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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

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Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#91

Post by cuttothechase »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #20

> 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. This is such a bizarre take. The relation associating each human to the list of all words they will ever say is obviously a function. > almost magical human-like powers to something that - in my mind - is just MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities. There's a ric…

>Think of it this way: do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics? If so that's essentially a religious position (or more literally, a belief in the supernatural). If not, then functions and approximations to functions are what the human experience boils down to.

It seems like, we can at best, claim that we have modeled the human thought process for reasoning/analytic/quantitative through Linear Algebra, as the best case. Why should we expect the model to be anything more than a model ?

I understand that there is tons of vested interest, many industries, careers and lives literally on the line causing heavy bias to get to AGI. But what I don't understand is what about linear algebra that makes it so special that it creates a fully functioning life or aspects of a life?

Should we make an argument saying that Schroedinger's cat experiment can potentially create zombies then the underlying Applied probabilistic solutions should be treated as super-human and build guardrails against it building zombie cats?

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#92

Post by gpm »

NiloCK wrote: post #90
gpm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM does not "have" a plan. Arguably there's reason to believe it comes up with a plan when it is computing token propabilities, but it does not store it between tokens. I.e. it doesn't possess or "have" it. It simply comes up with a plan, emits a token, and entirely throws all its intermediate thoughts (including any plan) to start again from scratch on the next token.

I don't think that the comment above you made any suggestion that the plan is persisted between token generations. I'm pretty sure you described exactly what they intended.

I agree. I'm suggesting that the language they are using is unintentionally misleading, not that they are factually wrong.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#93

Post by sothatsit »

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.

I think anthropomorphizing LLMs is useful, not just a marketing tactic. A lot of intuitions about how humans think map pretty well to LLMs, and it is much easier to build intuitions about how LLMs work by building upon our intuitions about how humans think than by trying to build your intuitions from scratch.

Would this question be clear for a human? If so, it is probably clear for an LLM. Did I provide enough context for a human to diagnose the problem? Then an LLM will probably have a better chance of diagnosing the problem. Would a human find the structure of this document confusing? An LLM would likely perform poorly when reading it as well.

Re-applying human intuitions to LLMs is a good starting point to gaining intuition about how to work with LLMs. Conversely, understanding sequences of tokens and probability spaces doesn't give you much intuition about how you should phrase questions to get good responses from LLMs. The technical reality doesn't explain the emergent behaviour very well.

I don't think this is mutually exclusive with what the author is talking about either. There are some ways that people think about LLMs where I think the anthropomorphization really breaks down. I think the author says it nicely:

> The moment that people ascribe properties such as "consciousness" or "ethics" or "values" or "morals" to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#94

Post by rockskon »

The people in this thread incredulous at the assertion that they are not God and haven't invented machine life are exasperating. At this point I am convinced they, more often than not, financially benefit from their near religious position in marketing AI as akin to human intelligence.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#95

Post by refulgentis »

rockskon wrote: post #94

The people in this thread incredulous at the assertion that they are not God and haven't invented machine life are exasperating. At this point I am convinced they, more often than not, financially benefit from their near religious position in marketing AI as akin to human intelligence.

I am ready and waiting for you to share these comments that are incredulous at the assertion they are not God, lol.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#96

Post by ants_everywhere »

cuttothechase wrote: post #91
ants_everywhere wrote: post #20

> 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. This is such a bizarre take. The relation associating each human to the list of all words they will ever say is obviously a function. > almost magical human-like powers to something that - in my mind - is just MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities. There's a ric…

>Think of it this way: do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics? If so that's essentially a religious position (or more literally, a belief in the supernatural). If not, then functions and approximations to functions are what the human experience boils down to. It seems like, we can at best, claim that we have modeled the human thought process for reasoning/ana…

> It seems like, we can at best, claim that we have modeled the human thought process for reasoning/analytic/quantitative through Linear Algebra....I don't understand is what about linear algebra that makes it so special that it creates a fully functioning life or aspects of a life?

Not linear algebra. Artificial neural networks create arbitrarily non-linear functions. That's the point of non-linear activation functions and it's the subject of the universal approximation theorems I mentioned above.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#97

Post by krackers »

fastball wrote: post #73

"Don't anthropomorphize token predictors" is a reasonable take assuming you have demonstrated that humans are not in fact just SOTA token predictors. But AFAIK that hasn't been demonstrated. Until we have a much more sophisticated understanding of human intelligence and consciousness, any claim of "these aren't like us" is either premature or spurious.

Every time this discussion comes up, I'm reminded of this tongue-in-cheek paper.

https://ai.vixra.org/pdf/2506.0065v1.pdf

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#98

Post by positron26 »

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…

> Is it too anthropomorphic to say that this is a lie?

Yes. Current LLMs can only introspect from output tokens. You need hidden reasoning that is within the black box, self-knowing, intent, and motive to lie.

I rather think accusing an LLM of lying is like accusing a mousetrap of being a murderer.

When models have online learning, complex internal states, and reflection, I might consider one to have consciousness and to be capable of lying. It will need to manifest behaviors that can only emerge from the properties I listed.

I've seen similar arguments where people assert that LLMs cannot "grasp" what they are talking about. I strongly suspect a high degree of overlap between those willing to anthropomorphize error bars as lies while declining to award LLMs "grasping". Which is it? It can think or it cannot? (objectively, SoTA models today cannot yet.) The willingness to waffle and pivot around whichever perspective damns the machine completely belies the lack of honesty in such conversations.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#99

Post by positron26 »

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.

> because it's perceived as good marketing

We are making user interfaces. Good user interfaces are intuitive and purport to be things that users are familiar with, such as people. Any alternative explanation of such a versatile interface will be met with blank stares. Users with no technical expertise would come to their own conclusions, helped in no way by telling the user not to treat the chat bot as a chat bot.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#100

Post by cuttothechase »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #96
cuttothechase wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Think of it this way: do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics? If so that's essentially a religious position (or more literally, a belief in the supernatural). If not, then functions and approximations to functions are what the human experience boils down to. It seems like, we can at best, claim that we have modeled the human thought process for reasoning/ana…

> It seems like, we can at best, claim that we have modeled the human thought process for reasoning/analytic/quantitative through Linear Algebra....I don't understand is what about linear algebra that makes it so special that it creates a fully functioning life or aspects of a life? Not linear algebra. Artificial neural networks create arbitrarily non-linear functions. That's the point of non-linear activation functi…

ANNs are just mathematical transformations, powered by linear algebra + non-linear functions. They simulate certain cognitive processes — but they are fundamentally math, not magic.
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