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Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

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Re: Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

#281

Post by im3w1l »

andsoitis wrote: post #232
codenlearn wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Language itself encode multimodal experiences? Let's take this case write when we write text, we have the skill and opportunity to encode the visual, tactile, and other sensory experiences into words. and the fact is llm's trained on massive text corpora are indirectly learning from human multimodal experiences translated into language. This might be less direct than firsthand sensory experience, but potentia…

Some aspects of experience— e.g. raw emotions, sensory perceptions, or deeply personal, ineffable states—often resist full articulation. The taste of a specific dish, the exact feeling of nostalgia, or the full depth of a traumatic or ecstatic moment can be approximated in words but never fully captured. Language is symbolic and structured, while experience is often fluid, embodied, and multi-sensory. Even the most p…

Just because we struggle to verbalize something, doesn't mean that it cannot be verbalized. The taste of a specific dish can be broken down into its components. The basic tastes: how sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory it is. The smell of it: there are are apparently ~400 olfactory receptor types in the nose. So you could describe how strongly each of them is activated. Thermoception, the temperature of the food itself, but also fake temperature sensation produced by capsaicin and menthol. The mechanoceptors play a part, detecting both the shape of the food as well as the texture of it. The texture also contributes to a sound sensation as we hear the cracks and pops when we chew. And that is just the static part of it. Food is actually an interactive experience, where all those impressions change over time and varies over time as the food is chewed.

It is highly complex, but it can all be described.

Re: Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

#282

Post by jcims »

pessimizer wrote: post #207
ninetyninenine wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM is just the name. You can encode anything into the "language" including pictures video and sound.

I've always been wondering if anyone is working on using nerve impulses. My first thought when transformers came around was if they could be used for prosthetics, but I've been too lazy to do the research to find anybody working on anything like that, or to experiment myself with it.

There are ‘spiking neural networks’ that operate in a manner that more closely emulates how neurons communicate. One idea I think that is interesting to think about is that we build a neural network that operates in a way that is effectively ‘native’ to our mind, so it’s less like there’s a hidden keyboard and screen in your brain, but that it simply becomes new space you can explore in your mind.

Or learn king fu.

Re: Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

#283

Post by chongli »

mietek wrote: post #273
chongli wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrical signals are not the same as subjective experiences. While a machine may be able to record and play back these signals for humans to experience, that does not imply that the experiences themselves are recorded nor that the machine has any access to them. A deaf person can use a tape recorder to record and play back a symphony but that does not encode the experience in any way the deaf person could share.

That’s some strong claims, given that philosophers (e.g. Chalmers vs Dennett) can’t even agree whether subjective experiences exist or not.

Even if you’re a pure Dennettian functionalist you still commit to a functional difference between signals in transit (or at rest) and signals being processed and interpreted. Holding a cassette tape with a recording of a symphony is not the same as hearing the symphony.

Applying this case to AI gives rise to the Chinese Room argument. LLMs’ propensity for hallucinations invite this comparison.

Re: Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

#284

Post by kadushka »

yahoozoo wrote: post #272
kadushka wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day, all modalities boil down to patterns of electrical activity in your brain.

The brain is the important part. The electricity just keeps it going. And it’s more than numerical matrices.

You mean soul?

Re: Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

#285

Post by kerkeslager »

Lerc wrote: post #240
flamedoge wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It literally doesn't know how to handle 'I don't know' and needs to be taught. fascinating.

I think it would be more accurate to say that after fine tuning on a series of questions with answers that it thinks that you don't want to hear "I don't know"

I think it's more fundamental than that. If you start saying "it thinks" in regards to an LLM, you're wrong. LLMs don't think, they pattern match fuzzily.

If the training data contained a bunch of answers to questions which were simply "I don't know", you could get an LLM to say "I don't know" but that's still not actually a concept of not knowing. That's just knowing that the answer to your question is "I don't know".

It's essentially like if you had an HTTP server that responded to requests for nonexistent documents with a "200 OK" containing "Not found". It's fundamentally missing the "404 Not found" concept.

LLMs just have a bunch of words--they don't understand what the words mean. There's no metacognition going on for it to think "I don't know" for it to even think you would want to know that.

