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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#121

Post by kelseyfrog »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #107
kelseyfrog wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another alternative is that consciousness exists on the map, and unfortunately we're confusing that with the territory.

Aren't you saying the same thing? It seems like the metaphysical and the map would be analogous here. Of course both of those suffer from the recursive problem of just kicking the can one level up. But I guess that's fundamentally unsolvable so who cares.

I feel like someone confusing the map and territory can exist without needing to invoke the metaphysical. Maybe, I'm misunderstanding tho

Re: They’re made out of weights

#122

Post by aeonfox »

kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

The difference with biological brains is that the 'weights' (or synaptic action potentials) are updated with greater frequency. If one were reaching to make some kind of analogy to consciousness, this update frequency could be considered the 'resolution' of consciousness.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#123

Post by petra »

kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

Regarding consciousness , I like the explanation by neuroscientist Ramachandran:

https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran07/ramachandran...

In short, as far as I can remember: evolutionary, it makes sense to understand other humans, to feel what they feel(empathy - the mirror neurons system), and simulate their thinking and feelings.

And once we have those systems, we can also use those on ourselves. And that's consciousness.

Edit:And I wonder if this is a testable hypothesis, in a simulation.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#124

Post by scotty79 »

zkmon wrote: post #88

They are made out of data bits (memory) and switching bits (transistors/compute). Bits are made out of electric voltage and no voltage. Voltage is made out of flow of positive electric charges. Charges are made out of quarks ...

> Voltage is made out of flow of positive electric charges.

Not really. What usually flows (in metals) are electrons. Quarks stay where they are. And when we prefer to think about flow of positive charges, the positive charge in question is a hole left by a missing electron. Physically real positive charges (ions) can flow in electrolytes though.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#125

Post by dyauspitr »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #105
samrus wrote: post #39

I have to agree. It is messed up that transformers can just talk, and it been pretty normalized. We are only talking about the impact they will have and whether they can do what people say they can, but we arent talking about how crazy it is that they can talk

LLMs have really changed the world. I didn’t think something like then would be possible in my lifetime

It came out of nowhere. It’s all emergent. I’m convinced this is possible with just about anything given enough data. We will be seeing a near magical physical outputs LLM in the near future. It’s going to take in video and sounds and spit out physical movements that will be just as mind blowing as when 3.5 came out and it will come out of nowhere.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#126

Post by Sharlin »

Waterluvian wrote: post #35

It must have been kind of incredible early on to be exploring this tech and you’re suddenly getting what look like sentences.

Markov chains give what look like sentences. People in the frigging 1950s assumed their primitive NNs would be able to talk any day now. Transformers are clearly a big deal, but GPT-1 wasn’t exactly earth-shattering.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#127

Post by ludwik »

trick-or-treat wrote: post #50
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our machines won't have biological systems driving their needs which in turn fuel behaviors like desire and planning for the future. They may imitate them but it won't be innate.

For an LLM, "innate" means "in their training data". So yeah, those things are pretty much innate.

And also "instilled during their reinforcement training", and we are currently pushing planning hard there, for autonomous agents.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#128

Post by ffwd »

eszed wrote: post #15
kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

Yeah, I currently suspect that consciousness is an emergent property. I read elsewhere (it's somewhere in my HN history, I'm sure) that the biggest compute we can currently muster is something like three or four magnitudes away from the number of neurons / connections (or their analog) that our brains have, so it may be a while until we can expect to see it in our machines. But, if the emergent phenomenon hypothesis…

Personally I'm not a fan of the emergence story, for a number of reasons. First is, it doesn't really make sense for consciousness to have emerged gradually through natural selection. When we and animals are conscious, the whole brain is coordinated and works to for example turn off consciousness when we sleep. And as someone else mentioned, animals with much fewer numbers seem to have a similar consciousness to us.

If consciousness really evolved gradually, you would expect to see for example dogs or gorillas having less of it, but if they has less of it, why does it function the same way? Like for example animals can be scared, happy, anxious etc, they can experience the full range of emotions and thoughts, so their conscious experience seems just as rich as ours. What I mean by this is, if you can be "less conscious", then what does that mean _exactly_? Is it that you have less content in consciousness, or is it that you feel more like you are asleep? Or something else? We don't have any examples in animals of "less conscious", I would argue.

This makes me think that rather than having emerged gradually, evolution found a mechanism by which consciousness exists, and then some animals have that mechanism and others don't. I think that if it is a mechanism, then this mechanism is located in one part of the brain, not many parts functioning together (though one possibility is that this mechanism coordinates brain activity in such a way to enable consciousness).

Re: They’re made out of weights

#129

Post by dyauspitr »

gobdovan wrote: post #83

You can take the weights and model description, write them down on a notebook, then, by hand, compute the next token. Try to do the same with meat.

Probably pretty similar. Weights are how many synapses there are between neurons. Temperature is whatever hormonal chemical mix is going on at the moment. Inputs tokens are electrical signals from our senses. Output tokens are thoughts, muscle movements. How you’re raised and your interactions with society are the RLHF. Some people are born with a GB300 while others have an L40S and lower token/sec output rates…

Re: They’re made out of weights

#130

Post by drdaeman »

dsign wrote: post #118

Oh, this was a fun read and one that kids should have in school before they turn ten. Because we are not taking things seriously. If ClosedAI or DeepDisTrust or Posthropic come up with something that quacks like a sentient being, our built-in innate reaction is going to be to scorn it, dismiss it and end the conversation. The alternative, to even consider that we fungible creatures who live in apple-eating-sin that g…

> alien souls

Do those actually qualify as alien, if they're products of our human culture and just the substrate is different?

> We would have to stop believing that the nature of disease and death is more divine than ourselves.

Why? Stopping believing in mutually contradictory claims is not a requirement. Especially when it comes to concepts that don't seem to have a definition, like "divine".

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