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Bag of words, have mercy on us

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Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#241

Post by estearum »

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #86
djoldman wrote: post #58

As a consequence of my profession, I understand how LLMs work under the hood. I also know that we data and tech folks will probably never win the battle over anthropomorphization. The average user of AI, nevermind folks who should know better, is so easily convinced that AI "knows," "thinks," "lies," "wants," "understands," etc. Add to this that all AI hosts push this perspective (and why not, it's the easiest white…

These discussions often end up resembling religious arguments. "We don't know how any of this works, but we can fathom an intelligent god doing it, therefore an intelligent god did it." "We don't really know how human consciousness works, but the LLM resembles things we associate with thought, therefore it is thought." I think most people would agree that the functioning of an LLM resembles human thought, but I think…

I don't think I've heard anyone (beyond the most inane Twitterati) confidently state "therefore it is thought."

I hear a lot of people saying "it's certainly not and cannot be thought" and then "it's not exactly clear how to delineate these things or how to detect any delineations we might want."

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#242

Post by crazygringo »

Libidinalecon wrote: post #223
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 motorcycle is not "sprinting" and an LLM is not "thinking". Everyone would agree that a motorcycle is not running but the same dumb shit is posted over and over and over on here that somehow the LLM is "thinking".

But your assertion is merely semantic. It doesn't say anything substantive.

I could also say a motorcycle "moves forward" just like a person "moves forward". Whether we use the same or different words for same or different concepts doesn't say anything about the actual underlying similarity.

And please don't call stuff "dumb shit" here. Not appropriate for HN.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#243

Post by Extasia785 »

Libidinalecon wrote: post #223
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 motorcycle is not "sprinting" and an LLM is not "thinking". Everyone would agree that a motorcycle is not running but the same dumb shit is posted over and over and over on here that somehow the LLM is "thinking".

A forklift is "lifting" things, despite using a completely different mechanical process as a human "lifting" things. The only real similarity between these kinds of "lifting" is the end result, something is higher up than it was before.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#244

Post by xg15 »

I think the author oversimplifies the inference loop a bit, as many opinion pieces like this do.

If you call an LLM with "What is the meaning if life?", it will return the most relevant token, which might be "Great".

If you call it with "What is the meaning if life? Great", you might get back "question".

... and so on until you arrive at "Great question! According to Western philosophy" ... etc etc.

The question is how the LLM determines that "relevancy" information.

The problem I see is that there are a lot of different algorithms which operate that way and only differ in how they calculate the relevancy scores. In particular, there are Markov chains that use a very simple formula. LLMs also use a formula, but it's an inscrutably complex one.

I feel the public discussion either treats LLMs as machine gods or as literal Markov chains, and both is misleading. The interesting question, how that giant formula of feedforward neural network inference can deliver those results isn't really touched.

But I think the author's intuition is right in the sense that (a) LLMs are not living beings and they don't "exist" outside of evaluating that formula - and (b) the results are still restricted by the training data and certainly aren't any sorts of "higher truths" that humans would be incapable of understanding.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#246

Post by namero999 »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #240
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 gues…

Libet has only measured the latency of metaconsciousness/cognition, nothing else. It says nothing about free will, which is ill defined anyway.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#247

Post by beepbooptheory »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #240
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 gues…

What is the import of this to you here? Whether you have free will or you feel like you do, kinda same difference for this particular point right? It doesn't make me more human actually having free will, it is sufficient to simply walk around as if I do.

But beyond that, what do you want to say here? What is lost, what is gained? Are you wanting to say this makes us more like an LLM? How so?

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#248

Post by gardenhedge »

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 am a stream of words - I have even ran out of tokens while speaking before :)

But raising kids, I can clearly see that intelligence isn't just solved by LLMs

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#249

Post by eric-p7 »

red75prime wrote: post #78
eric-p7 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no properties of matter or energy that can have a sense of self or experience qualia. Yet we all do. Denying the hard problem of consciousness just slows down our progress in discovering what it is.

We need a difference to discover what it is. How can we know that all LLMs don't?

If you tediously work out the LLM math by hand, is the pen and paper conscious too?

Consciousness is not computation. You need something else.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#250

Post by agumonkey »

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #80
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…

> 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.

when LLM popped out and people started to say 'this is just markov chain on steroid and not thinking' i was a bit confused because a lot of my "thinking" is statistical too.. I very often try to solve an issue by switching a known solution with a different "probable" variant of it (tweaking a parameter)

LLMs have higher dimensions (they map token to grammatical and semantical space) .. it might not be thinking but it seems on its way we're just thinking with more abstractions before producing speech ?... dunno

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