This is really hard to judge because by the looks of it, finance papers mostly consist of gobbledygook and extensive filler to begin with.
This. Verbalism lands really well to verbalism.
I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”
21–30 of 275 posts
Re: I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”
#22It’s called emergent behavior. We understand how an llm works, but do not have even a theory about how the behavior emerges from among the math. We understand ants pretty well, but how exactly does anthill behavior come from ant behavior? It’s a tricky problem in system engineering where predicting emergent behavior (such as emergencies) would be lovely.
> but do not have even a theory about how the behavior emerges from among the math
Actually we have an awful lot of those.
I'm not sure if emergent is quite the right term here. We carefully craft a scenario to produce a usable gradient for a black box optimizer. We fully expect nontrivial predictions of future state to result in increasingly rich world models out of necessity.
It gets back to the age old observation about any sufficiently accurate model being of equal complexity as the system it models. "Predict the next word" is but a single example of the general principle at play.
Re: I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”
#23This is really hard to judge because by the looks of it, finance papers mostly consist of gobbledygook and extensive filler to begin with.
Economics is the attempt to take sociology and add numbers to make it look like a hard science. The fintechbros then seem to think because they can make numbers go up that this proof it's a hard science.
Re: I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”
#24> the kind of analysis the program is able to do is past the point where technology looks like magic. I don’t know how you get here from “predict the next word.”
You're implicitly assuming that what you asked the LLM to do is unrepresented in the training data. That assumption is usually faulty - very few of the ideas and concepts we come up with in our everyday lives are truly new.
All that being said, the refine.ink tool certainly has an interesting approach, which I'm not sure I've seen before. They review a single piece of writing, and it takes up to an hour, and it costs $50. They are probably running the LLM very painstakingly and repeatedly over combinations of sections of your text, allowing it to reason about the things you've written in a lot more detail than you get with a plain run of a long-context model (due to the limitations of sparse attention).
It's neat. I wonder about what other kinds of tasks we could improve AI performance at by scaling time and money (which, in the grand scheme, is usually still a bargain compared to a human worker).
Re: I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”
#25Is this an ad? Seems like it. The text is not really what the headline suggests.
Re: I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”
#26It’s called emergent behavior. We understand how an llm works, but do not have even a theory about how the behavior emerges from among the math. We understand ants pretty well, but how exactly does anthill behavior come from ant behavior? It’s a tricky problem in system engineering where predicting emergent behavior (such as emergencies) would be lovely.
> but do not have even a theory about how the behavior emerges We fully do. There is a significant quality difference between English language output and other languages which lends a huge hint as to what is actually happening behind the scenes. > but how exactly does anthill behavior come from ant behavior? You can't smell what ants can. If you did I'm sure it would be evident.
Two very big revelations here that I would love to know more about:
1. Can you reveal "what's actually happening behind the scenes" beyond the hint you gave? I can't figure it out.
2. Can you explain how an ants sense of smell leads to anthills?
Re: I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”
#27It’s called emergent behavior. We understand how an llm works, but do not have even a theory about how the behavior emerges from among the math. We understand ants pretty well, but how exactly does anthill behavior come from ant behavior? It’s a tricky problem in system engineering where predicting emergent behavior (such as emergencies) would be lovely.
I'd rather go the route of bats [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Re: I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”
#28I have come to think “predict the next token” is not a useful way to explain how LLMs work to people unfamiliar with LLM training and internals. It’s technically correct, but at this point saying that and not talking about things like RLVR training and mechanistic interpretability is about as useful as framing talking with a person as “engaging with a human brain generating tokens” and ignoring psychology. At least A…
>“predict the next token” is not a useful way
That is the exact thing to say because that is exactly what it does, despite how it does so.
It is not useful to say it if you are an AI-shill though. You bought up AI-hater, so I think I am entitled to bring up AI-shills.
Re: I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”
#29The "predict the next word" to a current llm is at the same level as a "transistor" (or gate) is to a modern cpu. I don't understand llms enough to expand on that comparison, but I can see how having layers above that feed the layers below to "predict the next word" and use the output to modify the input leading to what we see today. It is turtles all the way down.
Re: I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”
#30I have come to think “predict the next token” is not a useful way to explain how LLMs work to people unfamiliar with LLM training and internals. It’s technically correct, but at this point saying that and not talking about things like RLVR training and mechanistic interpretability is about as useful as framing talking with a person as “engaging with a human brain generating tokens” and ignoring psychology. At least A…
I think talking to people unfamiliar with LLM training using words like "RLVR training and mechanistic interpretability" is about as useful as a grave robber in a crematorium.