Re: Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

#286

Post by borgdefenser »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #64
ActorNightly wrote: post #2

Not an official ML researcher, but I do happen to understand this stuff. The problem with LLMs is that the output is inherently stochastic - i.e there isn't a "I don't have enough information" option. This is due to the fact that LLMs are basically just giant look up maps with interpolation. Energy minimization is more of an abstract approach to where you can use architectures that don't rely on things like different…

> The problem with LLMs is that the output is inherently stochastic Isn't that true with humans too? There's some leap humans make, even as stochastic parrots, that lets us generate new knowledge.

I think it is because we don't feel the random and chaotic nature of what we know as individuals.

If I had been born a day earlier or later I would have a completely different life because of initial conditions and randomness but life doesn't feel that way even though I think this is obviously true.

Re: Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

#287

Post by PeterStuer »

implmntatio wrote: post #255
PeterStuer wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Late 80's and 90's had the 'nouvelle AI' movement that argued embodiment was required for grounding the system into the shared world model. Without it symbols would be ungrounded and never achieve open world consistency. So unlike their knowledge system predecessors, a bit derogatory refered to as GOFAI (good old fashioned AI), nAI hawked back to cybernetics and multi layered dynamical systems rather than having expl…

> grounding the system into the shared world model before we fix certain things [..., 'corruption', Ponzi schemes, deliberate impediment of information flow to population segments and social classes, among other things, ... and a chain of command in hierarchies that are build on all that] is impossible. Why do smart people not talk about this at all? The least engineers and smart people should do is picking these fig…

I hear you, but while you can have many layers of semantic obfuscation, no amount of sophistry will allow you to smash your face unharmed through a concrete wall. Reality is a hard mistress.

In absense of being able to sense reality, post modernism can run truly unchecked.

Re: Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

#288

Post by mietek »

chongli wrote: post #283
mietek wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s some strong claims, given that philosophers (e.g. Chalmers vs Dennett) can’t even agree whether subjective experiences exist or not.

Even if you’re a pure Dennettian functionalist you still commit to a functional difference between signals in transit (or at rest) and signals being processed and interpreted. Holding a cassette tape with a recording of a symphony is not the same as hearing the symphony. Applying this case to AI gives rise to the Chinese Room argument. LLMs’ propensity for hallucinations invite this comparison.

Are LLMs having subjective experiences? Surely not. But if you claim that human subjective experiences are not the result of electrical signals in the brain, then what exactly is your position? Dualism?

Personally, I think the Chinese room argument is invalid. In order for the person in the room to respond to any possible query by looking up the query in a book, the book would need to be infinite and therefore impossible as a physical object. Otherwise, if the book is supposed to describe an algorithm for the person to follow in order to compute a response, then that algorithm is the intelligent entity that is capable of understanding, and the person in the room is merely the computational substrate.

Re: Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

#289

Post by sturza »

kryogen1c wrote: post #279
ninetyninenine wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM is just the name. You can encode anything into the "language" including pictures video and sound.

> You can encode anything into the "language Im just a layman here, but i don't think this is true. Language is an abstraction, an interpreative mechanism of reality. A reproduction of reality, like a picture, by definition holds more information than it's abstraction does.

A picture is also an abstraction. If you take a picture of a tree, you have more details than the word "tree". What i think the parent is saying, is that all the information in a picture of a tree can be encoded in language, for example a description of a tree, using words. Both are abstractions but if you describe the tree well enough with text(and comprehend the description) it might have the same "value" as a picture(not for a human, but for a machine). Also, the size of the text describing the tree might be smaller than the picture.

Re: Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?

#290

Post by random3 »

emrah wrote: post #280
chriskanan wrote: post #246

A lot of the responses seem to be answering a different question: "Why does LeCun think LLMs won't lead to AGI?" I could answer that, but the question you are asking is "Why does LeCun think hallucinations are inherent in LLMs?" To answer your question, think about how we train LLMs: We have them learn the statistical distribution of all written human language, such that given a chunk of text (a prompt, etc.) it then…

Would you care to post your ideas somewhere online so others can read, critique, try etc?

"we love your ideas" == no

"when do you close the round?" = maybe

money in the bank account = yes

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