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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#181

Post by triceratops »

drob518 wrote: post #161
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. Se…

You're missing the point. This is the crux of munificent's argument IMO (and I've made variations of it as well)

> We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others.

You getting a summary of a copyrighted work from a friend is necessarily limited by the number of friends you have, the amount of time they have to read stuff and talk to you, and so on. Machines (and AIs) don't have any limitations.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#182

Post by rudhdb773b »

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).

Sure the implementation details are different.

I suppose I should have asked by what definition of "consciousness and agency" are today's LLMs (with proper tooling) not meeting?

And if today's models aren't meeting your standard, what makes you think that future LLMs won't get there?

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#183

Post by camgunz »

simianwords wrote: post #167
camgunz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Hey ChatGPT. How would you describe me?"

https://chatgpt.com/share/69d69780-ae58-83e8-a41c-7d10a5f298...

It has no conversations and no memory of me. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't, but there's no basis for it.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#184

Post by logicprog »

bee_rider wrote: post #99
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…

We shouldn’t try to build a worse version of a human. We should try to build a better compiler and encyclopedia.

We tried that. It was called Cyc. It never got even close to the level of capabilities a modern LLM has in an agentic harness — even on common sense and reasoning problems!

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#185

Post by dgb23 »

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…

In what way?

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#186

Post by drob518 »

zug_zug wrote: post #155
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 differ…

Right. I think the modern LLMs are quite good at mimicking human words, but we were initially taken in like we were in the 1960s by ELIZA. It’s a (increasingly sophisticated) magic trick, but it’s just a trick.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#187

Post by steveklabnik »

munificent wrote: post #173
steveklabnik wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contribut…

I can totally see that, for sure. I was much more likely to write a review long ago, now I don't even bother. (For buying stuff online, at least.) Maybe I lost my innocence about this stuff a long time ago, and so it's not so much LLMs that broke it for me, but maybe... I dunno, the downfall of Web 2.0 and the death of RSS? I do think that the old internet, for some definition of "old," felt different. For sure. I'll have to chew on this. I certainly felt some shock on the IP questions when all of this came up. I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old.

Also I'm not a fan of billionaires, obviously, but I think that given I've worked on open source and tools for so long, I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think.

(Also, I didn't say this in the first comment, but I'm gonna be thinking about the industrial revolution thing a lot, I think you're on to something there. Scale meaningfully changes things.)

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#188

Post by hackinthebochs »

root_axis wrote: post #123
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. I think we need to start rejecting anthropomorphic statements like this out of hand. They are lazy, typically wrong, and are always delivered as a dismissive defense of LLM failure modes. Anything can be anthropomorphized, and it's always problematic to do so - that's why the word exists. This rhetorical…

>this LLM behavior can be analogized in terms of some human behavior, thus it follows that LLMs are human-like

No, the argument is "this behavior is similar enough to human behavior that using it as evidence against is specious"

>"Confabulation" in LLMs and "confabulation" in humans have basically nothing in common

I don't know why you think this. They seem to have a lot in common. I call it sensible nonsense. Humans are prone to this when self-reflective neural circuits break down. LLMs are characterized by a lack of self-reflective information. When critical input is missing, the algorithm will craft a narrative around the available, but insufficient information resulting in sensible nonsense (e.g. neural disorders such as somatoparaphrenia)

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#189

Post by lelanthran »

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…

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

I think you are walking all around the word "consent" and trying very hard to avoid it altogether.

Your perspective, because it refuses to include any sort of consent, is invalid. No perspective that refuses consent can be valid.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#190

Post by lamasery »

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…

I'm struggling to reckon how that can even possibly be true, unless we're counting automation of the "dumping that shorter summary into the input of every run" thing.

I can imagine it being true with models so small that each user could afford to have their own, but not with big shared models like what're getting used for all the major services. Is that what you mean?

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