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Bag of words, have mercy on us

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Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#351

Post by arowthway »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #236
arowthway wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the link, I haven't seen this before and it's interesting.

I don't think the version of self awareness they demonstrated is synonymous with subjective experience. But same thing can be said about any human other then me.

Damn, just let me believe all brains are magical or I'll fall into solipsism.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#352

Post by ACCount37 »

habinero wrote: post #350
ACCount37 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It isn't clear because they do none of that lol. They don't think. It can kinda sorta look like thinking if you don't have a critical eye, but it really doesn't take much to break the illusion. I really don't get this obsessive need to pretend your tools are alive. Y'all know when you watch YouTube that it's a trick and the tiny people on your screen don't live in your computer, right?

And how do you know that exactly? What is the source of that certainty? What makes you fully confident that a system that can write short stories and one-shot Python scripts and catch obscure pop culture references in text isn't "thinking" in any way?

The answer to that is the siren song of "AI effect".

Even admitting "we don't know" requires letting go of the idea that "thinking" must be exclusive to humans. And many are far too weak to do that.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#353

Post by namero999 »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #273
namero999 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've seen that argument repeated ad-nauseum. It makes sense if you're desperate for free will to be real, but you really have to work for it. Especially when you add in the countless other studies showing that a lot of the reasons we give for our actions, especially in quick or ambiguous choices, are confabulationalist post-hoc constructions. Our own introspection seems mostly to consist of just "making stuff up" to…

Maybe the point of someone else you've spoken to. Personally I don't even see how free will enters into this discussion, and if you were to ask me, I don't even think we have it as it is commonly defined/understood. But any comment on free will doesn't change the fact that Libet measured metacognition latency and nothing else.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#354

Post by staticman2 »

panarky wrote: post #152
meheleventyone wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When someone says "AIs aren't really thinking" because AIs don't think like people do, what I hear is "Airplanes aren't really flying" because airplanes don't fly like birds do.

Whenever someone paraphrases a folksy aphorism about airplanes and birds or fish and submarines I suppose I'm meant to rebut with folksy aphorisms like:

"A.I. and humans are as different as chalk and cheese."

As aphorisms are a good way to think about this topic?

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#355

Post by maleldil »

Davidzheng wrote: post #180
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…

well they are trained to be almost in distribution as a thinking human. So...

Which only means they can mimic the output of a human. So does a p-zombie. It doesn't make them human.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#356

Post by startupsfail »

patrickmay wrote: post #284
startupsfail wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Below is the worst quote... It is plain wrong to see an LLM as a bags of words. LLMs pre-trained on large datasets of text are world models . LLMs post-trained with RL are RL-agents that use these modeling capabilities. > We are in dire need of a better metaphor. Here’s my suggestion: instead of seeing AI as a sort of silicon homunculus, we should see it as a bag of words.

LLMs aren't world models, they are language models. It will be interesting to see which of the LLM implementation techniques will be useful in building world models, but that's not what we have now.

Can you give an example of some part of the physical world or infosphere that an LLM can't model, at least approximately?

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#357

Post by AlexeyBelov »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #36
bitwize wrote: post #25

I was trying to explain the concept of "token prediction" to my wife, whose eyes glaze over when discussing such technical topics. (I think she has the brainpower to understand them, but a horrible math teacher gave her a taste aversion to even attempting to that hasn't gone away. So she just buys Apple stuff and hopes Tim Apple hasn't shuffled around the UI bits AGAIN.) I stumbled across a good-enough analogy based…

Did you explain how LLMs can achieve gold-medal performance at math competitions involving original problems, without any original knowledge or thought? Did she ask if a "statistical soup of words," if large enough, might somehow encode or represent something a little more profound than just a bunch of words?

Objection. Leading questions.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#358

Post by Peteragain »

ptidhomme wrote: post #154
Peteragain wrote: post #135

The article is actually about the way we humans are extremely charitable when it comes to ascribing a ToM (theory of mind) and goes on to the Gym model of value. Nice. The comments drop back into the debate I originally saw Hinton describe on The Newyorker: do LLMs construct models (of the world) - that is do they think the way we think we think - or are they "glorified auto complete". I am going for the GAF view. Bu…

Those billion parameters, they are a model of the world. Autocomplete is such a shortsighted understanding of LLMs.

Sorry for the late response. Yes that is Hinton's argument, and the claim made by the believers. On the other hand, if the GAC explanation is correct, an explanation might be that what we humans write down (that is, the training corpus) is a model of the world, and LLMs reconstruct (descriptions of) human understanding.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#359

Post by [deleted] »

xtracto wrote: post #258
visarga wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#360

Post by jibal »

jibal wrote: post #335
panarky wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone says "AIs aren't really thinking" because AIs don't think like people do, what I hear is "Airplanes aren't really flying" because airplanes don't fly like birds do.

That's a fallacy of denial of the antecedent. You are inferring from the fact that airplanes really fly that AIs really think, but it's not a logically valid inference.

"Observing a common (potential) failure mode"

That's not what we have here.

"It is only a fallacy if you "P, therefore C" which GP is not (at least to my eye) doing."

Some people are willfully blind.

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