Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

addxorrol.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 432 posts

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#241

Post by galangalalgol »

flir wrote: post #233
LeonardoTolstoy wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one was as bothered when we anthropomorphized crud apps simply for the purpose of conversing about "them". "Ack! The thing is corrupting tables again because it thinks we are still using api v3! Who approved that last MR?!" The fact that people are bothered by the same language now is indicative in itself. If you want to maintain distance, pre prompt models to structure all conversations to lack pronouns as between a non sentient language model and a non sentient agi. You can have the model call you out for referring to the model as existing. The language style that forces is interesting, and potentially more productive except that there are fewer conversations formed like that in the training dataset. Translation being a core function of language models makes it less important thought. As for confusing the map for the territory, that is precisely what philosophers like Metzinger say humans are doing by considering "self" to be a real thing and that they are conscious when they are just using the reasoning shortcut of narrating the meta model to be the model.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#243

Post by dtj1123 »

sailingparrot wrote: post #239
dtj1123 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ultimately my bad for letting my original comment turn into a word salad. Glad we've ended up on the same page though.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#244

Post by scarface_74 »

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…

Wait until a conversation about “serverless” comes up and someone says there is no such thing because there are servers somewhere as if everyone - especially on HN -doesn’t already know that.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#245

Post by HelloUsername »

cmenge wrote: post #126
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 kinda agree with both of you. It might be a required abstraction, but it's a leaky one. Long before LLMs, I would talk about classes / functions / modules like "it then does this, decides the epsilon is too low, chops it up and adds it to the list". The difference I guess it was only to a technical crowd and nobody would mistake this for anything it wasn't. Everybody know that "it" didn't "decide" anything. With AI…

> EDIT: some clarifications / wording

This made me think, when will we see LLMs do the same; rereading what they just sent, and editing and correcting their output again :P

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#246

Post by whilenot-dev »

psychoslave wrote: post #218
whilenot-dev wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"predirence" -> prediction meets inference and it sounds a bit like preference

Except -ence is a regular morph, and you would rather suffix it to predict(at)-. And prediction is already an hyponym of inference. Why not just use inference then?

I didn't think of prediction in the statistical sense here, but rather as a prophecy based on a vision, something that is inherently stored in a model without the knowledge of the modelers. I don't want to imply any magic or something supernatural here, it's just the juice that goes off the rails sometimes, and it gets overlooked due to the sheer quantity of the weights. Something like unknown bugs in production, but, because they still just represent a valid number in some computation that wouldn't cause any panic, these few bits can show a useful pattern under the right circumstances.

Inference would be the part that is deliberately learned and drawn from conclusions based on the training set, like in the "classic" sense of statistical learning.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#247

Post by inciampati »

gugagore wrote: post #214
gugagore wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll say it once more: I think it is useful to distinguish between autoregressive and recurrent architectures. A clear way to make that distinction is to agree that the recurrent architecture has hidden state, while the autoregressive one does not. A recurrent model has some point in a space that "encapsulates its understanding". This space is "hidden" in the sense that it doesn't correspond to text tokens or any oth…

I'll also point out what is most important part from your original message: > 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). But what does it mean for an LLM to output a token in opposition to its hidden state? If there's a longer-ter…

You're correct, the distinction matters. Autoregressive models have no hidden state between tokens, just the visible sequence. Every forward pass starts fresh from the tokens alone.But that's precisely why they need chain-of-thought: they're using the output sequence itself as their working memory. It's computationally universal but absurdly inefficient, like having amnesia between every word and needing to re-read everything you've written.https://thinks.lol/2025/01/memory-makes-computation-universa...

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#248

Post by grey-area »

stoneyhrm1 wrote: post #226
cmenge wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda agree with both of you. It might be a required abstraction, but it's a leaky one. Long before LLMs, I would talk about classes / functions / modules like "it then does this, decides the epsilon is too low, chops it up and adds it to the list". The difference I guess it was only to a technical crowd and nobody would mistake this for anything it wasn't. Everybody know that "it" didn't "decide" anything. With AI…

I mean you can boil anything down to it's building blocks and make it seem like it didn't 'decide' anything. When you as a human decide something, your brain and it's neurons just made some connections with an output signal sent to other parts that resulting in your body 'doing' something. I don't think LLMs are sentient or any bullshit like that, but I do think people are too quick to write them off before really th…

I wasn't talking about knowing (they clearly encode knowledge), I was talking about thinking/reasoning, which is something LLMs do not in fact do IMO.

These are very different and knowledge is not intelligence.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#249

Post by danielbln »

CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #193
tempfile wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ta…

> Why don't LLMs get frustrated with you if you ask them the same question repeatedly? To be fair, I have had a strong sense of Gemini in particular becoming a lot more frustrated with me than GPT or Claude. Yesterday I had it ensuring me that it was doing a great job, it was just me not understanding the challenge but it would break it down step by step just to make it obvious to me (only to repeat the same errors,…

In addition, when the boss man asks for the same thing repeatedly then the underling might get frustrated as hell, but they won't be telling that to the boss.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#250

Post by smus »

You are still being incredibly reductionist but just going into more detail about the system you are reducing. If I stayed at the same level of abstraction as "a brain is just proteins and current" and just described how a single neuron firing worked, I could make it sound equally ridiculous that a human brain might be conscious.

Here's a question for you: how do you reconcile that these stochastic mapping are starting to realize and comment on the fact that tests are being performed on them when processing data?

Post reply on HN