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Will scaling work?

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Will scaling work?

#91

Post by gitfan86 »

crowbahr wrote: post #67
gitfan86 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a human makes a mistake it is a "cognitive 0-day" but when an LLM does something correctly it is "illusory"?

The cognitive 0-day is not the way that humans act like LLMs, it's the way humans anthropomorphize LLMs. It's the blind faith that LLMs do more than they do. The illusion of emergence is fact not fiction. The cognitive biases exposed by stochastic parrots are fact not fiction.

That is no different than saying beauty is only real if it is 100% natural. A woman who wears makeup and colors her hair is just an illusion of beauty.

It is a philosophical argument to say that a machine isn't truly intelligent because it isn't using the same type of neural network as a human

Re: Will scaling work?

#92

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

slibhb wrote: post #49

The best analogy for LLMs (up to and including AGI) is the internet + google search. Imagine explaining the internet/google to someone in 1950. That person might say "Oh my god, everything will change! Instantaneous, cheap communication! The world's information available at light speed! Science will accelerate, productivity will explode!" And yet, 70 years later, things have certainly changed, but we're living in the…

I think AGI can change the world once it gets way beyond human level both in terms of types of beyond-human "senses" and pattern matching/prediction (i.e. intelligence), but we are nowhere near that yet.

On their current trajectory LLMs are just expert systems that will let certain types of simple job be automated. A potential productivity amplifier similar to having a personal assistant that you can assign tasks too. Handy (more so for people doing desk-bound jobs than others), but not a game changer.

An AGI far beyond human capability could certainly accelerate scientific advance and let us understand the world (e.g. how to combat climate change, how to address international conflicts, how to handle pandemics) so be very beneficial, but what that would feel like to us is hard to guess. We get used to slowly introduced (or even not so slowly) changes very quickly and just accept them, even though today's tech would look like science fiction 100 years ago.

What would certainly be a game changer, and presumably will eventually come (maybe only in hundreds of years?) would be if humans eventually relinquish control of government, industry, etc to AGIs. Maybe our egos will cause us to keep pretending we're in control - we're the ones asking the oracle, we could pull the plug anytime (we'll tell ourselves) etc, but it'll be a different world if all the decisions are nonetheless coming from something WAY more intelligent than ourselves.

Re: Will scaling work?

#93

Post by cchance »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #71
berniedurfee wrote: post #31

I think there’s a huge assumption here that more LLM will lead to AGI. Nothing I’ve seen or learned about LLMs leads me to believe that LLMs are in fact a pathway to AGI. LLMs trained on more data with more efficient algorithms will make for more interesting tools built with LLMs, but I don’t see this technology as a foundation for AGI. LLMs don’t “reason” in any sense of the word that I understand and I think the ab…

We do have systems that reason. Prolog comes to mind. It's a niche tool, used in isolated cases by relatively few people. I think that the other candidates are similar: proof assistants, physics simulators, computational chemistry and biology workflows, CAD, etc. When we get to the point where LLMs are able to invoke these tools for a user, even if that user has no knowledge of them, and are able to translate the res…

Ya i feel like this issue is people think an LLM will someday "wake up" no, LLM's will just be multimodal and developed to use tools, and a software ecosystem around it will end up using the LLM to reason how to execute, basically the LLM will be the internal monologue of whatever the AGI looks like.

Re: Will scaling work?

#94

Post by hutzlibu »

timacles wrote: post #89
lumost wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LLM is simply a model which given a sequence, predicts the rest of the sequence. You can accurately describe any AGI or reasoning problem as an open domain sequence modeling problem. It is not an unreasonable hypothesis that brains evolved to solve a similar sequence modeling problem.

> It is not an unreasonable hypothesis that brains evolved to solve a similar sequence modeling problem. The real world is random, requires making decisions on incomplete information in situations that have never happened before. The real world is not a sequence of tokens. Consciousness requires instincts in order to prioritize the endless streams of information. One thing people dont want to accept about any AI is t…

"Consciousness requires instincts in order to prioritize the endless streams of information. "

What if "instinct" is also just (pretrained) model weight?

The human brain is very complex and far from understood and definitely does NOT work like a LLM. But it likely shares some core concepts. Neuronal networks were inspired by brain synapses after all.

Re: Will scaling work?

#95

Post by MeImCounting »

beardedwizard wrote: post #16
az226 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are closer to discoveries on the spectrum than inventions. Nobody predicted or planned the many emergent capabilities we’ve seen. Almost like magic. Now is a period of moving along the axis to invention with many intentional design, architecture, and feature development alongside testing and evaluation. We are far from done with LLMs, plenty of room for many more discoveries, lots to explore. It’s definitely a p…

> It’s definitely a precursor to AGI. What are you basing this claim on? There is no intelligence in an LLM, only humans fooled by randomness.

