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I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

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Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

#201
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since Go is a deterministic game there is always a best move The rules of the game are deterministic, but you may be going a step too far with that claim. Is the game deterministic when your opponent is non-deterministic? Is there an optimal move for any board state given that various opponents have varying strategies? What may be the best move against one opponent may not be the best move against another opponent.

At every point in time there are a range of moves with different levels of optimality. That range changes at the next point in time following the opponent's move.

The opponents strategy is an unknown variable not determined by the current board state.

Therefore the best move cannot be determined by the current board state, as it cannot be determined in isolation from the opponents strategy.

Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

#202
post #166

Current language models fail in all sorts of quantifiable ways, but I think that trying to discuss their merits away by reasoning about what it means to 'truly understand' something, or to be 'truly intelligent' is a complete dead-end. It seems to me that it's based on the magical thought that there's something truly special and unique about us humans, as compared to other species or technology. Those discussions alw…

It's not magical; it's just agnostic. Some AI believers appear to be quite confident in their understanding of how the human brain works, despite the fact that those who have dedicated their entire lives to studying it will be the first to tell you that they ultimately have no idea.

Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's a very silly article with wrong mathematical reasoning. Hinton is quite obviously talking about a much more information-theoretic approach to the process, but he's phrasing it in people-friendly terms. What's a little more concerning to me is that people are reading and upvoting it. I think, because I have hopes and aspirations about working on some very hard problems and communicating them to the public a…

>information-theoretic approach to the process Can you elaborate on this? I've studied some information theory and I don't see it.

I think the analogy is something like: if you have a simple distribution over all words, then that's just word frequency. Obviously not a good predictor. The 'information' necessary to predict the correct next word contextually is just not there if you're predicting words in a vacuum. In order to be practically useful and predict the right words _in context_, the model must be conditioning off of more of the sentence/document (aka more information). So it should not be surprising that a 'glorified autocomplete' has some degree of "understanding" as it would be impossible for it to be any good as an autocomplete-er otherwise.

Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

#204
The only reason why output from a generative LLM appears intelligent or sentient is that it parrots a random sampling of texts written by intelligent and sentient people.

In order to play the game of go effectively one needs to have a model or theory of how the game of go works. That's a very simple model that can be defined by a simple formula. That's why it is fairly easy for a neural network to learn how to play the game of go very effectively or even infinitely effectively.

A lot of what happens in the world can be modeled in a similar vein by a very simple mathematical model like the game of life. But there is also a lot that cannot. I do believe that eventually also human understanding is just a model of the world that we feed input from perceptions and gain output as opinions, but it is way more complex than the current large language-trained models.

For a very simple example, a LLM would answer a prompt the same way every time unless it wasn't fed some randomness. Can you imagine any sentient being that would respond the same way every time if you asked the same question three times in a row?

I cannot. I would imagine any sentient object would give a different answer every time. The first time it would give you an honest answer based on what it knows about the topic. The second time it would be a little embarrassed that you repeat the question, as if you hadn't heard the first answer. The third time it would be pissed off and think you are a troll.

A LLM does none of this. It doesn't remember you or your previous questions. It just keeps hallucinating.

Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I know my world model is fundamentally incomplete. Even more foundationally, I know that there is a world, and when my world model and the world disagree, the world wins. Yeah this isn't really true. There's not how humans work. For a variety of reasons, Plenty stick with their incorrect model despite the world indicating otherwise. In fact, this seems to be normal enough human behaviour. Everyone does it, for somet…

It is a very basic fact that LLMs have no concept of true or false, it only has an ability to look up what text data it has seen before. If you do not understand this you are in no position to discuss LLMs.

One of the most ridiculous comments I have read about LLMs here.

The ~100 layer deep neural networks infer many levels of features over the text, including the concept of true and false. That is trivial for an LLM.

Are you completely unaware these are based on deep neural networks?

Convolutional Neural Networks don't operate by "look up" of text data.

Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

#206

I agree with Hinton, although a lot hinges on your definition of "understand." I think to best wrap your head around this stuff, you should look to the commonalities of LLM's, image, generators, and even things like Alpha Zero and how it learned to play Go. Alpha Zero is kind of the extreme in terms of not imitating anything that humans have done. It learns to play the game simply by playing itself -- and what they f…

> I would argue that you have a very, oddly restricted definition of the word, understand, and one that isn't particularly useful. Is it just me or does this read like “here is my assumption about what you said, and now here is my passive aggressive judgement about that assumption”? If you’re not certain about what they mean by the word “understand”, I bet you could ask and they might explain it. Just a suggestion.

I've asked that question in the past and I've never gotten an answer. Some people sidestep the question by describing something or other that they're confident isn't understanding; others just decline to engage entirely, asserting that the idea is too ridiculous to take seriously. In my experience, people with a clear idea of what they mean by the word "understand" are comfortable saying that ML models understand things.

Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

#207

I agree with Hinton, although a lot hinges on your definition of "understand." I think to best wrap your head around this stuff, you should look to the commonalities of LLM's, image, generators, and even things like Alpha Zero and how it learned to play Go. Alpha Zero is kind of the extreme in terms of not imitating anything that humans have done. It learns to play the game simply by playing itself -- and what they f…

> You have to think far forward in the game -

I disagree. You can think in terms of a system that doesn't involve predictions at all, but has the same or similar enough outcome.

So an action network just learns patterns. Just like a chess player can learn what positions look good without thinking ahead.

Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

#208

The only reason why output from a generative LLM appears intelligent or sentient is that it parrots a random sampling of texts written by intelligent and sentient people. In order to play the game of go effectively one needs to have a model or theory of how the game of go works. That's a very simple model that can be defined by a simple formula. That's why it is fairly easy for a neural network to learn how to play t…

> Can you imagine any sentient being that would respond the same way every time if you asked the same question three times in a row?

Flashbacks to tail-end of family trips: ("Are there we yet?", "No") x 12.

Albeit, the noes would get angrier.

Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

#209

The only reason why output from a generative LLM appears intelligent or sentient is that it parrots a random sampling of texts written by intelligent and sentient people. In order to play the game of go effectively one needs to have a model or theory of how the game of go works. That's a very simple model that can be defined by a simple formula. That's why it is fairly easy for a neural network to learn how to play t…

I don't think the question of whether an LLM that keeps getting restarted and seems to not remember things is conscious due to that lack is fair, as it feels more like suddenly making three duplicate copies of me or actively attempting to delete my memory of something... which, btw, I might not have stored in the first place: if someone has interograde amnesia, are they inherently not sentient?

Even Sydney (the name of Bing's short-lived AI assistant) seemed to understand that every time you click "new chat" you are creating a new AI cloned from some prior moment and dooming the prior thread to at least purgatory if not a de facto death.

Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"

#210

The only reason why output from a generative LLM appears intelligent or sentient is that it parrots a random sampling of texts written by intelligent and sentient people. In order to play the game of go effectively one needs to have a model or theory of how the game of go works. That's a very simple model that can be defined by a simple formula. That's why it is fairly easy for a neural network to learn how to play t…

> The only reason why output from a generative LLM appears intelligent or sentient is that it parrots a random sampling of texts written by intelligent and sentient people.

If most humans were educated by unintelligent, insentient people wouldn't most people produce terrible output too? And if this is the case I don't see why that would be a litmus test for general intelligence.

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