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Bag of words, have mercy on us

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Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#251

Post by Hendrikto »

ACCount37 wrote: post #181
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.

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 whil…

> It's how LLMs can do things like translate from language to language

The heavy lifting here is done by embeddings. This does not require a world model or “thought”.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#252

Post by efitz »

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…

AI has made me question what it is to be a human.

I am not having some existential crisis, but if we get to a point where X% of humans cannot outperform “AI” on any task that humans deem “useful”, for some nontrivial value of X, then many assumptions that culture has inculcated into me about humanity are no longer valid.

What is the role of humans then?

Can it be said that humans “think” if they can’t think a thought that a non thinking AI cannot also think?

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#253

Post by Hendrikto »

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…

> 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.

This conclusion does not follow from the result at all.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#254

Post by throw4847285 »

efitz wrote: post #252
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…

AI has made me question what it is to be a human. I am not having some existential crisis, but if we get to a point where X% of humans cannot outperform “AI” on any task that humans deem “useful”, for some nontrivial value of X, then many assumptions that culture has inculcated into me about humanity are no longer valid. What is the role of humans then? Can it be said that humans “think” if they can’t think a thought…

But the "AI" is simply a gestalt of all human language. You're looking in a mirror.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#255

Post by throw4847285 »

balamatom wrote: post #190
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.

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…

Then what are non-human animals doing?

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#256

Post by xtracto »

viccis wrote: post #3

Every day I see people treat gen AI like a thinking human, Dijkstra's attitudes about anthropomorphizing computers is vindicated even more. That said, I think the author's use of "bag of words" here is a mistake. Not only does it have a real meaning in a similar area as LLMs, but I don't think the metaphor explains anything. Gen AI tricks laypeople into treating its token inferences as "thinking" because it is traine…

For me, the problem is in the "chat" mechanic that OpenAI and others use to present the product. It lends itself to strong antropomorphizing.

If instead of a chat interface we simply had a "complete the phrase" interface, people would understand the tool better for what it is.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#257

Post by littlestymaar »

quantummagic wrote: post #227
littlestymaar wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thinking machines are still babies, whose ideas aren't honed by personal experience; but that will come, in one form or another. Some machines, maybe. But attention-based LLMs aren't these machines.

I'm not sure. If you see what they're doing with feedback already in code generation. The LLM makes a "hallucination", generates the wrong idea, then tests its code only to find out it doesn't compile. And goes on to change its idea, and try again.

A few minutes worth of “personal experience” doesn't really deserve the “personal experience” qualifier.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#258

Post by xtracto »

visarga wrote: post #108
roxolotl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea bag of words isn’t helpful at all. I really do think that “superpowered sentence completion” is the best description. Not only is it reasonably accurate it is understandable, everyone has seen autocomplete function, and it’s useful. I don’t know how to “use” a bag of words. I do know how to use sentence completion. It also helps explains why context matters.

Sentence completion does not give it justice, when I can ask a LLM to refactor my repo and come back half an hour later to see the deed done.

Thats the thing, when you use an Ask/answer mechanism, you are just writing a "novel" where User: asks and personal coding assistant: answers. But all the text goes into the autocomplete function and the "toaster" outputs the most probable text according to the function.

Its useful, it's amazing, but as the original text says, thinking of it as "some intelligence with reasoning " makes us use the wrong mental models for it.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#259

Post by jimbokun »

4bpp wrote: post #128
jimbokun wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her argument really only works if you institute new economic systems where humans don’t need to labor in order to eat or pay rent.

"Her"->"the"? (Or, who is "she" here?) Either way, in what way is this relevant? If the human's labor is not useful at any price point to any entity with money, food or housing, then they presumably will not get paid/given food/housing for it.

Why are you repeating what I said with slightly different words?

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#260

Post by jimbokun »

altmanaltman wrote: post #129
jimbokun wrote: post #91

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.

I don't really like the assumption that anyone who uses AI to, say, write an essay, is not the "kind of person who can think." And using AI to replace things you find recreational is not the point. If you got paid $100 each time you lifted a weight, would you see a point in bringing a forklift to the gym if it's allowed? Or will that make you a person who is so dumb that they cannot think, as the author is implying?

I notice you make no concrete defense of the value of having an AI write an essay for you.
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