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Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

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Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#151

Post by SiempreViernes »

BobbyJo wrote: post #116
frozenlettuce wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can replicate all calculations done by LLMs with pen and paper. It would take ages to calculate anything, but it's possible. I don't think that pen and paper will ever "think", regardless of how complex the calculations involved are.

If you put a droplet of water in a warm bowl every 12 hours, the bowl will remain empty as the water will evaporate. That does not mean that if you put a trillion droplets in every twelve hours it will still remain empty.

It will also not be empty if I put the bowl in the sea, which is a remark about the nature of thoughthat that proves exactly as much as your comment.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#152

Post by djeastm »

nkrisc wrote: post #150
IgorPartola wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like these conversations really miss the mark: whether an LLM thinks or not is not a relevant question. It is a bit like asking “what color is an Xray?” or “what does the number 7 taste like?” The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. It is a building block. Your brain thinks. Your prefrontal cortex however is not a complete syste…

> The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. The AI companies themselves are the ones drawing the parallels to a human being. Look at how any of these LLM products are marketed and described.

Is it not within our capacity on HN to ignore whatever the marketers say and speak to the underlying technology?

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#153

Post by circuit10 »

gus_massa wrote: post #27
frozenlettuce wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can replicate all calculations done by LLMs with pen and paper. It would take ages to calculate anything, but it's possible. I don't think that pen and paper will ever "think", regardless of how complex the calculations involved are.

The official name is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room The opinions are exactly the same than about LLM.

I don’t understand why people say the Chinese Room thing would prove LLMs don’t think, to me it’s obvious that the person doesn’t understand Chinese but the process does, similarly the CPU itself doesn’t understand the concepts an LLM can work with but the LLM itself does, or a neuron doesn’t understand concepts but the entire structure of your brain does

The concept of understanding emerges on a higher level from the way the neurons (biological or virtual) are connected, or the way the instructions being followed by the human in the Chinese room process the information

But really this is a philosophical/definitional thing about what you call “thinking”

Edit: I see my take on this is listed on the page as the “System reply”

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#154

Post by SiempreViernes »

tehjoker wrote: post #148
SiempreViernes wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should take your complaints to OpenAI, who constantly write like LLMs think in the exact same sense as humans; here a random example: > Large language models (LLMs) can be dishonest when reporting on their actions and beliefs -- for example, they may overstate their confidence in factual claims or cover up evidence of covert actions

They have a product to sell based on the idea AGI is right around the corner. You can’t trust Sam Altman as far as you can throw him. Still, the sales pitch has worked to unlock huge liquidity for him so there’s that. Still making predictions is a big part of what brains do though not the only thing. Someone wise said that LLM intelligence is a new kind of intelligence, like how animal intelligence is different from…

> Someone wise said that LLM intelligence is a new kind of intelligence

So long as you accept the slide ruler as a "new kind of intelligence" everything will probably work out fine, it's the Altmannian insistence that only the LLM is of the new kind that is silly.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#155

Post by softwaredoug »

dang wrote: post #190

[stub for offtopicness] (in this case, thinkiness)

LLMs don't really think, they emulate their training data. Which has a lot of examples of humans walking through problems to arrive at an answer. So naturally, if we prompt an LLM to do the same, it will emulate those examples (which tend to be more correct).

LLMs are BAD at evaluating earlier thinking errors, precisely because there's not copious examples of text where humans thinking through a problem, screwing up, going back, correcting their earlier statement, and continuing. (a good example catches these and corrects them)

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#156

Post by sublinear »

IgorPartola wrote: post #134
dang wrote: post #190

[stub for offtopicness] (in this case, thinkiness)

I feel like these conversations really miss the mark: whether an LLM thinks or not is not a relevant question. It is a bit like asking “what color is an Xray?” or “what does the number 7 taste like?” The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. It is a building block. Your brain thinks. Your prefrontal cortex however is not a complete syste…

The part that's most infuriating is that we don't have to speculate at all. Any discussion or philosophizing beyond the literal computer science is simply misinformation.

There's absolutely no similarity between what computer hardware does and what a brain does. People will twist and stretch things and tickle the imagination of the naive layperson and that's just wrong. We seriously have to cut this out already.

Anthropomorphizing is dangerous even for other topics, and long understood to be before computers came around. Why do we allow this?

The way we talk about computer science today sounds about as ridiculous as invoking magic or deities to explain what we now consider high school physics or chemistry. I am aware that the future usually sees the past as primitive, but why can't we try to seem less dumb at least this time around?

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#157

Post by SiempreViernes »

djeastm wrote: post #152
nkrisc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. The AI companies themselves are the ones drawing the parallels to a human being. Look at how any of these LLM products are marketed and described.

Is it not within our capacity on HN to ignore whatever the marketers say and speak to the underlying technology?

There was around 500 comments on the OpenAI + Disney story, so the evidence points to "no".

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#158

Post by [deleted] »

downboots wrote: post #111
mcswell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always the case, but often verifying an answer is far easier than coming up with the answer in the first place. That's precisely the principle behind the RSA algorithm for cryptography.

Sure, it's easy to check ((sqrt(x-3)+1)/(x/8)) is less than 4. Now do it without calculus. Very much like this effect https://www.reddit.com/r/opticalillusions/comments/1cedtcp/s... . Shouldn't hide complexity under a truth value.

[deleted]

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#159

Post by ChuckMcM »

IgorPartola wrote: post #134
dang wrote: post #190

[stub for offtopicness] (in this case, thinkiness)

I feel like these conversations really miss the mark: whether an LLM thinks or not is not a relevant question. It is a bit like asking “what color is an Xray?” or “what does the number 7 taste like?” The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. It is a building block. Your brain thinks. Your prefrontal cortex however is not a complete syste…

Why do people call is "Artificial Intelligence" when it could be called "Statistical Model for Choosing Data"?

"Intelligence" implies "thinking" for most people, just as "Learning" in machine learning implies "understanding" for most people. The algorithms created neither 'think' nor 'understand' and until you understand that, it may be difficult to accurately judge the value of the results produced by these systems.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#160

Post by astrange »

bondarchuk wrote: post #121

I wish I would've learned about ANNs in elementary school. It looks like a worthwhile and cool lesson package, if only they'd do away with the idiotic dogma...

I took an AI class in 2010 and even then was mostly taught that neural networks aren't very useful and you should use random forests and MCMC.
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