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Claude's Cycles [pdf]

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

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Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#171

Post by whimsicalism »

mccoyb wrote: post #2

It's fascinating to think about the space of problems which are amenable to RL scaling of these probability distributions. Before, we didn't have a fast (we had to rely on human cognition) way to try problems - even if the techniques and workflows were known by someone. Now, we've baked these patterns into probability distributions - anyone can access them with the correct "summoning spell". Experts will naturally us…

> how these models are going to keep up with the expanding boundary of science

The same way humans do?

The phraseology in this comment: 'probability distributions', 'baked these patterns' IMO has all the trappings of the stochastic parrot-style HN-discourse that has been consistently wrong for almost a decade now.

The reference to how AI will keep up with AI-assisted human progress in science in 2030 is meant to reassure. It contains a number of premises that we have no business being confident in. We are potentially witnessing the obviation of human cognitive labor.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#172

Post by whimsicalism »

mccoyb wrote: post #135
sosodev wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding, from listening/reading what top researchers are saying, is that model architectures in the near future are going to attempt to scale the context window dramatically. There's a generalized belief that in-context learning is quite powerful and that scaling the window might yield massive benefits for continual learning. It doesn't seem that hard because recent open weight models have shown that the mem…

I don't disagree with this, but I don't think the memory cost is the only issue right? I remember using Sonnet 4.5 (or 4, I can't remember the first of Anthropic's offerings with a million context) and how slow the model would get, how much it wanted to end the session early as tokens accrued (this latter point, of course, is just an artifact of bad training). Less worried about memory, more worried about compute spe…

The parent commentator is a bit confused - most of the innovation in these hybrid architectures comes from reducing the computation pressure not just the memory pressure.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#173

Post by whimsicalism »

worldsavior wrote: post #24
ecshafer wrote: post #16

I wonder how long we have until we start solving some truly hard problems with AI. How long until we throw AI at "connect general relativity and quantum physics", give the AI 6 months and a few data centers, and have it pop out a solution?

If AGI will ever come, then. Currently, AI is only a statistical machines, and solutions like this are purely based on distribution and no logic/actual intelligence.

It only took 4 years, but it appears that this view is finally dying out on HN. I would advise everyone who found this viewpoint compelling to think about how those same blinders might be affecting how you are imagining the future to look like.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#174

Post by whimsicalism »

emp17344 wrote: post #104
cjcole wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"humans" Donald Knuth is an extremal outlier human and the problem is squarely in his field of expertise. Claude, guided by Filip Stappers, a friend of Knuth, solved a problem that Knuth and Stappers had been working on for several weeks. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem (from my quick scan) to have been stated how long (or how many tokens or $) it took for Claude + Stappers to complete the proof. In response, Knuth sa…

What goalposts do you think are being moved? I constantly see AI enthusiasts use this phrase, but it’s not clear what goalposts they have in mind. Specifically, what is it that you want opponents to recognize that you believe they aren’t currently? We now have a tool that can be useful in some narrow domains in some narrow cases. It’s pretty neat that our tools have new capabilities, but it’s also pretty far from AGI…

You must have forgotten the /s at the end of your comment?

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#175

Post by aerodexis »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #87
dtj1123 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider someone with anterograde amnesia not to be intelligent?

Sure, why can't both things be true? "Intelligence" is just what you call something and someone else knows what you mean. Why did AI discourse throw everyone back 100 years philosophically? Its like post-structuralism or Wittgenstein never happened.. It's so much less important or interesting to like nail down some definition here (I would cite HN discourse the past three years or so), than it is to recognize what it…

Agree wholeheartedly - but the conversation around what these technologies /mean/ is gonna end up happening one way or another - even if it is sloppy, imprecise and done by proxy of the definition. If anything, this is a feature and not a bug. It's through this imprecision that the actually important questions of morality and ethics can leak into discussions that are often structured by their participants to obscure the ethical and moral implications of what is being discussed.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#176

Post by logicprog »

wang_li wrote: post #78
zarzavat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear that AI could independently develop a cure for cancer and people would still say that it's not actually intelligent, just matrix multiplications giving a statistically probable answer! LLMs are at least designed to be intelligent. Our monkey brains have much less reason to be intelligent, since we only evolved to survive nature, not to understand it. We are at this moment extremely deep into what most people…

Last week I put "was val kilmer in heat" into the search box on my browser. The AI answer came back with "No, Val Kilmer was not in heat. Val Kilmer played Chris Shiherlis in the movie Heat but the film did not indicate that he was pregnant or in heat. His performance was nuanced and skilled and represents a high point of the film." I was not curious about whether he was pregnant. We are not only not close to human l…

> I was not curious about whether he was pregnant.

I interpreted the question the same way the AI did.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#177

Post by lijok »

ainiriand wrote: post #4

Are not LLMs supposed to just find the most probable word that follows next like many people here have touted? How this can be explained under that pretense? Is this way of problem solving 'thinking'?

To get an answer to that you would first have to define 'thinking'

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#178

Post by IAmGraydon »

beej71 wrote: post #77

From my naive standpoint, LLMs like this seem to have some big strengths. One: possession of a superhuman expanse of knowledge. Two: making connections. Three: tireless trial and error. If you put those three things together, you end up with some cool stuff from time to time. Perhaps the proof of P!=NP is tied to an obscure connection that humans don't easily see due to individual lack of knowledge or predisposition…

>One: possession of a superhuman expanse of knowledge. Two: making connections. Three: tireless trial and error.

One and three I believe are correct. The second point, making connections, is something LLMs seem to be incapable of truly doing unless the connection is already known and in its training data.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#179

Post by red75prime »

qsera wrote: post #90
throw310822 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The training data If the prompt is unique, it is not in the training data. True for basically every prompt. So how is this probability calculated?

Just using a scaled up and cleverly tweaked version of linear regression analysis...

That is, the probability distribution that the network should learn is defined by which probability distribution the network has learned. Brilliant!

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#180

Post by UltraSane »

qsera wrote: post #141
empath75 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is impossible to accurately imitate the action of intelligent beings without being intelligent. To believe otherwise is to believe that intelligence is a vacuous property.

>It is impossible to accurately imitate the action of intelligent beings without being intelligent. Wait what? So a robot who is accurately copying the actions of an intelligent human, is intelligent?

How can you distinguish intelligence form a sufficiently accurate imitation of intelligence?
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