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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

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Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#181

Post by raincole »

latexr wrote: post #165
raincole wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said that before: we have been anthropomorphizing computers since the dawn of information age. - Read and write - Behaviors that separate humans from animals. Now used for input and output. - Server and client - Human social roles. Now used to describe network architecture. - Editor - Human occupation. Now a kind of software. - Computer - Human occupation! And I'm sure people referred their cars and ships as 'he…

You are conflating anthropomorphism with personification. They are not the same thing. No one believes their guitar or car or boat is alive and sentient when they give it a name or talk to or about it. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/anthropomorphism-vs-per...

But the author used "anthropomorphism" the same way as I did. I guess we both mean "personification" then.

> we talk about "behaviors", "ethical constraints", and "harmful actions in pursuit of their goals". All of these are anthropocentric concepts that - in my mind - do not apply to functions or other mathematical objects.

One talking about a program's "behaviors", "actions" or "goals" doesn't mean they believe the program is sentient. Only "ethical constraints" is suspiciously anthropomorphizing.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#182

Post by dtj1123 »

sailingparrot wrote: post #150
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 ac…

Where exactly in my description do I invoke consciousness?

Where does the description given imply that consciousness is required in any way?

The fact that there's a non-obvious emergent phenomena which is apparently responsible for your subjective experience, and that it's possible to provide a superficially accurate description of you as a system without referencing that phenomena in any way, is my entire point. The fact that we can provide such a reductive description of LLMs without referencing consciousness has literally no bearing on whether or not they're conscious.

To be clear, I'm not making a claim as to whether they are or aren't, I'm simply pointing out that the argument in the article is fallacious.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#183

Post by dtj1123 »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #145
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.

Inclined to agree, but most thermal physics uses the reals as they're simpler to work with, so I think they're ok here for the purpose of argument.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#184

Post by tempfile »

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…

The "point" of not anthropomorphizing is to refrain from judgement until a more solid abstraction appears. The problem with explaining LLMs in terms of human behaviour is that, while we don't clearly understand what the LLM is doing, we understand human cognition even less! There is literally no predictive power in the abstraction "The LLM is thinking like I am thinking". It gives you no mechanism to evaluate what tasks the LLM "should" be able to do.

Seriously, try it. Why don't LLMs get frustrated with you if you ask them the same question repeatedly? A human would. Why are LLMs so happy to give contradictory answers, as long as you are very careful not to highlight the contradictory facts? Why do earlier models behave worse on reasoning tasks than later ones? These are features nobody, anywhere understands. So why make the (imo phenomenally large) leap to "well, it's clearly just a brain"?

It is like someone inventing the aeroplane and someone looks at it and says "oh, it's flying, I guess it's a bird". It's not a bird!

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#185

Post by latexr »

raincole wrote: post #181
latexr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating anthropomorphism with personification. They are not the same thing. No one believes their guitar or car or boat is alive and sentient when they give it a name or talk to or about it. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/anthropomorphism-vs-per...

But the author used "anthropomorphism" the same way as I did. I guess we both mean "personification" then. > we talk about "behaviors", "ethical constraints", and "harmful actions in pursuit of their goals". All of these are anthropocentric concepts that - in my mind - do not apply to functions or other mathematical objects. One talking about a program's "behaviors", "actions" or "goals" doesn't mean they believe the…

> One talking about a program's "behaviors", "actions" or "goals" doesn't mean they believe the program is sentient.

Except that is exactly what we’re seeing with LLMs. People believing exactly that.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#186

Post by barrkel »

positron26 wrote: post #103
lostmsu wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Current LLMs can only introspect from output tokens The only interpretation of this statement I can come up with is plain wrong. There's no reason LLM shouldn't be able to introspect without any output tokens. As the GP correctly says, most of the processing in LLMs happens over hidden states. Output tokens are just an artefact for our convenience, which also happens to be the way the hidden state processing is tra…

There are no recurrent paths besides tokens. How may I introspect something if it is not an input? I may not.

The recurrence comes from replaying tokens during autoregression.

It's as if you have a variable in a deterministic programming language, only you have to replay the entire history of the program's computation and input to get the next state of the machine (program counter + memory + registers).

Producing a token for an LLM is analogous to a tick of the clock for a CPU. It's the crank handle that drives the process.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#187

Post by NetRunnerSu »

ACCount36 wrote: post #153
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…

"Not conscious" is a silly claim. We have no agreed-upon definition of "consciousness", no accepted understanding of what gives rise to "consciousness", no way to measure or compare "consciousness", and no test we could administer to either confirm presence of "consciousness" in something or rule it out. The only answer to "are LLMs conscious?" is "we don't know". It helps that the whole question is rather meaningles…

Now we have.

https://github.com/dmf-archive/IPWT

https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/backpropagation-as-...

But you're right, capital only cares about performance.

https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/PoIQ-v2/

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#188

Post by quantumgarbage »

latexr wrote: post #172
lostmsu wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, as a person that knows in detail how LLMs work with probably unique alternative perspective in addition to the commonplace one, I found any claims of them not having emergent behaviors to be of the same fallacy as claiming that crows can't be black because they have DNA of a bird.

> the same fallacy as claiming that crows can't be black because they have DNA of a bird. What fallacy is that? I’m a fan of logical fallacies and never heard that claim before nor am I finding any reference with a quick search.

I think s/he meant swans instead (in ref. to Popperian epistemology).

Not sure though, the point s/he is making isn't really clear to me as well

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#189

Post by NetRunnerSu »

quonn wrote: post #147
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 structur…

The brain is trained to perform supervised and unsupervised hybrid learning from the environment's uninterrupted multimodal input.

Please do not ignore your childhood.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#190

Post by latexr »

quantumgarbage wrote: post #188
latexr wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the same fallacy as claiming that crows can't be black because they have DNA of a bird. What fallacy is that? I’m a fan of logical fallacies and never heard that claim before nor am I finding any reference with a quick search.

I think s/he meant swans instead (in ref. to Popperian epistemology). Not sure though, the point s/he is making isn't really clear to me as well

I was thinking of the black swan fallacy as well. But it doesn’t really support their argument, so I remained confused.
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