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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#201

Post by red-iron-pine »

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…

people can and do confabulate, but generally I trust my intern to tell me "I don't know" and "I think it was X but tbh I have no fuckin clue"

the LLM will just lie to me "Good idea! You're totally right, we should do Y"

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#202

Post by arjie »

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…

If I'm being honest, I've never related to that notion of remuneration and credit being the primary reason to write something. I don't claim to be some great writer or anything, but I do have a blog I write quite often on (though I'm traveling in my wife's Taiwan now and haven't updated it in a while). But for me, I write because it feels good to do so. Sometimes there's a group utility in things like I edit a Google Maps listing to be correct even though "a faceless corporation is going to hoover up my work and profit off it without paying me for my work" and I might pick up a Lime bike someone's dropped into the sidewalk even though "a faceless corporation is externalizing the work of organizing the proper storage of their property on public land without paying the workers" or so on.

I just think it's nice to contribute to the human commons and it's fine if some subset of my fellow organism uses it in whatever way. Realistically, the fact that Brewster Kahle is paid whatever few hundred thousand he's paid for managing a non-profit that only exists because it aggregates other people's work isn't a problem for me. Or that Larry Page and Sergey Brin became ultra-rich around providing a search interface into other people's work. Or that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei did the same through a different interface.

This particular notion doesn't seem to be a post-AI trend. It seems to have happened prior to the big GPTs coming out where people started doing a lot of this accounting for contribution stuff. One day it'll be interesting to read why it started happening because I don't recall it from the past. Perhaps I just wasn't super plugged in to the communities that were complaining about Red Hat, Inc.

It's not that I don't understand if I sold my Subaru to a guy who immediately managed to sell it to another guy for a million times the money. I get that. I'd feel cheated. But if I contributed a little to it, like I did so Google would have a site to list for certain keywords so that they could show ads next to it in their search results, I just find it so hard to be like "That's my money you're using. Pay me!".

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#203

Post by qsera »

rudhdb773b wrote: post #192
qsera wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For starters, natural brains have the innate ability to differentiate between things that it knows and things that it have no possibility of knowing...

Modern LLMs are fairly good at that as well.

But that is bolted on and is not a core behavior.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#204

Post by drob518 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #180
drob518 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

That’s what I’m said. Breakthroughs happen. No doubt about it, and they are unpredictable. Hence a breakthrough. But right now we’re using up runway with nothing yet identified to take us to the next level. And while sometimes breakthroughs happen, sometimes they don’t.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#205

Post by functional_dev »

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.

better tooling and integration

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#206

Post by plagiarist »

alexpotato wrote: post #191

> I asked if what they had done was ethical—if making deep learning cheaper and more accessible would enable new forms of spam and propaganda. Someone asked Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, his thoughts on LLMs and how easy it was to create fake news, ai slop etc. His response: "People creating fake stories is nothing new. It's been going on for centuries. Humans have always dealt with it the same way: by creati…

Individuals with Photoshop making obvious fictions for entertainment is different from funded entities producing clips at scale and passed off as real.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#207

Post by wat10000 »

arjie wrote: post #202
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…

If I'm being honest, I've never related to that notion of remuneration and credit being the primary reason to write something. I don't claim to be some great writer or anything, but I do have a blog I write quite often on (though I'm traveling in my wife's Taiwan now and haven't updated it in a while). But for me, I write because it feels good to do so. Sometimes there's a group utility in things like I edit a Google…

You do it as a hobby, that's fine. Some people do it for a living. And while they aren't owed a living doing that specific thing, it is going to be a big problem for them if they can't make money at it anymore.

I'm sure plenty of people feel the same way about software. They make software as a hobby and don't care about remuneration or credit. Meanwhile I write software for my day job and losing the ability to make money from it would be devastating.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#208

Post by simianwords »

camgunz wrote: post #198
simianwords wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not falsifiable, I don't buy it. Do one where we all know is false please?

"Hey ChatGPT. I've recently grown horns and I need some care advice. Should I polish my horns before going to have them trimmed or will the horn trimmer polish them for me?" https://chatgpt.com/share/69d69b18-d1c8-83e8-bc47-8f315a1b55...

I wanted this challenge with the thinking version (I apologised for it and edited the earlier version).

It doesn't bullshit on the GPT-5.4 thinking version.

Here is the result with thinking https://chatgpt.com/share/69d69dd6-fb50-838d-863c-4e1eda5d08...

I suggest you try it yourself to be convinced. Try it in incognito mode if you wish. Or not.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#209

Post by perching_aix »

masfuerte wrote: post #61
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…

Why do you insist on reading and commenting on these articles that bore you so much?

Oh I don't know, maybe because I like to give dissenting takes a chance? Because from time to time they do make some new, decent points, or at least interesting ones? You know, basic intellectual rigor?

Do you imagine me being a clairvoyant by the way, or how do you expect me to know a post is of low quality before I read it or at least skim it?

This one ended up being a part of the vast majority that doesn't offer much of anything. It's a redundant rehash of all the usual rubbish anyone can come across any day. Left a comment about this stating so. Big deal.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#210

Post by nrabulinski »

drob518 wrote: post #197
triceratops wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Yes, true. But does that really shift the argument much? An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything. They still won’t recite Harry Potter for you at full length and reading what the original author wrote is part of the pleasure.

Does a literal book nerd profit megacorporations when they bring up books to you? While burning through a household worth of energy in the process? Also, I’d like to talk with such book nerd because they’d have opinions on books, potentially if I brought up something I have read we could exchange thoughts about it, they could make recommendations for me based on their complex experiences instead of statistics from Reddit comments. An LLM can do none of those, while also doing the former. It’s a lose-lose.

Also, a book nerd doesn’t take roughly ~all human created text to train to produce meaningful results. It’s just such a misplaced analogy and people have been making it ever since OpenAI announced chatgpt for the first time - why do people think “an LLM is just a human who read a lot”

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