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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

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Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#41

Post by patcon »

8note wrote: post #33
gugagore wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hidden state". If you set aside chain of thought, memories, system prompts, etc. and the interfaces that don't show them, there is no hidden state. These LLMs are almost always, to my knowledge, autoregressive models, not recurrent models (Mamba is a notable exception).

do LLM models consider future tokens when making next token predictions? eg. pick 'the' as the next token because there's a strong probability of 'planet' as the token after? is it only past state that influences the choice of 'the'? or that the model is predicting many tokens in advance and only returning the one in the output? if it does predict many, id consider that state hidden in the model weights.

I think recent Anthropic work showed that they "plan" future tokens in advance in an emergent way:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#42

Post by quotemstr »

dgfitz wrote: post #38
quotemstr wrote: post #12

> I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human. And I'm baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a human as something other than a function to generate sequences of words! Oh, but AI is introspectable and the brain isn't? fMRI and BCI are getting better all the time. You really want…

“ Determinism, in philosophy, is the idea that all events are causally determined by preceding events, leaving no room for genuine chance or free will. It suggests that given the state of the universe at any one time, and the laws of nature, only one outcome is possible.” Clearly computers are deterministic. Are people?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of...

> Clearly computers are deterministic. Are people?

Give an LLM memory and a source of randomness and they're as deterministic as people.

"Free will" isn't a concept that typechecks in a materialist philosophy. It's "not even wrong". Asserting that free will exists is _isomorphic_ to dualism which is _isomorphic_ to assertions of ensoulment. I can't argue with dualists. I reject dualism a priori: it's a religious tenet, not a mere difference of philosophical opinion.

So, if we're all materialists here, "free will" doesn't make any sense, since it's an assertion that something other than the input to a machine can influence its output.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#43

Post by brookst »

barrkel wrote: post #27
gugagore wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hidden state". If you set aside chain of thought, memories, system prompts, etc. and the interfaces that don't show them, there is no hidden state. These LLMs are almost always, to my knowledge, autoregressive models, not recurrent models (Mamba is a notable exception).

Hidden state in the form of the activation heads, intermediate activations and so on. Logically, in autoregression these are recalculated every time you run the sequence to predict the next token. The point is, the entire NN state isn't output for each token. There is lots of hidden state that goes into selecting that token and the token isn't a full representation of that information.

State typically means between interactions. By this definition a simple for loop has “hidden state” in the counter.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#44

Post by kazinator »

> LLMs solve a large number of problems that could previously not be solved algorithmically. NLP (as the field was a few years ago) has largely been solved.

That is utter bullshit.

It's not solved until you specify exactly what is being solved and show that the solution implements what is specified.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#45

Post by brookst »

cmiles74 wrote: post #15
barrkel wrote: post #5

The problem with viewing LLMs as just sequence generators, and malbehaviour as bad sequences, is that it simplifies too much. LLMs have hidden state not necessarily directly reflected in the tokens being produced and it is possible for LLMs to output tokens in opposition to this hidden state to achieve longer term outcomes (or predictions, if you prefer). Is it too anthropomorphic to say that this is a lie? To say th…

IMHO, anthrophormization of LLMs is happening because it's perceived as good marketing by big corporate vendors. People are excited about the technology and it's easy to use the terminology the vendor is using. At that point I think it gets kind of self fulfilling. Kind of like the meme about how to pronounce GIF.

Nobody cares about what’s perceived as good marketing. People care about what resonates with the target market.

But yes, anthropomorphising LLMs is inevitable because they feel like an entity. People treat stuffed animals like creatures with feelings and personality; LLMs are far closer than that.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#46

Post by 8note »

barrkel wrote: post #32
d3m0t3p wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they ? LLM embedd the token sequence N^{L} to R^{LxD}, we have some attention and the output is also R^{LxD}, then we apply a projection to the vocabulary and we get R^{LxV} we get therefore for each token a likelihood over the voc. In the attention, you can have Multi Head attention (or whatever version is fancy: GQA,MLA) and therefore multiple representation, but it is always tied to a token. I would argue that…

There is hidden state as plain as day merely in the fact that logits for token prediction exist. The selected token doesn't give you information about how probable other tokens were. That information, that state which is recalculated in autoregression, is hidden. It's not exposed. You can't see it in the text produced by the model. There is plenty of state not visible when an LLM starts a sentence that only becomes s…

this sounds like a fun research area. do LLMs have plans about future tokens?

how do we get 100 tokens of completion, and not just one output layer at a time?

are there papers youve read that you can share that support the hypothesis? vs that the LLM doesnt have ideas about the future tokens when its predicting the next one?

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#47

Post by djoldman »

Let's skip to the punchline. Using TFA's analogy: essentially folks are saying not that this is a set of dice rolling around making words. It's a set of dice rolling around where someone attaches those dice to the real world where if the dice land on 21, the system kills a chicken, or a lot worse.

Yes it's just a word generator. But then folks attach the word generator to tools where it can invoke the use of tools by saying the tool name.

So if the LLM says "I'll do some bash" then it does some bash. It's explicitly linked to program execution that, if it's set up correctly, can physically affect the world.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#48

Post by coolKid721 »

Anthropomorphizing LLMs is just because half the stock market gains are dependent on it, we have absurd levels of debt we will either have to have insane growth out of or default, and every company and "person" is trying to hype everyone up to get access to all of this liquidity being thrown into it.

I agree with the author, but people acting like they are conscious or humans isn't weird to me, it's just fraud and liars. Most people basically have 0 understanding of what technology or minds are philosophically so it's an easy sale, and I do think most of these fraudsters also likely buy into it themselves because of that.

The really sad thing is people think "because someone runs an ai company" they are somehow an authority on philosophy of mind which lets them fall for this marketing. The stuff these people say about this stuff is absolute garbage, not that I disagree with them, but it betrays a total lack of curiosity or interest in the subject of what llms are, and the possible impacts of technological shifts as those that might occur with llms becoming more widespread. It's not a matter of agreement it's a matter of them simply not seeming to be aware of the most basic ideas of what things are, technology is, it's manner of impacting society etc.

I'm not surprised by that though, it's absurd to think because someone runs some AI lab or has a "head of safety/ethics" or whatever garbage job title at an AI lab they actually have even the slightest interest in ethics or any even basic familiarity with the major works in the subject.

The author is correct if people want to read a standard essay articulating it more in depth check out https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/Is%20the%2... (the full extrapolation requires establishing what things are and how causality in general operates and how that relates to artifacts/technology but that's obvious quite a bit to get into).

The other note would be something sharing an external trait means absolutely nothing about causality and suggesting a thing is caused by the same thing "even to a way lesser degree" because they share a resemblance is just a non-sequitur. It's not a serious thought/argument.

I think I addressed the why of why this weirdness comes up though. The entire economy is basically dependent on huge productivity growth to keep functioning so everyone is trying to sell they can offer that and AI is the clearest route, AGI most of all.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#49

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

djoldman wrote: post #47

Let's skip to the punchline. Using TFA's analogy: essentially folks are saying not that this is a set of dice rolling around making words. It's a set of dice rolling around where someone attaches those dice to the real world where if the dice land on 21, the system kills a chicken, or a lot worse. Yes it's just a word generator. But then folks attach the word generator to tools where it can invoke the use of tools by…

Given our entire civilization is built on words, all of it, it's shocking how poorly most of us understand their importance and power.
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