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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

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Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#141

Post by 4ndrewl »

amelius wrote: post #140
grey-area wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even the verb 'trained' is contentious wrt anthropomorphism.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#142

Post by justinfreitag »

From my recent post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44487261

What if instead of defining all behaviors upfront, we created conditions for patterns to emerge through use?

Repository: https://github.com/justinfreitag/v4-consciousness

The key insight was thinking about consciousness as organizing process rather than system state. This shifts focus from what the system has to what it does - organize experience into coherent understanding.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#143

Post by fenomas »

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.

When I see these debates it's always the other way around - one person speaks colloquially about an LLM's behavior, and then somebody else jumps on them for supposedly believing the model is conscious, just because the speaker said "the model thinks.." or "the model knows.." or whatever.

To be honest the impression I've gotten is that some people are just very interested in talking about not anthropomorphizing AI, and less interested in talking about AI behaviors, so they see conversations about the latter as a chance to talk about the former.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#144

Post by ACCount36 »

lostmsu wrote: post #102
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.

This is wrong, intermediate activations are preserved when going forward.

Within a single forward pass, but not from one emitted token to another.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#145

Post by bravesoul2 »

dtj1123 wrote: post #137

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 t…

Brain probably isn't modelled as real but as natural or rational numbers. This is my suspicion. The reals just hold too much information.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#147

Post by quonn »

NetRunnerSu wrote: post #123

The author's critique of naive anthropomorphism is salient. However, the reduction to "just MatMul" falls into the same trap it seeks to avoid: it mistakes the implementation for the function. A brain is also "just proteins and currents," but this description offers no explanatory power. The correct level of analysis is not the substrate (silicon vs. wetware) but the computational principles being executed. A modern…

> A brain is also "just proteins and currents,"

This is actually not comparable, because the brain has a much more complex structure that is _not_ learned, even at that level. The proteins and their structure are not a result of training. The fixed part for LMMs is rather trivial and is, in fact, not much for than MatMul which is very easy to understand - and we do. The fixed part of the brain, including the structure of all the proteins is enormously complex which is very difficult to understand - and we don't.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#148

Post by bravesoul2 »

quotemstr wrote: post #42
dgfitz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ 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…

Input/output and the mathematical consistency and repeatability of the universe is a religious tenet of science. Believing your eyes is still belief.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#150

Post by sailingparrot »

dtj1123 wrote: post #137

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 t…

I don’t see how your description “clearly fails to capture the fact that we're conscious” though. There are many example in nature of emergent phenomena that would be very hard to predict just by looking at its components.

This is the crux of the disagreement between those that believe AGI is possible and those that don’t. Some are convinced that we “obviously” more than the sum of our parts, and thus an LLM can’t achieve consciousness because it’s missing this magic ingredient, and those that believe consciousness is just an emergent behaviour from a complex device (the brain). And thus we might be able to recreate it simply by scaling the complexity of another system.

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