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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

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Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#131

Post by tomhow »

HeartStrings wrote: post #119
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…

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Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#132

Post by seadan83 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #129
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.

Are we looking at the same thread? I see nobody claiming this. Anthropic does sometimes, their position is clearly wishful thinking, and it's not represented ITT. Try looking at this from another perspective - many people simply do not see human intelligence (or life, for that matter) as magic. I see nothing religious about that, rather the opposite.

I agree with you @orbital-decay that I also do not get the same vibe reading this thread.

Though, while human intelligence is (seemingly) not magic, it is very far from being understood. The idea that a LLM is comparable to human intelligence implies that we even understand human intelligence well enough to say that.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#133

Post by petesergeant »

> We are speaking about a big recurrence equation that produces a new word

It’s not clear that this isn’t also how I produce words, though, which gets to heart of the same thing. The author sort of acknowledges this in the first few sentences, and then doesn’t really manage to address it.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#134

Post by seadan83 »

elliotto wrote: post #79

To claim that LLMs do not experience consciousness requires a model of how consciousness works. The author has not presented a model, and instead relied on emotive language leaning on the absurdity of the claim. I would say that any model one presents of consciousness often comes off as just as absurd as the claim that LLMs experience it. It's a great exercise to sit down and write out your own perspective on how con…

I believe the author is rather drawing this distinction:

LLMs: (R^n)^c -> (R^n)^c

Humans: [set of potentially many and complicated inputs that we effectively do not understand at all] -> (R^n)^c

The point is that the model of how consciousness works is unknown. Thus the author would not present such a model, it is the point.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#135

Post by xtal_freq »

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…

Not that this is your main point, but I find this take representative, “do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics?”There are things “about humans”, or at least things that our words denote, that are outside physic’s explanatory scope. For example, the experience of the colour red cannot be known, as an experience, by a person who only sees black and white. This is the case no matter what empirical propositions, or explanatory system, they understand.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#136

Post by suddenlybananas »

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…

>There's a rich family of universal approximation theorems

Wow, look-up tables can get increasingly good at approximating a function!

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#137

Post by dtj1123 »

It's possible to construct a similar description of whatever it is that human brain is doing that clearly fails to capture the fact that we're conscious. If you take a cross section of every nerve feeding into the human brain at a given time T, the action potentials across those cross sections can be embedded in R^n. If you take the history of those action potentials across the lifetime of the brain, you get a path through R^n that is continuous, and maps roughly onto your subjectively experienced personal history, since your brain neccesarily builds your experienced reality from this signal data moment to moment. If you then take the cross sections of every nerve feeding OUT of your brain at time T, you have another set of action potentials that can be embedded in R^m which partially determines the state of the R^n embedding at time T + delta. This is not meaningfully different from the higher dimensional game of snake described in the article, more or less reducing the experience of being a human to 'next nerve impulse prediction', but it obviously fails to capture the significance of the computation which determines what that next output should be.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#138

Post by seadan83 »

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.

FWIW, in another part of this thread I quoted a paper that summed up what Neurophysiologists think:

> Author's note: Despite a century of anatomical, physiological, and molecular biological efforts scientists do not know how neurons by their collective interactions produce percepts, thoughts, memories, and behavior. Scientists do not know and have no theories explaining how brains and central nervous systems work. [1]

That lack of understanding I believe is a major part of the author's point.

[1] "How far neuroscience is from understanding brains" - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10585277/#abstract1

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#139

Post by suddenlybananas »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #21
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #16

My question: how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work. What seems intuitively logical to me is that we have brains evolved through evolutionary process via random mutations yielding in a structure that has its own evolutionary reward based algorithms designing it yielding a structure that at any point is trying to predict next actions to maximise survival/procreation, of course with a lot of s…

> My question: how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work. It is similar to how human brains operate. LLMs are the (current) culmination of at least 80 years of research on building computational models of the human brain.

It really is not. ANNs bear only a passing resemblance to how neurons work.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#140

Post by amelius »

grey-area wrote: post #120
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #117

I have the technical knowledge to know how LLMs work, but I still find it pointless to not anthropomorphize, at least to an extent. The language of "generator that stochastically produces the next word" is just not very useful when you're talking about, e.g., an LLM that is answering complex world modeling questions or generating a creative story. It's at the wrong level of abstraction, just as if you were discussing…

On the contrary, anthropomorphism IMO is the main problem with narratives around LLMs - people are genuinely talking about them thinking and reasoning when they are doing nothing of that sort (actively encouraged by the companies selling them) and it is completely distorting discussions on their use and perceptions of their utility.

I don't agree. Most LLMs have been trained on human data, so it is best to talk about these models in a human way.
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