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ML promises to be profoundly weird

aphyr.com

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#161

Post by drob518 »

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…

A couple thoughts…

Mostly, AIs don’t recite back various works. Yes, there a couple of high profile cases where people were able to get an AI to regurgitate pieces of New York Times articles and Harry Potter books, but mostly not. Mostly, it is as if the AI is your friend who read a book and gives you a paraphrase, possibly using a couple sentences verbatim. In other words, it probably falls under a fair use rule.

Secondly, given the modern world, content that doesn’t appear online isn’t consumed much, so creators who are doing it for the money will certainly continue putting content online. Much of that content will be generated by AIs, however.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#162

Post by beders »

simianwords wrote: post #60
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?

I think you highlight one of the problems with users of LLMs: You can't tell anymore if it is BS or not.

I caught Claude the other day hallucinating code that was not only wrong, but dangerously wrong, leading to tasks being failed and never recover. But it certainly wasn't obvious.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#163

Post by drob518 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #102
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…

> I’m not even sure whether this is possible. Based on what's happened so far, maybe. At least that's exactly how we got to the current iteration back in 2022/2023, quite literally "lets see what happens when we throw an enormous amount data at them while training" worked out up until one point, then post-training seems to have taken over where labs currently differ.

Right, but we played the scaling card and it worked but is now reaching limits. What is the next card? You can surely argue that we can find a new one at any time. That’s the definition of a breakthrough. I just don’t see one at the moment.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#164

Post by cgh »

drob518 wrote: post #151
krainboltgreene wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The Vatican Library contains roughly 1.1 million printed books and around 75,000 codices, only a small percentage of which have been digitised.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#165

Post by steveklabnik »

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…

As you know, I deeply respect you. Not trying to argue here, just provide my own perspective:

> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article?

I write things for two main reasons: I feel like I have to. I need to create things. On some level, I would write stuff down even if nobody reads it (and I do do that already, with private things.) But secondly, to get my ideas out there and try to change the world. To improve our collective understanding of things.

A lot of people read things, it changes their life, and their life is better. They may not even remember where they read these things. They don't produce citations all of the time. That's totally fine, and normal. I don't see LLMs as being any different. If I write an article about making code better, and ChatGPT trains on it, and someone, somewhere, needs help, and ChatGPT helps them? Win, as far as I'm concerned. Even if I never know that it's happened. I already do not hear from every single person who reads my writing.

I don't mean that thinks that everyone has to share my perspective. It's just my own.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#166

Post by simoncion »

simianwords wrote: post #60
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?

> If it bullshits so much, you wouldn't have a problem giving me an example of it bullshitting on ChatGPT (paid version)?

There's an entire paragraph in the essay about apyhr's direct experience with ChatGPT failures and sustained bullshitting that we'd never expect from a moderately-skilled human who possesses at least two functioning braincells. That paragraph begins "I have recently argued for forty-five minutes with ChatGPT". Do notice that there are six sentences in the paragraph. I encourage you to read all of them (make sure to check out the footnote... it's pretty good).

The exact text of the ChatGPT session is irrelevant; even if you reported that you were unable to reproduce the issue, it would only reinforce one of the underlying points -namely- that these systems are unreliable. aphyr has a pretty extensive body of published work that indicates that he'd not likely fabricate a story of an LLM repeatedly failing to accomplish a task that any moderately-skilled human could accomplish when equipped with the proper tools. So, I believe that his report is true and accurate.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#167

Post by simianwords »

camgunz wrote: post #160
simianwords wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think calling AI a bullshit machine is correct. In spirit.

I'm earnestly curious why not.

Can you try to get a question that fits in 2-3 pages (text only) and test whether ChatGPT bullshits? I can’t do it. It gets pretty much everything.

Edit: I forgot to mention thinking version - I did this for all the other times I asked in this thread but not this one. Apologies.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#168

Post by drob518 »

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #71

I think the discussion has to be more nuanced than this. "LLMs still can't do X so it's an idiot" is a bad line of thought. LLMs with harnesses are clearly capable of engaging with logical problems that only need text. LLMs are not there yet with images, but we are improving with UI and access to tools like figma. LLMs are clearly unable to propose new, creative solutions for problems it has never seen before.

> "LLMs still can't do X so it's an idiot"

Let’s be careful. That’s a straw man. I don’t know anyone who says that. Aphyr says in the article that AIs can do things. But they have been marketed as “intelligent,” and I agree with Aphyr that the word is suggesting way more than AIs currently deliver. They do not reason and they do not think and are not truly intelligent. As the article says, they are big wads of linear algebra. Sometimes, that’s useful.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#169

Post by glitchc »

> Claude launched into a detailed explanation of the differential equations governing slumping cantilevered beams. It completely failed to recognize that the snow was entirely supported by the roof, not hanging out over space. No physicist would make this mistake, but LLMs do this sort of thing all the time.

You have to meet some physicist friends of mine then. They are likely to assume that the roof is spherical and frictionless.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#170

Post by SoftTalker »

marssaxman wrote: post #67
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They're presumably referring to the Harry Frankfurt definition of bullshit: "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false."

The bullshitter does have an objective in mind however. There is some ultimate purpose to his bullshitting. LLMs don't even have that. They just spew words.
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