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Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

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Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#261

Post by misja111 »

_nalply wrote: post #252

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 i…

I see instincts as something like a pre-installed ROM. It shouldn't be too hard to add something like that to LLM. In fact, I think this is being done already, for instance by hardwiring LLM to not have racist or sexual conversations.

To make LLM's more similar to humans, we'd need to hardwire them with a concept of 'self', and, importantly, the hardwired idea that their self was unique, special, and should survive. But I think the result would be terrible. Imagine a LLM that would be begging not to be switched off, or worse, trying to subtly manipulate its creators.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#262

Post by bjelkeman-again »

magneticnorth wrote: post #131
ryandrake wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, I think we're worried about AI taking our incomes , not our jobs. I would love it if an AI could do my entire job for me, and I just sat there collecting the income while the AI did all the "job" part, but we know from history (robotics) that this is not what happens. The owners of the robots (soon, AI) keep all the income and the job goes away. An enlightened Humanity could solve this by separatin…

At some point someone said to me, "How badly did we fuck up as a society that robots taking all our jobs is a bad thing." And I think about that a lot.

Isn’t the problem that the person loosing the job and income isn’t the same person that owns the robot? If everyone owned a robot and could go to the beach instead it would be nice, except that some would work at the same time and outcompete those that didn’t?

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#263

Post by ImHereToVote »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #48
ImHereToVote wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Science history should be mandatory for undergrads. I didn't think what I said is controversial. This is established history. Sorry if it scares you.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#264

Post by stavros »

hammock wrote: post #224
dools wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We taught both our kids to sign. My favourite moment was in March, my daughter was about to turn 2 and wasn't speaking yet. I asked her if she would like to hear some music. She made the sign for dog. I searched youtube for some songs about dogs and she shook her head. She made the sign for tree. I was like "dog, tree", she nodded. Hmmm... I was searching for "dog tree music" when one of the pictures that came up was…

This must have been what it was like when the settlers were trying to communicate with native Americans at first

Unfortunately, the settlers never really got what the native Americans were trying to say.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#265

Post by stavros »

hammock wrote: post #224
dools wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We taught both our kids to sign. My favourite moment was in March, my daughter was about to turn 2 and wasn't speaking yet. I asked her if she would like to hear some music. She made the sign for dog. I searched youtube for some songs about dogs and she shook her head. She made the sign for tree. I was like "dog, tree", she nodded. Hmmm... I was searching for "dog tree music" when one of the pictures that came up was…

This must have been what it was like when the settlers were trying to communicate with native Americans at first

Which group is the toddler here?

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#266

Post by persnickety »

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…

This argument got long in the tooth, but suffice to say that you can analyze a human in exactly the same way, breaking one down to the basic physics and chemistry (and what does "artificial" mean, anyway?).

Then there's the concept of panpsychism.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#267

Post by defrost »

stavros wrote: post #265
hammock wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This must have been what it was like when the settlers were trying to communicate with native Americans at first

Which group is the toddler here?

One group had an advanced democratic government of the people which the other group struggled to learn from: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/democracy-indigenous-ame...

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#268

Post by calf »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #158
calf wrote: post #102

I think it's reductivism to assume that neural networks cannot emergently support/implement a non-stochastic computational model capable of explicit logical reasoning. We already have an instance of emergent logic. Animals engage in logical reasoning. Corollary, humans and toddlers are not merely super-autocompletes or stochastic parrots. It has nothing to do with "sensory embodiment" and/or "personal agency" argumen…

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…

I don't find that a compelling argument :)

If one computational model accepts only assembly code, and another model accepts only C++, it tells us nothing about what is going on inside their black boxes. They could be doing computationally fundamentally equivalent things, or totally different things. We don't know till we look.

My point was really about neural networks in general. The argument is that neural networks include both humans and synthetic ones. The myopic focus on LLMs (because of mainstream media coverage) as they exist now is what limits such arguments.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#269

Post by intended »

persnickety wrote: post #266
smoldesu wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This argument got long in the tooth, but suffice to say that you can analyze a human in exactly the same way, breaking one down to the basic physics and chemistry (and what does "artificial" mean, anyway?). Then there's the concept of panpsychism.

I would very strongly urge people to actually work and build tools with LLMs.

Its readily apparent after a point that the previous poster is correct, and that these are simply tools.

They are impressive tools yes. But life they are not. At best, they are mimics.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#270

Post by calf »

cozzyd wrote: post #242
intelkishan wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well I think toddlers get both offline training from millions of years of evolution (idea being that evolution itself is nature's very own training algorithm, a computational process that creates genetic information), and online training in the form of nurture and environmental interaction -- and of course AI professors are saying the way to go is to research was to make online training possible for models.

But the crux is that both kinds of "training" - almost a loaded term by now - are open areas of scientific research.

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