This is such an interesting take. What do you classify as intelligence?

From my perspective theres intelligence in a how to manual.

It seems like maybe you mean consciousness? Or creativity?

Re: Will scaling work?

#96

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

bee_rider wrote: post #60
slibhb wrote: post #49

The best analogy for LLMs (up to and including AGI) is the internet + google search. Imagine explaining the internet/google to someone in 1950. That person might say "Oh my god, everything will change! Instantaneous, cheap communication! The world's information available at light speed! Science will accelerate, productivity will explode!" And yet, 70 years later, things have certainly changed, but we're living in the…

The internet did change things pretty dramatically. Productivity at information communication tasks just isn’t the entire economy. I think we are massively more productive. Some of the biggest new companies are ad companies (Google, Facebook), or spend a ton of their time designing devices that can’t be modified by their users (Apple, Microsoft). Even old fashioned companies like tractor and train companies have time…

> The internet did change things pretty dramatically.

For sure - I grew up in the mid-late 70s having to walk to the library to research stuff for homework, parents having to use the yellow-pages to find things, etc.

Maybe smartphones are more of a game changer than desk-bound internet though - a global communication device in your pocket that'll give you driving directions, etc, etc.

BUT ... does the world really FEEL that different now, than pre-internet? Only sort-of - more convenient, more connected, but not massively different in the ways that I imagine other inventions such as industrialization, electricity, cars may have done. The invention of the telephone and radio maybe would have felt a bit like the internet - a convenience that made you feel more connected, and maybe more startling being the first such capability?

Re: Will scaling work?

#97

Post by afpx »

crowbahr wrote: post #26
ralusek wrote: post #15

Almost everything interesting about AI so far has been unexpected emergent behavior, and huge gains through minor insights. While I don't doubt that the current architecture is likely to have a current ceiling below that of peak human intelligence in certain dimensions, it's already surpassed it in some, and there are still gains to be made in others through things like synthetic data. I also don't understand the cla…

Latest research shows emergent behavior is illusory. It doesn't preclude future emergence but currently models show 0 emergent behavior. To me the most interesting aspect of LLMs is the way that they reveal cognitive 0-days in humans. The human race needs patches to cognitive firmware to deal with predictive text... Which is a fascinating revelation to me. Sure it's backed up by psych analysis for decades but it's in…

What about papers like these that suggest creation of task-oriented manifolds?

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/764258v3

Re: Will scaling work?

#98

Post by ctoth »

berniedurfee wrote: post #31

I think there’s a huge assumption here that more LLM will lead to AGI. Nothing I’ve seen or learned about LLMs leads me to believe that LLMs are in fact a pathway to AGI. LLMs trained on more data with more efficient algorithms will make for more interesting tools built with LLMs, but I don’t see this technology as a foundation for AGI. LLMs don’t “reason” in any sense of the word that I understand and I think the ab…

> I think there’s a huge assumption here that more LLM will lead to AGI.

I'm not sure you realize this, but that is literally what this article was written to explore!

I feel like you just autocompleted what you believe about large language models in this thread, rather than engaging with the article. Engagement might look like "I hold the skeptic position because of X, Y, and Z, but I see that the other position has some really good, hard-to-answer points."

Instead, we just got the first thing that came to your mind talking about AI.

In fact, am I talking to a person?

Re: Will scaling work?

#99

Post by timacles »

hutzlibu wrote: post #94
timacles wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not an unreasonable hypothesis that brains evolved to solve a similar sequence modeling problem. The real world is random, requires making decisions on incomplete information in situations that have never happened before. The real world is not a sequence of tokens. Consciousness requires instincts in order to prioritize the endless streams of information. One thing people dont want to accept about any AI is t…

"Consciousness requires instincts in order to prioritize the endless streams of information. " What if "instinct" is also just (pretrained) model weight? The human brain is very complex and far from understood and definitely does NOT work like a LLM. But it likely shares some core concepts. Neuronal networks were inspired by brain synapses after all.

> What if "instinct" is also just (pretrained) model weight?

Sure - then it will take the same amount of energy to train as our reptilian and higher brains took. That means trillions of real life experiences over millions of years.

Re: Will scaling work?

#100

Post by cultureswitch »

slibhb wrote: post #49

The best analogy for LLMs (up to and including AGI) is the internet + google search. Imagine explaining the internet/google to someone in 1950. That person might say "Oh my god, everything will change! Instantaneous, cheap communication! The world's information available at light speed! Science will accelerate, productivity will explode!" And yet, 70 years later, things have certainly changed, but we're living in the…

The internet did change things dramatically, but the change wasn't as dramatic as industrialization. And that one matured over two centuries.
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