> there's no dictionary in there
Someone has clearly never gone rooting around the model files for a pytorch model before.
They’re made out of weights
331–340 of 739 posts
Re: They’re made out of weights
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically there are rules, we just can’t articulate them and so we can’t decode them from the weights. The Goedel Numbering metaphor is pretty appealing to me. You can represent any finite series of real numbers with a series of computations performed on some other finite series of real numbers. We just happen to be using matrices because the math is easy to parallelize. The trick is to realize that when you know…
> You can represent any finite series of real numbers with a series of computations performed on some other finite series of real numbers. That statement caught my eye. It's either trivially true or quite clearly wrong, depending on how you mean it. In the literal meaning it's true. Given any finite set of real numbers, I can easily produce a different set (like taking the original set and adding a number which wasn'…
> For example if you give me a single real number as set A and the empty set as set B then I can't create a program which generates set A from set B. Your real number in set A could encode anything.
And that’s why in computation theory, the set of symbols is the union of the input and output. As set B is a subset of set A, then the set that govern any program from B to A has set A as its domain.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#333You 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.
> Try to do the same with meat.
People have been doing that for decades, the earliest efforts go back to the 50s.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#334What if instead of creating weights out of language we could somehow record many events and create weights out of long chains of causes and effects, so that an LLM could predict the next thing to happen?
It's called Time Series Forecasting
Re: They’re made out of weights
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is Russel’s Teapot a bad argument in the God debate? What's the relevance? If the argument made here are was a good argument, it wouldn't matter if Russell's argument was bad. We could construct a bad argument using reductio ad absurdum right here and now and it wouldn't matter to either argument. Can you be straight with me? You know the salient difference between asserting the consciousness of a toaster and the c…
> What's the relevance? It directly parallels your argument. > Can you be straight with me? You know the salient difference between asserting the consciousness of a toaster and the consciousness of an AI, right? It isn't a mystery to you why we would find one line of inquiry interesting and the other not so much? There are two aspects here. 1. That people find the question interesting 2. That it has any bearing on re…
> It directly parallels your argument.
Much like Russel argued that the burden of proof of God's existence is on theists, the burden to establish this parallel is on you as the person forwarding the argument. I don't see any relevant connection. Russel isn't arguing that a teapot is as real as God in the same way it's disputed here that a toaster is as conscious as an LLM.
> So far you have said that the argument is compelling. What’s that got to do with reality? A robot cow could be sexually arousing to a real bull.
AI is a real phenomenon that we can study and measure. There is no experiment that anyone has devised can determine whether or not they are conscious, so that is the reality - uncertainty. That doesn't mean they're conscious. It means that the belief they are not conscious is assumption.
You might say the same of a toaster, but these hypothesis are not equally strong. The toaster doesn't exhibit any behaviors to suggest that it's conscious. Consciousness isn't a hypothesis with any explanatory power for the observed behaviors of a toaster. It's not a hypothesis that's on the table. That's why the analogy doesn't work.
To put a fine point on it, it appears on it's face that AIs could be conscious. They can put on a very convincing performance of being a person. A sufficiently convincing performance is indistinguishable from the real thing. So at face value, the burden of proof is on them not being conscious. Reductionist arguments that present the mechanics of how they work and leap to their not being conscious don't work, because there is no law saying a statistical model can't be conscious. That's an assumption, not knowledge.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#336They 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 ...
> Charges are made out of quarks
Only in Hadrons. Leptons also have charge and they aren’t made of quarks.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency So, I work in AI research (as a research engineer though, not a scientist). I've also studied philosophy and I'm a vegan. Yes yes, insert "they will tell you" joke here, but I promise it's actually relevant this time. First, while I studied philosophy one of the things that stuck with me the most, was the discussion…
“Reflections on trusting trust” is the paper that posits a compiler which is edited once so that when it compiles a program, it adds a security vulnerability to it, and when it compiles it’s own source code, it adds this edit into itself. Then it is used to compile its own source code once. Then this edit is removed. Now any study of the program or compiler source code will not show any vulnerability, but compiling t…
> Accidentally stumbling on a mechanism that is simple enough to be recreated with every human birth might be possible, accidentally stumbling on a mechanism that took evolution billions of years to find and which it has hung onto by copying it and has never recreated it from scratch, could be much less likely, in a much bigger search space.
Maybe, but you could make the same argument about anything artificial.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compression is the reason why these Models are able to learn and understand. My brain is doing the exact same thing. I learned enough to compress concepts like a bike and what a bike does and for what i can use a bike. Ask a LLM and it will answer you similiar to humans. Blind people learn concepts of bikes too and in a smiliar way: by description. LLMs just have so much data in form of text available and are able to…
> Blind people learn concepts of bikes too and in a smiliar way: by description. And by touch and sound. And maybe some were daring enough to drive one, or unlucky enough to get hit by one. But have way more input than just texts.
Obligatory echolocation bit:
Re: They’re made out of weights
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago. The whole idea of sentience "on the other side of the wire" is wrong, as there is neither wire, nor other side. We think there is, but the DB just expounds the query and repurposes this information into views, that we give notion and meaning to. LLMs are the same, do not be mistaken. One other importa…
> If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago. If we agree that silicon can perform calculations, then beaches must have been working out log tables long ago.
Greg Egan wrote an entire (fabulous) book about exactly that, "Permutation City".
Re: They’re made out of weights
#340The original story is an original work made by a human consciousness exploring how it might be different from other forms of consciousness. This one is a pastiche made by a human consciousness borrowing extremely heavily from another human consciousness justifying why something else might be another form of consciousness. That rather undercuts the point; if this was generated by an LLM unprompted, it would be differe…
I think that the reaction here alone disproves this somewhat, because imo it's exposing how anthropocentric most people still are, despite all evidence that we are in fact just "meat all the way down".
Despite all the evidence that we are in fact just biological machines, people still persist the theory of our own uniqueness from other creatures, which we ourselves often treat as biological machines.
This adaptation is wonderful to me specifically because I think it shows that our shifted goalposts of, "well we're not just animals, we can think and reason" was never more than a convenient excuse for many people (and as evidence of animal intelligence continues to mount, denialism still attempts to preserve this distinction by claiming human thought and reason is different than 'animal' thought and reason, sans evidence).
It's not about who created it or why, it's about how people still haven't actually internalized the point, because the subject changing from human to LLM doesn't intrinsically change the message about consciousness, but the reaction being a 180 shows how hostile people are to that message, still.