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Bag of words, have mercy on us

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Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#181

Post by ACCount37 »

RayVR wrote: post #70
bloaf wrote: post #41

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…

Are you a stream of words or are your words the “simplistic” projection of your abstract thoughts? I don’t at all discount the importance of language in so many things, but the question that matters is whether statistical models of language can ever “learn” abstract thought, or become part of a system which uses them as a tool. My personal assessment is that LLMs can do neither.

Words are the "simplistic" projection of an LLM's abstract thoughts.

An LLM has: words in its input plane, words in its output plane, and A LOT of cross-linked internals between the two.

Those internals aren't "words" at all - and it's where most of the "action" happens. It's how LLMs can do things like translate from language to language, or recall knowledge they only encountered in English in the training data while speaking German.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#182

Post by d1sxeyes »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #138
akoboldfrying wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I claim that all of thinking can be reduced to predicting the next thing. Predicting the next thing = thinking in the same way that reading and writing strings of bytes is a universal interface, or every computation can be done by a Turing machine.

People can claim whatever they like. That doesn't mean it's a good or reasonable hypothesis (especially for one that is essentially unfalsifible like predictive coding).

The problem is that we don’t have a good understanding of what “thinking” really is, and those parts of it we think we do understand involve simple things done at scale (electrical pulses on specific pathways, etc).

It is not unreasonable to suspect differences between humans and LLMs are differences in degree, rather than category.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#183

Post by tristanlukens »

> If we allow ourselves to be seduced by the superficial similarity, we’ll end up like the moths who evolved to navigate by the light of the moon, only to find themselves drawn to—and ultimately electrocuted by—the mysterious glow of a bug zapper.

Woah, that hit hard

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#184

Post by RayVR »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #112
RayVR wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a stream of words or are your words the “simplistic” projection of your abstract thoughts? I don’t at all discount the importance of language in so many things, but the question that matters is whether statistical models of language can ever “learn” abstract thought, or become part of a system which uses them as a tool. My personal assessment is that LLMs can do neither.

LLMs and human brains are both just mechanisms. Why would one mechanism a priori be capable of "learning abstract thought", but no others? If it turns out that LLMs don't model human brains well enough to qualify as "learning abstract thought" the way humans do, some future technology will do so. Human brains aren't magic, special or different.

I'm not arguing that human brains are magic. the current AI models will probably teach us more about what we didn't know about intelligence than anything else.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#185

Post by ACCount37 »

habinero wrote: post #177
akersten wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bag of words is actually the perfect metaphor. The data structure is a bag. The output is a word. The selection strategy is opaquely undefined. > Gen AI tricks laypeople into treating its token inferences as "thinking" because it is trained to replicate the semiotic appearance of doing so. A "bag of words" doesn't sufficiently explain this behavior. Something about there being significant overlap between the smartest…

Yeah. I have a half-cynical/half-serious pet theory that a decent fraction of humanity has a broken theory of mind and thinks everyone has the same thought patterns they do. If it talks like me, it thinks like me. Whenever the comment section takes a long hit and goes "but what is thinking, really " I get slightly more cynical about it lol

Why not?

By now, it's pretty clear that LLMs implement abstract thinking - as do humans.

They don't think exactly like humans do - but they sure copy a lot of human thinking, and end up closer to it than just about anything that's not a human.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#186

Post by rob74 »

ben_w wrote: post #162
littlestymaar wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs and human brains are both just mechanisms. Why would one mechanism a priori be capable of "learning abstract thought", but no others? “Internal combustion engines and human brains are both just mechanisms. Why would one mechanism a priori be capable of "learning abstract thought", but no others?” The question isn't about what an hypothetical mechanism can do or not, it's about whether the concrete mechanism we…

The general argument you make is correct, but you conclusion "And this one doesn't." is as yet uncertain. I will absolutely say that all ML methods known are literally too stupid to live, as in no living thing can get away with making so many mistakes before it's learned anything, but that's the rate of change of performance with respect to examples rather than what it learns by the time training is finished. What is…

> no living thing can get away with making so many mistakes before it's learned anything

If you consider that LLMs have already "learned" more than any one human in this world is able to learn, and still make those mistakes, that suggests there may be something wrong with this approach...

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#187

Post by jampekka »

bloaf wrote: post #41

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…

A good heuristic is that if an argument resorts to "actually not doing " or "just doing " etc, it is not a rigorous argument.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#188

Post by jampekka »

visarga wrote: post #104
MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone is out here acting like "predicting the next thing" is somehow fundamentally irrelevant to "human thinking" and it is simply not the case. Nobody is. What people are doing is claiming that "predicting the next thing" does not define the entirety of human thinking, and something that is ONLY predicting the next thing is not, fundamentally, thinking.

Well, yes because thinking soon requires interacting, not just ideating. It's in the dialogue between ideation and interaction that we make our discoveries.

LLMs can interact with the world via e.g. function calling.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#189

Post by salicaster »

b112 wrote: post #118
monegator wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tough most people either don't get it or are lay people that do not want to become the kind of people who can think. I go with the second one

Russ Hanneman's thigh implants are a key example. Appearances are all to some people. Actual growth is meaningless to them. The problem with AI, is that they waste the time of dedicated, thinking humans which care to improve themselves. If I write a three paragraph email on a technical topic, and some yahoo responds with AI, I'm now responding to gibberish. The other side may not have read, may not understand, and is…

[dead]

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#190

Post by balamatom »

RayVR wrote: post #70
bloaf wrote: post #41

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…

Are you a stream of words or are your words the “simplistic” projection of your abstract thoughts? I don’t at all discount the importance of language in so many things, but the question that matters is whether statistical models of language can ever “learn” abstract thought, or become part of a system which uses them as a tool. My personal assessment is that LLMs can do neither.

I'm definitely a stream of words.

My "abstract thoughts" are a stream of words too, they just don't get sounded out.

Tbf I'd rather they weren't there in the first place.

But bodies which refuse to harbor an "interiority" are fast-tracked to destruction because they can't suf^W^W^W be productive.

Funny movie scene from somewhere. The sergeant is drilling the troops: "You, private! What do you live for!", and expects an answer along the lines of dying for one's nation or some shit. Instead, the soldier replies: "Well, to see what happens next!"

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