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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

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Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#51

Post by brookst »

szvsw wrote: post #3

So the author’s core view is ultimately a Searle-like view: a computational, functional, syntactic rules based system cannot reproduce a mind. Plenty of people will agree, plenty of people will disagree, and the answer is probably unknowable and just comes down to whatever axioms you subscribe to in re: consciousness. The author largely takes the view that it is more productive for us to ignore any anthropomorphic re…

Thank you for a well thought out and nuanced view in a discussion where so many are clearly fitting arguments to foregone, largely absolutist, conclusions.

It’s astounding to me that so much of HN reacts so emotionally to LLMs, to the point of denying there is anything at all interesting or useful about them. And don’t get me started on the “I am choosing to believe falsehoods as a way to spite overzealous marketing” crowd.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#52

Post by degun »

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…

This was the same idea that crossed my mind while reading the article. It seems far too naive to think that because LLMs have no will of their own, there will be no harmful consequences on the real world. This is exactly where ethics comes to play.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#53

Post by cmiles74 »

brookst wrote: post #45
cmiles74 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alright, let’s agree that good marketing resonates with the target market. ;-)

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#54

Post by andyferris »

low_tech_punk wrote: post #22

The anthropomorphic view of LLM is a much better representation and compression for most types of discussions and communication. A purely mathematical view is accurate but it isn’t productive for the purpose of the general public’s discourse. I’m thinking a legal systems analogy, at the risk of a lossy domain transfer: the laws are not written as lambda calculus. Why? And generalizing to social science and humanities…

I've personally described the "stochastic parrot" model to laypeople who were worried about AI and they came away much more relaxed about it doing something "malicious". They seemed to understand the difference between "trained at roleplay" and "consciousness".

I don't think we need to simplify it to the point of considering it sentient to get the public to interact with it successfully. It causes way more problems than it solves.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#55

Post by szvsw »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #40

Has anyone asked an actual Ethologist or Neurophysiologist what they think? People keep debating like the only two options are "it's a machine" or "it's a human being", while in fact the majority of intelligent entities on earth are neither.

Yeah, I think I’m with you if you ultimately mean to say something like this:

“the labels are meaningless… we just have collections of complex systems that demonstrate various behaviors and properties, some in common with other systems, some behaviors that are unique to that system, sometimes through common mechanistic explanations with other systems, sometimes through wildly different mechanistic explanations, but regardless they seem to demonstrate x/y/z, and it’s useful to ask, why, how, and what the implications are of it appearing to demonstrating those properties, with both an eye towards viewing it independently of its mechanism and in light of its mechanism.”

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#56

Post by markerz »

halJordan wrote: post #35
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).

If you dont know, that's not necessarily anyone's fault, but why are you dunking into the conversation? The hidden state is a foundational part of a transformers implementation. And because we're not allowed to use metaphors because that is too anthropomorphic, then youre just going to have to go learn the math.

I don't think your response is very productive, and I find that my understanding of LLMs aligns with the person you're calling out. We could both be wrong, but I'm grateful that someone else spoke saying that it doesn't seem to match their mental model and we would all love to learn a more correct way of thinking about LLMs.

Telling us to just go and learn the math is a little hurtful and doesn't really get me any closer to learning the math. It gives gatekeeping.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#57

Post by 8note »

patcon wrote: post #41
8note wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

oo thanks!

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#58

Post by brookst »

cmiles74 wrote: post #53
brookst wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alright, let’s agree that good marketing resonates with the target market. ;-)

I 1000% agree. It’s a vicious, evolutionary, and self-selecting process.

It takes great marketing to actually have any character and intent at all.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#59

Post by tbrownaw »

halJordan wrote: post #35
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).

If you dont know, that's not necessarily anyone's fault, but why are you dunking into the conversation? The hidden state is a foundational part of a transformers implementation. And because we're not allowed to use metaphors because that is too anthropomorphic, then youre just going to have to go learn the math.

The comment you are replying to is not claiming ignorance of how models work. It is saying that the author does know how they work, and they do not contain anything that can properly be described as "hidden state". The claimed confusion is over how the term "hidden state" is being used, on the basis that it is not being used correctly.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#60

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

andyferris wrote: post #54
low_tech_punk wrote: post #22

The anthropomorphic view of LLM is a much better representation and compression for most types of discussions and communication. A purely mathematical view is accurate but it isn’t productive for the purpose of the general public’s discourse. I’m thinking a legal systems analogy, at the risk of a lossy domain transfer: the laws are not written as lambda calculus. Why? And generalizing to social science and humanities…

I've personally described the "stochastic parrot" model to laypeople who were worried about AI and they came away much more relaxed about it doing something "malicious". They seemed to understand the difference between "trained at roleplay" and "consciousness". I don't think we need to simplify it to the point of considering it sentient to get the public to interact with it successfully. It causes way more problems t…

Am I misunderstanding what you mean by "malicious"? It sounds like the stochastic parrot model wrongly convinced these laypeople you were talking to that they don't need to worry about LLMs doing bad things. That's definitely been my experience - the people who tell me the most about stochastic parrots are the same ones who tell me that it's absurd to worry about AI-powered disinformation or AI-powered scams.
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