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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#41

Post by PaulKeeble »

gdulli wrote: post #14
bensyverson wrote: post #2

I get the frustration, but it's reductive to just call LLMs "bullshit machines" as if the models are not improving. The current flagship models are not perfect, but if you use GPT-2 for a few minutes, it's incredible how much the industry has progressed in seven years. It's true that people don't have a good intuitive sense of what the models are good or bad at (see: counting the Rs in "strawberry"), but this is more…

Computer graphics have been improving for decades but the uncanny valley remains undefeated. I don't know why anyone expects a breakthrough in other areas. There's a wall we hit and we don't understand our own consciousness and effectiveness well enough to replicate it.

In computer graphics we understand how it works, we just lack the computational power to do it real time, but we can with sufficient processing produce realistic looking images with physically accurate lighting. But when it comes to cognition its a lot of guesswork, we haven't yet mapped out the neuron connections in a brain, we haven't validated it works as popular science writing suggests. We don't understand intelligence, so all we can do is accidentally bumble into it and it seems unlikely that will just happen especially when its so hard to compute what we are already doing.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#42

Post by perching_aix »

This is like all the usual anti-LLM talking points and sentiments fused together.

Doesn't it get boring?

I like using these models a lot more than I stand hearing people talk about them, pro or contra. Just slop about slop. And the discussions being artisanal slop really doesn't make them any better.

Every time I hear some variation of bullshitting or plagiarizing machines, my eyes roll over. Do these people think they're actually onto something? I've been seeing these talking points for literal years. For people who complain about no original thoughts, these sure are some tired ones.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#43

Post by floren »

the_snooze wrote: post #7
bensyverson wrote: post #2

I get the frustration, but it's reductive to just call LLMs "bullshit machines" as if the models are not improving. The current flagship models are not perfect, but if you use GPT-2 for a few minutes, it's incredible how much the industry has progressed in seven years. It's true that people don't have a good intuitive sense of what the models are good or bad at (see: counting the Rs in "strawberry"), but this is more…

Two things can be true at the same time: The technology has improved, and the technology in its current state still isn't fit for purpose. I stress test commercially deployed LLMs like Gemini and Claude with trivial tasks: sports trivia, fixing recipes, explaining board game rules, etc. It works well like 95% of the time. That's fine for inconsequential things. But you'd have to be deeply irresponsible to accept that…

Six months bro, we're still so early

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#44

Post by stickfigure »

I think it's too early to declare the Turing test passed. You just need to have a conversation long enough to exhaust the context window. Less than that, since response quality degrades long before you hit hard window limits. Even with compaction.

Neuroplasticity is hard to simulate in a few hundred thousand tokens.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#45

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

While the economic, energy, political and social issues associated with LLMs ought to be enough to nix the adoption that their boosters are seeking ...

... I still think there is an interesting question to be investigated about whether, by building immensely complex models of language, one of our primary ways that we interact with, reason about and discuss the world, we may not have accidentally built something with properties quite different than might be guessed from the (otherwise excellent) description of how they work in TFA.

I agree with pretty much everything in TFA, so this is supplemental to the points made there, not contesting them or trying to replace them.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#46

Post by telephone3 »

FloorEgg wrote: post #35
dwallin wrote: post #28

Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing. I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimension…

Yes, and to me the evolution of life sure looks like an evolution of more truthful models of the universe in service of energy profit. Better model -> better predictions -> better profit. I'm extremely skeptical that all of life evolved intelligence to be closer to truth only for us to digitize intelligence and then have the opposite happen. Makes no sense.

My understanding is that this is the opposite of what is typically understood to be true - organisms with less truthful (more reductive/compressed) perception survive better than those with more complete perception. "Fitness beats truth."

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#47

Post by Frieren »

dwallin wrote: post #28

Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing. I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimension…

> Some people point at LLMs confabulating

No. LLMs do not confabulate they bullshit. There is a big difference. AIs do not care, cannot care, have not capacity to care about the output. String tokens in, string tokes out. Even if they have all the data perfectly recorded they will still fail to use it for a coherent output.

> Collapsing the dimensionality is going to be lossy, which means it will have gaps between what it thinks is the reality and what is.

Confabulation has to do with degradation of biological processes and information storage.

There is no equivalent in a LLM. Once the data is recorded it will be recalled exactly the same up to the bit. A LLM representation is immutable. You can download a model a 1000 times, run it for 10 years, etc. and the data is the same. The closes that you get is if you store the data in a faulty disk, but that is not why LLMs output is so awful, that would be a trivial problem to solve with current technology. (Like having a RAID and a few checksums).

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#48

Post by quantummagic »

embedding-shape wrote: post #36
ambicapter wrote: post #16

The recent article of Sam Altman described pretty much as a compulsive liar. Would it be any surprise if his most impactful contribution to the world was a machine that compulsively lies?

How could it be that we humans hardly even agree on what "knowledge" truly is, yet somehow this machine learning algorithm somehow "compulsively lies"? How would it even know what is a lie, and how could something lacking autonomy in the first place do anything compulsively?

This is a good point. As much as there is too much breathless enthusiasm for AI, there is also a lot of emotionally manipulative and hyperbolic language used by skeptics. We're warned not to anthropomorphize, and then hear about AI's compulsive lying, or "hallucinations", in the next.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#49

Post by bitwize »

The fact that these "bullshit machines" have already proven themselves relatively competent at programming, with upcoming frontier models coming close to eliminating it as a human activity, probably says a lot about the actual value and importance of programming in the scheme of things.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#50

Post by simianwords »

Frieren wrote: post #47
dwallin wrote: post #28

Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing. I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimension…

> Some people point at LLMs confabulating No. LLMs do not confabulate they bullshit. There is a big difference. AIs do not care, cannot care, have not capacity to care about the output. String tokens in, string tokes out. Even if they have all the data perfectly recorded they will still fail to use it for a coherent output. > Collapsing the dimensionality is going to be lossy, which means it will have gaps between wh…

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