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

Bag of words, have mercy on us

experimental-history.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 362 posts

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#231

Post by DoctorOetker »

meheleventyone wrote: post #147
akoboldfrying wrote: post #112

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? 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.

Human brains aren’t magic in the literal sense but do have a lot of mechanisms we don’t understand. They’re certainly special both within the individual but also as a species on this planet. There are many similar to human brains but none we know of with similar capabilities. They’re also most obviously certainly different to LLMs both in how they work foundationally and in capability. I definitely agree with the mat…

I agree we shouldn't undersell or underestimate the complexity involved, but when LLM's start contributing significant ideas to scientists and mathematicians, its time to recognize that whatever tricks are used in biology (humans, octopuses, ...) may still be of interest and of value, but they no longer seem like the unique magical missing ingredients which were so long sought after.

From this point on its all about efficiencies:

modeling efficiency: how do we best fit the elephant, with bezier curves, rational polynomials, ...?

memory bandwidth training efficiency: when building coincidence statistics, say bigrams, is it really necessary to update the weights for all concepts? a co-occurence of 2 concepts should just increase the predicted probability for the just observed bigram and then decrease a global coefficient used to scale the predicted probabilities. I.e. observing a baobab tree + an elephant in the same image/sentence/... should not change the relative probabilities of observing french fries + milkshake versus bicycle + windmill. This indicates different architectures should be possible with much lower training costs, by only updating weights of the concepts observed in the last bigram.

and so on with all other kinds of efficiencies.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#232

Post by sublinear »

danielbln wrote: post #209
thesz wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Human brains aren't magic, special or different. DNA inside neurons uses superconductive quantum computations [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62539-5 As the result, all living cells with DNA emit coherent (as in lasers) light [2]. There is a theory that this light also facilitates intercellular communication. [2] https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-va... Chemical structures…

They are extremely complex, but is that complexity required for building a thinking machine? We don't understand bird physiology enough to build a bird from scratch, but an airplane flies just the same.

Are we not just getting lost in semantics when we say "fly"? An airplane does not at all perform the same behavior as a bird. Do we say that boats or submarines "swim"?

Planes and boats disrupt the environments they move through and air and sea freight are massive contributors to pollution.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#234

Post by d4rkn0d3z »

euroderf wrote: post #226

Considering the number of "brain cells" an LLM has, I could grant that it might have the self-awareness of (say) an ant. If we attribute more consciousness than that to the LLM, it might be strictly because it communicates to us in our own language, in part thanks to the technical assistance of LLM training giving it voice, and the semblance of thought. Even if a cockroach _could_ express its teeny tiny feelings in E…

A better anology would be a virus. In some sense LLMs, and all other very sophisticated technologies, lean on our resources to replicate themselves. With LLMs you actually do have a projection of intelligemce in the language domain. Even though it is rather corpse-like, as though you shot intelligence in the face and shoved its body in the direction of language, just so you could draw a chaulk outline around it.

Despite all that, one can adopt the view that an LLM is a form of silicon based life akin to a virus and we are its environmental hosts exerting selective pressure and supplying much needed energy. Whether that life is intelligent or not is another issue which is probably related to whether an LLM can tell that a cat cannot be, at the same time and in the same respect, not a cat. The paths through the meaning manifold contructed by an LLM are not geodesic, they are not reversible, while in human reason the correct path is lossless. An LLM literally "thinks", up is a little bit down, and vice versa, by design.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#235

Post by d-lisp »

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.

(Motors and human brains are both just mechanisms, the reason one is a priori capable of learning abstract thought and not the other ?)

While I agree to some extent with the materialistic conception, the brain is not an isolated mechanism, but rather the element of a system which itself isn't isolated from the experience of being a body in a world interacting with different systems to form super systems.

The brain must be a very efficient mechanism, because it doesn't need to ingest the whole textual production of the human world in order to know how to write masterpieces (music, litterature, films, software, theorems etc...). Instead the brain learns to be this very efficient mechanism with (as a starting process) feeling its own body sh*t on itself during a long part of its childhood.

I can teach someone to become really good at producing fine and efficient software, but on the contrary I can only observe everyday that my LLM of choice keeps being stupid even when I explain it how it fails. ("You're perfectly right !").

It is true that there's nothing magical about the brain, but I am pretty sure it must be stronger tech than a probabilistic/statistical next word guesser (otherwise there would be much more consensus about the usability of LLMs I think).

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#236

Post by mapontosevenths »

arowthway wrote: post #200
akoboldfrying wrote: post #112

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? 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.

For some unexplainable reason your subjective experience happens to be localized in your brain. Sounds pretty special to me.

There is nothing special about that either. LLM's also have self awareness/introspection, or at least a some version of it.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection

Its hard to tell sometimes because we specifically train them to believe they don't.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#237

Post by cindyllm »

d-lisp wrote: post #235
akoboldfrying wrote: post #112

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? 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.

(Motors and human brains are both just mechanisms, the reason one is a priori capable of learning abstract thought and not the other ?) While I agree to some extent with the materialistic conception, the brain is not an isolated mechanism, but rather the element of a system which itself isn't isolated from the experience of being a body in a world interacting with different systems to form super systems. The brain mu…

[dead]

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#238

Post by throw310822 »

euroderf wrote: post #226

Considering the number of "brain cells" an LLM has, I could grant that it might have the self-awareness of (say) an ant. If we attribute more consciousness than that to the LLM, it might be strictly because it communicates to us in our own language, in part thanks to the technical assistance of LLM training giving it voice, and the semblance of thought. Even if a cockroach _could_ express its teeny tiny feelings in E…

Clearly the number of "brain cells" is not a useful metric here- as noted also by Geoffrey Hinton. For a long time we thought that our artificial model of a neuron was capable of much less computation than its biologic counterpart; in fact the opposite appears to be true- LLMs have the size of a tiny speck of a human brain yet they converse fluently in tens of languages, solve difficult math problems, code in many programming languages, and possess an impressive general knowledge, of a breadth that is beyond what is attainable by any human. If that were what five cm3 of your brain are capable of, where are the signs of it? What do you do exactly with all the rest?

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#239

Post by estearum »

thfuran wrote: post #222
IAmGraydon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't strike you as a bit...illogical to state in your first sentence that you "understand how humans work under the hood" and then go on to say that humans don't actually "understand" anything? Clearly everything at its basis is a chemical reaction, but the right reactions chained together create understanding, knowing, etc. I do believe that the human brain can be modeled by machines, but I don't believe LLMs…

>everything at its basis is a chemical reaction, but the right reactions chained together create understanding, knowing, etc That was their point. Or rather, that the analogous argument about the underpinnings of LLMs is similarly unconvincing regarding the issue of thought or understanding.

Correct^ Thank you. I knew I was going out on a bit of a limb there :)

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#240

Post by mapontosevenths »

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…

I suspect that people instinctively believe they have free will, both because it feels like we do, and because society requires us to behave that way even when we don't.

The truth is that the evidence says we don't. See the Libet experiment and its many replications.

Your decisions can be predicted from brain scans up to 10 seconds before you make them, which means they are as deterministic as an LLM's. Sorry, I guess.

Post reply on HN