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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#151

Post by drob518 »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #136
drob518 wrote: post #94

> It remains unclear whether continuing to throw vast quantities of silicon and ever-bigger corpuses at the current generation of models will lead to human-equivalent capabilities. Massive increases in training costs and parameter count seem to be yielding diminishing returns. Or maybe this effect is illusory. Mysteries! I’m not even sure whether this is possible. The current corpus used for training includes virtual…

> The current corpus used for training includes virtually all known material. This is just totally incorrect. It's one of those things everyone just assumes, but there's an immense amount of known material that isn't even digitized, much less in the hands of tech companies.

What large caches of undigitized content exists? Surely, not everything has been digitized, but I can’t think it’s much in percentage terms.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#152

Post by camgunz »

nisegami wrote: post #104

Here's the opening paragraph of chapter 2 with "people" subbed out for terms referring AI/models/etc. "People are chaotic, both in isolation and when working with other people or with systems. Their outputs are difficult to predict, and they exhibit surprising sensitivity to initial conditions. This sensitivity makes them vulnerable to covert attacks. Chaos does not mean people are completely unstable; most people be…

Humans and large models are both unpredictable and fallible, that's true, but in different ways, and (many) humans are actually much better at following directions.

If a junior dev makes the same mistake Claude makes, I can easily work with them to correct it, or I can fire them and get someone more capable to fix it. You mostly can't do that at all with large models. They're also far less honest than your average junior dev, so even as you're working with them you can't trust what they say.

There is a lot of this neat trick where it's like "humans do X too" but most of the time it elides large differences. Like, a human driver would probable not drag someone screaming multiple blocks. A human coder probably wouldn't generate a gibberish 3D scene and try to pass it off as done, etc. Maybe we can build systems that account for these (pretty wild) failure modes, but at least in software we haven't figured it out yet (what is the system that reliably reviews a 25kloc PR?).

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#154

Post by wk_end »

dsign wrote: post #124

> At the same time, ML models are idiots. I occasionally pick up a frontier model like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, and ask it to help with a task I think it might be good at. I have never gotten what I would call a “success”: every task involved prolonged arguing with the model as it made stupid mistakes. I have a ton of skepticism built-in when interacting with LLMs, and very good muscles for rolling my eyes, so I b…

> And, when was the last time we stopped perfecting something we thought useful and valuable? When was the last time our attempts were so perfectly futile that we stopped them, invented stories about why it was impossible, and made it a social taboo to be met with derision, scorn and even ostracism? To my knowledge, in all of known human history, we have done that exactly once, and it was millennia ago.

I feel dense here, but I can't figure out what you're referring to. I asked ChatGPT (hah!) and it suggested the Tower of Babel, perpetual motion machines, or alchemy, but none of them really fit the bill.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#155

Post by zug_zug »

stickfigure wrote: post #44

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.

"You're absolutely right!"

I think for a while the test was passed. Then we learned the hallmark characteristics of these models, and now most of us can easily differentiate. That said -- these models are programmed specifically to be more helpful, more articulate, more friendly, and more verbose than people, so that may not be a fair expectation. Even so, I think if you took all of that away, you'd be able to differentiate the two, it just might take longer.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#156

Post by bluefirebrand »

munificent wrote: post #150

There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…

> It really feels like we're in the soot-covered child-coal-miner Dickensian London era of the Information Revolution and shit is gonna get real rocky before our social and legal institutions catch up

The really discouraging part of this is that it feels like our social and legal institutions don't even care if they catch up or not.

Technology is speeding up and the lag time before anything is discussed from a legal standpoint is way, way too long

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#157

Post by qsera »

erichocean wrote: post #125

> Models do not (broadly speaking) learn over time. They can be tuned by their operators, or periodically rebuilt with new inputs or feedback from users and experts. Models also do not remember things intrinsically: when a chatbot references something you said an hour ago, it is because the entire chat history is fed to the model at every turn. Longer-term “memory” is achieved by asking the chatbot to summarize a con…

Source?

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#158

Post by mayama »

erichocean wrote: post #119
beders wrote: post #79

Thank you for putting it so succinctly. I keep explaining to my peers, friends and family that what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency and that the term AI is just completely overloaded right now.

AI is exactly the right term: the machines can do "intelligence", and they do so artificially. Just like we have machines that can do "math", and they do so artificially. Or "logic", and they do so artificially. I assume we'll drop the "artificial" part in my lifetime, since there's nothing truly artificial about it (just like math and logic), since it's really just mechanical. No one cares that transistors can do ma…

> AI is exactly the right term: the machines can do "intelligence", and they do so artificially.

AI in pop culture doesn't mean that at all. Most people impression to AI pre-LLM craze was some form of media based on Asmiov laws of robotics. Now, that LLMs have taken over the world, they can define AI as anything they want.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#159

Post by camgunz »

perching_aix wrote: post #42

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 th…

If I have to suffer "look at this busted ass thing I slopped out with AI" a few times a week, you all have to suffer grouchy "AI bad" a few times a week. Fair is fair.
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