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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

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Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#231

Post by flir »

JimDabell wrote: post #227
flir wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreeing with you, this is a "can a submarine swim" problem IMO. We need a new word for what LLMs are doing. Calling it "thinking" is stretching the word to breaking point, but "selecting the next word based on a complex statistical model" doesn't begin to capture what they're capable of. Maybe it's cog-nition (emphasis on the cog).

> this is a "can a submarine swim" problem IMO. We need a new word for what LLMs are doing. Why? A plane is not a fly and does not stay aloft like a fly, yet we describe what it does as flying despite the fact that it does not flap its wings. What are the downsides we encounter that are caused by using the word “fly” to describe a plane travelling through the air?

I was riffing on that famous Dijkstra quote.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#232

Post by positron26 »

fenomas wrote: post #143
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.

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, an…

Most certainly the conversation is extremely political. There are not simply different points of view. There are competitive, gladiatorial opinions ready to ambush anyone not wearing the right colors. It's a situation where the technical conversation is drowning.

I suppose this war will be fought until people are out of energy, and if reason has no place, it is reasonable to let others tire themselves out reiterating statements that are not designed to bring anyone closer to the truth.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#233

Post by flir »

LeonardoTolstoy wrote: post #192
flir wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreeing with you, this is a "can a submarine swim" problem IMO. We need a new word for what LLMs are doing. Calling it "thinking" is stretching the word to breaking point, but "selecting the next word based on a complex statistical model" doesn't begin to capture what they're capable of. Maybe it's cog-nition (emphasis on the cog).

What does a submarine do? Submarine? I suppose you "drive" a submarine which is getting to the idea: submarines don't swim because ultimately they are "driven"? I guess the issue is we don't make up a new word for what submarines do, we just don't use human words. I think the above poster gets a little distracted by suggesting the models are creative which itself is disputed. Perhaps a better term, like above, would…

I really like that, I think it has the right amount of distance. They don't write, they model writing.

We're very used to "all models are wrong, some are useful", "the map is not the territory", etc.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#234

Post by gcanyon »

In some contexts it's super-important to remember that LLMs are stochastic word generators.

Everyday use is not (usually) one of those contexts. Prompting an LLM works much better with an anthropomorphized view of the model. It's a useful abstraction, a shortcut that enables a human to reason practically about how to get what they want from the machine.

It's not a perfect metaphor -- as one example, shame isn't much of a factor for LLMs, so shaming them into producing the right answer seems unlikely to be productive (I say "seems" because it's never been my go-to, I haven't actually tried it).

As one example, that person a few years back who told the LLM that an actual person would die if the LLM didn't produce valid JSON -- that's not something a person reasoning about gradient descent would naturally think of.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#235

Post by hackinthebochs »

positron26 wrote: post #221
hackinthebochs wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the function of an unrolled recursion is the same as a recursive function with bounded depth as long as the number of unrolled steps match. The point is whatever function recursion is supposed to provide can plausibly be present in LLMs.

And then during the next token, all of that bounded depth is thrown away except for the token of output. You're fixating on the pseudo-computation within a single token pass. This is very limited compared to actual hidden state retention and the introspection that would enable if we knew how to train it and do online learning already. The "reasoning" hack would not be a realistic implementation choice if the models h…

Sure. But notice "ruminate" is different than introspect, which was what your original comment was about.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#236

Post by pigpop »

> We understand essentially nothing about it. In contrast to an LLM, given a human and a sequence of words, I cannot begin putting a probability on "will this human generate this sequence".

If you fine tuned an LLM on the writing of that person it could do this.

There's also an entire field called Stylometry that seeks to do this in various ways employing statistical analysis.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#237

Post by [deleted] »

LeonardoTolstoy wrote: post #192
flir wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreeing with you, this is a "can a submarine swim" problem IMO. We need a new word for what LLMs are doing. Calling it "thinking" is stretching the word to breaking point, but "selecting the next word based on a complex statistical model" doesn't begin to capture what they're capable of. Maybe it's cog-nition (emphasis on the cog).

What does a submarine do? Submarine? I suppose you "drive" a submarine which is getting to the idea: submarines don't swim because ultimately they are "driven"? I guess the issue is we don't make up a new word for what submarines do, we just don't use human words. I think the above poster gets a little distracted by suggesting the models are creative which itself is disputed. Perhaps a better term, like above, would…

[deleted]

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#238

Post by tliltocatl »

psychoslave wrote: post #220
tliltocatl wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropomorphising implicitly assumes motivation, goals and values. That's what the core of anthropomorphism is - attempting to explain behavior of a complex system in teleological terms. And prompt escapes make it clear LLMs doesn't have any teleological agency yet. Whenever their course of action is, it is to easy to steer them of. Try to do it with a sufficiently motivated human.

>. Try to do it with a sufficiently motivated human. That's what they call marketing, propaganda or brain washing, acculturation , education depending on who you ask and at which scale you operate, apparently.

> sufficiently motivated

None of these targets sufficiently motivated, rather those who are either ambivalent or yet unexposed.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#239

Post by sailingparrot »

dtj1123 wrote: post #182
sailingparrot wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My bad, we are saying the same thing. I misinterpreted your last sentence as saying this simplistic view of the brain you described does not account for consciousness.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#240

Post by woliveirajr »

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…

I'd take it in reverse order: the problem isn't that it's possible to have a computer that "stochastically produces the next word" and can fool humans, it's why / how / when humans evolved to have technological complexity when the majority (of people) aren't that different from a stochastic process.
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