91–100 of 362 posts
> That’s also why I see no point in using AI to, say, write an essay, just like I see no point in bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, it can lift the weights, but I’m not trying to suspend a barbell above the floor for the hell of it. I lift it because I want to become the kind of person who can lift it. Similarly, I write because I want to become the kind of person who can think.
I am unsure myself whether we should regard LLMs as mere token-predicting automatons or as some new kind of incipient intelligence. Despite their origins as statistical parrots, the interpretability research from Anthropic [1] suggests that structures corresponding to meaning do exist inside those bundles of numbers and that there are signs of activity within those bundles of numbers that seem analogous to thought. T…
I am unsure myself whether we should regard LLMs as mere token-predicting automatons or as some new kind of incipient intelligence. Despite their origins as statistical parrots, the interpretability research from Anthropic [1] suggests that structures corresponding to meaning do exist inside those bundles of numbers and that there are signs of activity within those bundles of numbers that seem analogous to thought. T…
the anthropomorphization (say that 3 times quickly) is kinda weird, but also makes for a much more pleasant conversation imo. it's kinda tedious being pedantic all the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could an LLM trained on nothing and looped upon itself eventually develop language, more complex concepts, and everything else, based on nothing? If you loop LLMs on each other, training them so they "learn" over time, will they eventually form and develop new concepts, cultures, and languages organically over time? I don't have an answer to that question, but I strongly doubt it. There's clearly more going on in the…
If you come up with a genetic algorithm scaffolding to affect both the architecture and the training algorithm, and then you instantiate it in an artificial selection environment, and you also give it trillions generations to evolve evolvability just right (as life had for billions of years) then the answer is yes, I'm certain it will and probably much sooner than we did. Also, I think there is a very high chance tha…
> Also, I think there is a very high chance that given an existing LLM architecture there exists a set of weights that would manifest a true intelligence immediately upon instantiation (with anterograde amnesia).
I don't see why that would be the case at all, and I regularly use the latest and most expensive LLMs and am aware enough of how they work to implement them on the simplest level myself, so it's not just me being uninformed or ignorant.
Everyone is out here acting like "predicting the next thing" is somehow fundamentally irrelevant to "human thinking" and it is simply not the case. What does it mean to say that we humans act with intent? It means that we have some expectation or prediction about how our actions will effect the next thing, and choose our actions based on how much we like that effect. The ability to predict is fundamental to our abili…
The illusion wears off after about half an hour for even the most casual users. That's better than the old chatbots, but they're still chatbots.
Did anyone ever seriously buy the whole "it's thinking" BS when it was Markov chains? What makes you believe today's LLMs are meaningfully different?
As usual with these, it helps to try to keep the metaphor used for downplaying AI, but flip the script. Let's grant the author's perception that AI is a "bag of words", which is already damn good at producing the "right words" for any given situation, and only keeps getting better at it. Sure, this is not the same as being a human. Does that really mean, as the author seems to believe without argument, that humans ne…
Is a brain not a token prediction machine? Tokens in form of neural impulses go in, tokens in the form of neural impulses go out. We would like to believe that there is something profound happening inside and we call that consciousness. Unfortunately when reading about split-brain patient experiments or agenesis of the corpus callosum cases I feel like we are all deceived, every moment of every day. I came to realiza…
That’s the point of “I think therefore I am.”
Nice essay but when I read this > But we don’t go to baseball games, spelling bees, and Taylor Swift concerts for the speed of the balls, the accuracy of the spelling, or the pureness of the pitch. We go because we care about humans doing those things. My first thought was does anyone want to _watch_ me programming?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you come up with a genetic algorithm scaffolding to affect both the architecture and the training algorithm, and then you instantiate it in an artificial selection environment, and you also give it trillions generations to evolve evolvability just right (as life had for billions of years) then the answer is yes, I'm certain it will and probably much sooner than we did. Also, I think there is a very high chance tha…
I'm certain it wouldn't, and you're certain it would, and we have the same amount of evidence (and probably roughly the same means for running such an expensive experiment). I think they're more likely to go slowly mad, degrading their reasoning to nothing useful rather than building something real, but that could be different if they weren't detached from sensory input. Human minds looping for generations without se…
Best quote from the article: > That’s also why I see no point in using AI to, say, write an essay, just like I see no point in bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, it can lift the weights, but I’m not trying to suspend a barbell above the floor for the hell of it. I lift it because I want to become the kind of person who can lift it. Similarly, I write because I want to become the kind of person who can think.