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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#171

Post by nine_k »

gbgarbeb wrote: post #113
nine_k wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at different ancient traditions, you will notice how they struggle with the limitations of language, with its inability to represent certain things that are not just crucial for understanding the world, but also are even somehow communicable. Buddhists dug into that in a very analytical, articulate way, for instance. Another perspective: cetaceans are considered to be as conscious as humans, but any attem…

You're a little out of date. Cetaceans communicate images to each other in the form of ultrasonic chirps. They chirp, they hear a reflection, and they repeat the reflection.

Does this resemble human language, with syntax, the ability to define new notions based on known notions, etc?

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#172

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ajross wrote: post #87
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are different. Humans - at least thoughtful humans - know the difference between knowing something and not knowing something. Humans are capable of saying "I don't know" - not just as a stream of tokens, but really understanding what that means.

> Humans - at least thoughtful humans - know the difference between knowing something and not knowing something. Your no-true-scotsman clause basically falsifies that statement for me. Fine, LLMs are, at worst I guess, "non-thoughtful humans". But obviously LLMs are right an awful lot (more so than a typical human, even), and even the thoughtful make mistakes. So yeah, to my eyes "Humans are NOT different" fits your…

Disagree. If you went to 100 random humans and said, "Tell me about the Siberian marmoset", what fraction would make up completely random nonsense to spew back at you? More than zero, sure, but most of them would say "what are you talking about?" or some variation.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#173

Post by munificent »

steveklabnik wrote: post #165
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…

Agreed, totally! I still write and put stuff online.

But it definitely feels different now. It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time.

It's not enough to dissuade me from contributing to the public sphere, but the vibe is definitely different.

Honestly, it reminds me a lot about the early days of Amazon. It's hard to remember how optimistic the world felt back then, but I remember a time when writing reviews felt like a public good because you were helping other people find good products. It was like we all wanted honest product information and Amazon provided a neutral venue for us to build it. Like Wikipedia for stuff.

But as Amazon got bigger and bigger and the externalities more apparent, it felt less like we were helping each other and more like we were help Bezos buy yet another yacht or media empire. And as the reviews got more and more gamed by shady companies, they became less of a useful public good. The whole commons collapsed.

I worry that the larger web and digital knowledge environment is going that way.

I still intend to create and share my stuff with the world because that's who I want to be. But I'll always miss the early days of the web where it felt like a healthier environment to be that kind of person in.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#174

Post by ghywertelling »

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…

There are AI researchers who wrote blogposts which got to HN top about spiky spheres (I won't link the original blogpost making that claim to avoid hurt sentiments). Here's 3blue1brown correcting those AI/ML researchers intuitions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsLh-NYhOoU&t=3238s

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#175

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#176

Post by ruszki »

mayama wrote: post #158
erichocean wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 2018, ie “pre-LLM”, the label “AI” was already stamped to everything, so I highly doubt that most people thought that their washing machines are sentient in any way. I remember this starkly, because my team was responsible at Ericsson (that time, about 120k employees) for one of the crucial step to have models in production, and basically every single project wanted that stamp.

The shift in meaning has been slowly diluted more and more across decades.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#177

Post by drob518 »

cgh wrote: post #164
drob518 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is what percent of the world’s content? 0.000000001% or something similar. It’s nothing in the scheme of things. To put it another way, if we were to digitize that continent and train on it, our AIs would not get noticeably better in any way. It doesn’t move the needle.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#178

Post by hackinthebochs »

hedgehog wrote: post #145
rudhdb773b wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency What makes you think natural brains are doing something so different from LLMs?

Structurally a transformer model is so unrelated to the shape of the brain there's no reason to think they'd have many similarities. It's also pretty well established that the brain doesn't do anything resembling wholesale SGD (which to spell it is evidence that it doesn't learn in the same way).

>Structurally a transformer model is so unrelated to the shape of the brain there's no reason to think they'd have many similarities.

Substrate dissimilarities will mask computational similarities. Attention surfaces affinities between nearby tokens; dendrites strengthen and weaken connections to surrounding neurons according to correlations in firing rates. Not all that dissimilar.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#179

Post by lamasery »

wk_end wrote: post #154
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…

The Tower of Babel seems like an OK fit, but that's rather more poetic than what this seems to be getting at.

"Millennia" is what's really throwing me. We (respectable society, as the post outlines) didn't stop attempting alchemy or perpetual motion machines "millennia" ago, but a few centuries at most.

All I can think of is immortality. The very first surviving long recorded tale in human history that I'm aware of is about how it's a futile quest (The Epic of Gilgamesh, IIRC ~5,000ish years old in its earliest extant fragments, a few hundred years newer in reasonably-complete form). The trouble with that is despite wide observations over literally millennia that this has never even come close to working and repeated supposition and suggestion that it's unwise to attempt, outright impossible, or somehow sacrilegious (the "taboo" thing, as mentioned), I'm not aware of any time in history that rich people haven't been actively trying for it (including today! That's what all the body-freezing business is about, it's modern mummification, the contracts are the formulaic prayers carved in the tomb walls) and usually they're not exactly "scorned" or "ostracized" for it.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#180

Post by embedding-shape »

drob518 wrote: post #163
embedding-shape wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I just don’t see one at the moment.

Did you see the one before the current one was even found? Things tend to look easy in hindsight, and borderline impossible trying to look forward. Otherwise it sounds like you're in the same spot as before :)

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