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Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

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Re: Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

#111

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

nsagent wrote: post #31
GeneralMayhem wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument would be that that conceptual model is encoded in the intermediate-layer parameters of the model, in a different but analogous way to how it's encoded in the graph and chemical structure of your neurons.

Using Occam's razor, that is less probable than the model picking up on statistical regularities in human language, especially since that's what they are trained to do.

That's hard to conclude from Occam's razor here. Or, "statistical regularities" may have less explanatory power than you think, especially if the simplest statistical regularity is itself a fully predictive understanding of the concept of temperature.

Re: Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

#112

Post by ainoobler »

bubblyworld wrote: post #108
ainoobler wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to do any of that because according to your own logic AI can do all of it. You really should sit down and ponder what exactly you get out of equating Turing machines with human intelligence.

Sorry, I edited my reply because I decided going down that rabbit hole wasn't worth it. Didn't expect you to reply immediately. I'm not equating anything here, just pointing out that the fact that AI runs in software isn't a knockdown argument against anything. And computability theory certainly has nothing useful to say in that regard.

Right.

Re: Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

#113

Post by zoogeny »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #8

I am highly skeptical of LLMs as a mechanism to achieve AGI, but I also find this paper fairly unconvincing, bordering on tautological. I feel similarly about this as to what I've read of Chalmers - I agree with pretty much all of the conclusions, but I don't feel like the text would convince me of those conclusions if I disagreed; it's more like it's showing me ways of explaining or illustrating what I already belie…

> On embodiment - yes, LLMs do not have corporeal experience.

My own thought on this (as someone who believes embodiment is essential) is to consider the rebuttals to Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment.

For now (and the foreseeable future) humans are the embodiment of LLMs. In some sense, we could be seen as playing the role of a centralized AIs nervous system.

Re: Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

#114

Post by bubblyworld »

ainoobler wrote: post #112
bubblyworld wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I edited my reply because I decided going down that rabbit hole wasn't worth it. Didn't expect you to reply immediately. I'm not equating anything here, just pointing out that the fact that AI runs in software isn't a knockdown argument against anything. And computability theory certainly has nothing useful to say in that regard.

Right.

Well, you know, elaborate and we can have a productive discussion. The way you keep appealing to computability theory as a black box makes me think you haven't actually studied that much of it.

Re: Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

#115

Post by zoogeny »

exe34 wrote: post #46
GeneralMayhem wrote: post #8

I am highly skeptical of LLMs as a mechanism to achieve AGI, but I also find this paper fairly unconvincing, bordering on tautological. I feel similarly about this as to what I've read of Chalmers - I agree with pretty much all of the conclusions, but I don't feel like the text would convince me of those conclusions if I disagreed; it's more like it's showing me ways of explaining or illustrating what I already belie…

> . I feel similarly about this as to what I've read of Chalmers - I agree with pretty much all of the conclusions, but I don't feel like the text would convince me of those conclusions if I disagreed; my limited experience of reading Chalmers is that he doesn't actually present evidence - he goes on a meandering rant and then claims to have proved things that he didn't even cover. it was the most infuriating read of…

I haven't read any Chalmers so I can't comment on his writing style. I have seen him in several videos on discussion panels and on podcasts.

One thing I appreciate is he often states his premises, or what modern philosophers seem to call "commitments". I wouldn't go so far as to say he uses air-tight logic to reason from these premises/commitments to conclusions - but at the least his reasoning doesn't seem to stray too far from those commitments.

I think it would be fair to argue that not all of his commitments are backed by physical evidence (and perhaps some of them could be argued to go against some physical evidence). And so you are free to reject his commitments and therefore reject his conclusions.

In fact, I think the value of philosophers like Chalmers is less in their specific commitments and conclusions and more in their framing of questions. It can be useful to list out his commitments and find out where you stand on each of them, and then to do your own reasoning using logic to see what conclusions your own set of commitments forces you into.

