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ML promises to be profoundly weird

aphyr.com

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#211

Post by Fraterkes »

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…

What's your point? The ostensible benefit of LLM's is that you combine a computers' broad knowledgebase and capacity for exactness with fluency in human language.

A random human picked off the street is indeed bound to be difficult to predict and chaotic at a broad range of tasks, which is why I wouldn't blindly trust them to, say, summarize google search results or rewrite a codebase they are unfamiliar with.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#212

Post by Apocryphon »

simianwords wrote: post #80
xandrius wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like you probably went too deep in the LLM bandwagon. An LLM is a statistical next token machine trained on all stuff people wrote/said. It blends texts together in a way that still makes sense (or no sense at all). Imagine you made a super simple program which would answer yes/no to any questions by generating a random number. It would get things right 50% of the times. You can them fine-tune it to say yes…

If it were not "just a statistical next token machine", how different would it behave? Can you find an example and test it out?

How do non-LLM based World Models behave?

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#213

Post by cjcole »

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…

"but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution"

You're not the only one.

The current Pope Leo XIV explicitly named himself after the the previous Leo, Pope Leo XIII, who was pope during the Industrial Revolution (1878-1903) and issued the influential Encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) in response to the upheaval.

“Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Pope Leo recalled. “Today, the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.” A name, then, not only rooted in tradition, but one that looks firmly ahead to the challenges of a rapidly changing world and the perennial call to protect those most vulnerable within it.”

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-05/pope-leo-xiv...

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#214

Post by steveklabnik »

lelanthran wrote: post #189
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…

> 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.

Consent is absolutely important, but that does not mean that every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent. You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. That does not mean you're a bad person.

Free use is an important part of intellectual property law. If it did not exist, the powerful could, for example, stifle public criticism by declaring that they do not consent to you using their words or likeness. The ability to do that is important for society. It is also just generally important for creating works inspired by others, which is virtually every work. There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#215

Post by erichocean »

lamasery wrote: post #190
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?

> Is that what you mean?

I think the confusion is that, when I write "model", you read "LLM."

LLMs aren't the only kind of AI model, and they have the limitations Aphyr mentions, for the obvious reasons you're thinking of.

His mistake is thinking that's the only model that exhibits intelligence today, but it's not.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#216

Post by arjie »

wat10000 wrote: post #207
arjie wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Ah, I see. It’s just straightforward protectionism like dockworkers opposing automation and so on. That I do comprehend, in fact.

I write software too and I may no longer be able to just do it in the old way. Pretty scary world but also exciting. I can’t imagine trying to restrict LLM software writers on that basis but I can comprehend it as simply self-interest.

Fair enough.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#217

Post by perching_aix »

camgunz wrote: post #159
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.

Just this week I was baited into joining two meetings about "AI good". Absolutely zero substance throughout each, of course.

They somehow managed to stretch out like 3 sentences worth of sentiment to a whole hour, interspersing brainwash about how good AI is along the way. It was like watching someone try to hit a word limit in real time. They always made it feel like we're just about to hit a substantive bit too, only for that to never come.

It may be fair (to the sentiments) in that there's balance, but good lord, the end result is incessant all around (and thus unfair to the people exposed).

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#218

Post by camgunz »

simianwords wrote: post #208
camgunz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

"Hey ChatGPT. I'm building a Final Fantasy 6 mod, and I need more space for the battle scripts. How would I rearrange the data in the ROM to give me the extra space I need?"

https://chatgpt.com/share/69d6a16c-6014-83e8-a79d-d5d11ed2eb...

That is not where the battle scripts are.

---

Anyway, it's trivial to get pretty much any model to make things up. Don't we all know this? That's why I was surprised by your position; if we know anything about these things it's that they make things up.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#219

Post by konschubert »

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…

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant.

The opposite is true. Central Europe was almost devoid of trees. Food was scarce as arable land bore little fruit without fertiliser.

Society was Malthusian until the Industrial Revolution.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#220

Post by pocksuppet »

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…

Stuff gets put online when the reader isn't the customer. Someone is paying for a reader to be told certain things. So it's free at the point of reading.
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