things aren't alive, and both the software and hardware used to facilitate it is artificial. Once you get that out of the way, sure, I guess it could be "alive" per the same loose definition that any electrical system can exist in an actuated state. It's software, though. I don't think it's profound or overly confident to say that we very clearly know these systems are inanimate…

What about a hypothetical brain simulator? That would also be a software/hardware mash, with known mathematics. Would that be alive?
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