Re: Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

#116

Post by stoperaticless »

persnickety wrote: post #79
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Again, that conclusion feels wrong to me... but if I'm being honest with myself, I can't point to why, other than to point at some form of dualism or spirituality as the escape hatch. I like how Chomsky deals with it who doesn't have any spirituality at all, the big degenerate materialist: As far as I can see all of this [he's speaking about the Loebner Prize and the Turing test in general] is entirely pointless.…

I can't disagree more. Or maybe I actually agree. Because it's not easy to tell whether something is flying. Definitions like that fall apart every time we encounter something out of the ordinary. If you take the criterion of "there's no discussion about it", then you're limiting the definition to that which is familiar, not that which is interesting. Is an ekranoplan flying? Is an orbiting spaceship flying? Is a hov…

> Your criterion would suggest the answer of "no" to any of those cases, even though those cover much of the same use cases as flying, and possibly some new, more interesting ones.

Is it a problem though? Their existence are unrelated to how we categorize them.

That matters only in communication. “if everybody agrees” lowers/removes the risk of miscommunication.

If “hovercraft is flying” for you, but not for 50% the world, it makes it somewhat more difficult to communicate. (Easily solved with some qualifications, but that requires admission the questionability of “hovercraft is flying”)

> you're limiting the definition to that which is familiar, not that which is interesting.

You made an Interesting point - good food for thought.

Counterpoint: It seems natural and useful that only similar things get to use same word.

> And I don't think an AGI must be limited …

Could you expand on why does it matter and what would be impacted by such lenient (or strict) classification?

Re: Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

#117

Post by meroes »

valec wrote: post #4
dartos wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW even more recently, models have been tuned using a method called DPO instead of RLHF. IIRC DPO doesn’t have human feedback in the loop

it does. that's what the "direct preference" part of DPO means. you just avoid training an explicit reward model on it like in rlhf and instead directly optimize for log probability of preferred vs dispreferred responses

What is it called when humans interact with a model through lengthy exchanges (mostly humans correcting the model’s responses to a posed question to the model, mostly through chat and labeling each statement by the model as correct or not), and then all of that text (possibly with some editing) is fed to another model to train that higher model?

Does this have a specific name?

Re: Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

#118

Post by skybrian »

Lerc wrote: post #14
GeneralMayhem wrote: post #8

I am highly skeptical of LLMs as a mechanism to achieve AGI, but I also find this paper fairly unconvincing, bordering on tautological. I feel similarly about this as to what I've read of Chalmers - I agree with pretty much all of the conclusions, but I don't feel like the text would convince me of those conclusions if I disagreed; it's more like it's showing me ways of explaining or illustrating what I already belie…

>that sufficiently advanced mimicry is not only indistinguishable from the real thing, but at the limit in fact is the real thing. While sufficiently does a lot of the heavy lifting here, the indistinguishable criteria implicitly means there must be no-way to tell if it is not the real thing. The belief that it is the real thing comes from the intuition that anything that can be everything a person must be, but have…

One of the issues here is that future-focused discussions often lead to wild speculation because we don’t know the future. Also, there’s often too much confidence in people’s preferred predictions (skeptical or optimistic) and it would be less heated if we admitted that we don’t know how things will look even a couple of years out, and alternative scenarios are reasonable.

So I think you’re right, it’s not enlightening. Criticism of overconfident predictions won’t be enlightening if you already believe that they’re overconfident and the future is uncertain. Conversations might be more interesting if not so focused on bad arguments of the other side.

But perhaps such criticism is still useful. How else do you deflate excessive hype or skepticism?

Re: Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

#119

Post by ainoobler »

bubblyworld wrote: post #114
ainoobler wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right.

Well, you know, elaborate and we can have a productive discussion. The way you keep appealing to computability theory as a black box makes me think you haven't actually studied that much of it.

Not much to discuss.

Re: Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency

#120

Post by keybored »

IshKebab wrote: post #43
kazinator wrote: post #35

The authors of this paper are just another instance of the AI hype being used by people who have no connection to it, to attract some kind of attention. "Here is what we think about this current hot topic; please read our stuff and cite generously ..." > Language completeness assumes that a distinct and complete thing such as `a natural language' exists, the essential characteristics of which can be effectively and c…

Babies have feedback and interaction with someone speaking to them. Would they learn to speak if you just dumped them in front of a TV and never spoke to them? I'm not sure. But anyway I agree with you. This is just a confused HN comment in paper form.

> Babies have feedback and interaction with someone speaking to them. Would they learn to speak if you just dumped them in front of a TV and never spoke to them? I'm not sure.

Feedback and interaction is not vital for acquisition for secondary language learning at least according to one theory.

And if that’s good enough for adults it might be good enough for sponge-brain babies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

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