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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#51

Post by knowaveragejoe »

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…

> 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.

Isn't "caring" a necessary pre-requisite for bullshitting? One either bullshits because they care, or don't care, about the context.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#52

Post by margalabargala »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #37
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…

And is that considered a feature of humans or a bug? Is it something we want to emulate?

The suggestion is that it is an intrinsic quality and therefore neither a feature nor a bug.

It's like saying, computation requires nonzero energy. Is that a feature or a bug? Neither, it's irrelevant, because it's a physical constant of the universe that computation will always require nonzero energy.

If confabulation is a physical constant of intelligence, then like energy per computation, all we can do is try to minimize it, while knowing it can never go to zero.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#54

Post by nothinkjustai »

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…

It’s a failure mode of humans, it’s the entire mode of LLMs.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#55

Post by delusional »

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, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing.

Are you seriously making the argument that AI "hallucinations" are comparable and interchangeable to mistakes, omissions and lies made by humans?

You understand that calling AI errors "hallucinations" and "confabulations" is a metaphor to relate them to human language? The technical term would be "mis-prediction", which suddenly isn't something humans ever do when talking, because we don't predict words, we communicate with intent.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#56

Post by sillyfluke »

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…

If you want to call it that, I find the confabulation in LLMs extreme. That level of confabulation would most likely be diagnosed as dementia in humans.[0] Hence, it is considered a bug not a feature in humans as well.

Now imagine a high-skilled software engineer with dementia coding safety-critical software...

[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/confabulation-deme...

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#57

Post by simianwords »

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…

> 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 kind of error rate on things that actually matter.

95% is not my experience and frankly dishonest.

I have ChatGPT open right now, can you give me examples where it doesn't work but some other source may have got it correct?

I have tested it against a lot of examples - it barely gets anything wrong with a text prompt that fits a few pages.

> The most intellectually honest way to evaluate these things is how they behave now on real tasks

A falsifiable way is to see how it is used in real life. There are loads of serious enterprise projects that are mostly done by LLMs. Almost all companies use AI. Either they are irresponsible or you are exaggerating.

Lets be actually intellectually honest here.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#58

Post by _dwt »

I have a question for all the "humans make those mistakes too" people in this thread, and elsewhere: have you ever read, or at least skimmed a summary of, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"? Did you say "yeah, that sounds right"? Do you feel that your consciousness is primarily a linguistic phenomenon?

I am not trying to be snarky; I used to think that intelligence was intrinsically tied to or perhaps identical with language, and found deep and esoteric meaning in religious texts related to this (i.e. "in the beginning was the Word"; logos as soul as language-virus riding on meat substrate).

The last ~three years of LLM deployment have disabused me of this notion almost entirely, and I don't mean in a "God of the gaps" last-resort sort of way. I mean: I see the output of a purely-language-based "intelligence", and while I agree humans can make similar mistakes/confabulations, I overwhelmingly feel that there is no "there" there. Even the dumbest human has a continuity, a theory of the world, an "object permanence"... I'm struggling to find the right description, but I believe there is more than language manipulation to intelligence.

(I know this is tangential to the article, which is excellent as the author's usually are; I admire his restraint. However, I see exemplars of this take all over the thread so: why not here?)

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#59

Post by nradov »

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…

Which things actually matter? I think we can all agree that an LLM isn't fit for purpose to control a nuclear power plant or fly a commercial airliner. But there's a huge spectrum of things below that. If an LLM trading error causes some hedge fund to fail then so what? It's only money.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#60

Post by simianwords »

josefritzishere wrote: post #11

I appreciate the directness of calling LLMs "Bullshit machines." This terminology for LLMs is well established in academic circles and is much easier for laypeople to understand than terms like "non-deterministic." I personally don't like the excessive hype on the capabilities of AI. Setting realistic expectations will better drive better product adoption than carpet bombing users with marketing.

If it bullshits so much, you wouldn't have a problem giving me an example of it bullshitting on ChatGPT (paid version)? Lets take any example of a text prompt fitting a few pages - it may be a question in science or math or any domain. Can you get it to bullshit?
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