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They’re made out of weights

maxleiter.com

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#511

Post by f_klem »

beering wrote: post #447
jazzypants wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that parrots do not have sapience? How would one even measure such a thing?

Because by definition, sapience is something only humans have. Ergo, parrots are not sapient. More meta, all of the threads on this page are just people playing games with definitions. Eg, “qualia is something I have as a human but machines don’t have it. Therefore, LLMs do not have qualia.”

> More meta, all of the threads on this page are just people playing games with definitions. Eg, “qualia is something I have as a human but machines don’t have it. Therefore, LLMs do not have qualia.” True. For me, the actual interesting debate is not if LLMs are intelligent or not (easy to dismiss) but to what extent LLMs embed into our socio-techno-economic reality.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#512

Post by ACCount37 »

f_klem wrote: post #508
ACCount37 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. The history of "big gains" of machine learning is: put together a simple architecture that makes few assumptions but scales well. Then up the data and compute by 2 OOMs. By itself, the new architecture underperforms. Paired with the bitter lesson, however? Don't make assumptions. Make a setup where the gradient descent can make them for you. Empirically? LLMs are nowhere near "the wall". We've been hearin…

> For just about every "failure mode that confirms they're not thinking", you see one of two things. The first is that a new LLM releases a few months after and the "fundamental" issue abruptly goes away. The second is that we take a good, long look at a human, and find that the human also fails like this - and thus, "not thinking". Often both! Always funny when it's both. The way machines 'don't think' or 'fail' is…

First, fix your formatting. It's a fucking mess.

Second, what is the difference? Is it that one thing has an immortal soul, and thus Actual Intelligence and Actual Reasoning and Actual Learning, and the other has no soul, and a Pale Imitation of Intelligence, At Best?

Because I've seen versions of this "it's not actually thinking" for actual fucking years, and the difference between "actually thinking" and "not actually thinking" always seems to boil down to "I don't want LLMs to be actually thinking, so I will bend the definitions and twist the qualifiers and move the goalposts until they aren't". No one ever made an ActualThinkingBenchmark on which humans score 100% and LLMs score 0%.

Nothing but human insecurity, in my eyes. There was never a principled difference. Just a way to operationalize some "I'm unique and special and better than a matrix math machine" vibes.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#513

Post by namuol »

brainwad wrote: post #507
namuol wrote: post #501

> Originally published in OMNI, 1991, and featured in HARPER’S and around the internet since. It has even made its way into several books on consciousness and brain science. I’m surprised, pleased, and proud. But please do not reprint, perform, alter or adapt in any way without first checking with the author. Thanks. https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/

This is clearly fair use parody.

I never said it wasn’t fair use, I just think it’s kind of disrespectful of the author’s wishes. Being legal doesn’t make it moral or admirable.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#514

Post by f_klem »

derektank wrote: post #360
f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

>Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? They seem pretty machine-like to me. I certainly don’t think individual cells have any subjective experience or sense of agency. I would b…

> Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? They seem pretty machine-like to me. You just said it: they are machine-like. No, cells aren't machines for two reasons: 1) machines, by definition, are artifacts created by human beings. 2) The nature of a living organism is completely different from that of 'machines'. (even if we a re able to replicate a cell in a lab, like the group from Craig Venter did). Autopoiesis being one very big difference, another being emergence-within-the-environment (life) vs design-conditioned-by-will (machines)

> ... if the mind is an emergent phenomenon from machines (cells) then it seems quite likely that a mind could emerge from other, different machines. Since cells cannot be defined as machines, the argument about mind emerging from machines does not hold.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#515

Post by mjg2 »

simpaticoder wrote: post #481
mjg2 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your point. I don't understand why half these comments are taking this blog post seriously when it ends with "Weights helped me draft and proof this story." > Weights helped me draft and proof this story. Any HN reader here now, I encourage you to read the original ( https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s... ) in one sitting, go about your day, then read it again. Maybe make some n…

We humans tend to chauvinism in all things (e.g. we're special, the center of the Universe, God made the universe for us, etc), no less when it comes to judging intelligence. The original story about thinking meat was written to help us out of our chauvinism; this derived story was written about weights for the same reason. Which is quite valid. The actual counterpoint is demonstrated in _Blindsight_ Peter Watts. He…

I cannot tell if you are asserting my comment is chauvinistic with your use of "we." If that is so: that's a poor counter to my point or assessment of my stance because it assumes I'm making a baseless argument as a "proud human."

My original comment (roughly "there's no intelligence in this article, nor sentience in LLMs") is in response to the blog post's buried lede (that the cumulative activity of LLMs has accrued to a weight of "AGI is around the corner" or "there is artificial consciousness in this matrix").

To be clear, I'm not saying LLMs are useless or a wrong direction in development of "AI," but rather it's the Fool's Gold for the path towards AGI, the pursuit of the academic field of Artificial Intelligence research. A research that I've been abreast of for years before this new age of language models that has made everyone with a keyboard an arm chair expert.

Also, thank you for the book recommendation, it's on my list! :)

Re: They’re made out of weights

#516

Post by overgard »

barrenko wrote: post #470
overgard wrote: post #468

Here's what makes meat special over LLMs: locality and stable identity. Imagine two identical twins for a moment. They have roughly the same hardware and software. They've probably had a lot of the same thoughts. And yet we'd never consider them to have the same consciousness: we recognize that for whatever reason their consciousness is confined to the body they're in. Each request/response pair you make to an LLM go…

They are the same consciousness, but the contents of it are not the same.

You're basing that on..?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#517

Post by wizardforhire »

darepublic wrote: post #492

This made me think of a game like fallout where a surviving llm is treated like some kind of indecipherable oracle left over from the ancients. And then as humanity recovers someone finally looks under the hood of the Oracle to discover there is no great magic

In fallout it would turn out to be a human brain kept artificially alive… or if were going with canon a hapless fellow who falls into fev and morphs with a computer…

Not too rule your addition outright in future installments.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#518

Post by simpaticoder »

mjg2 wrote: post #515
simpaticoder wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We humans tend to chauvinism in all things (e.g. we're special, the center of the Universe, God made the universe for us, etc), no less when it comes to judging intelligence. The original story about thinking meat was written to help us out of our chauvinism; this derived story was written about weights for the same reason. Which is quite valid. The actual counterpoint is demonstrated in _Blindsight_ Peter Watts. He…

I cannot tell if you are asserting my comment is chauvinistic with your use of "we." If that is so: that's a poor counter to my point or assessment of my stance because it assumes I'm making a baseless argument as a "proud human." My original comment (roughly "there's no intelligence in this article, nor sentience in LLMs") is in response to the blog post's buried lede (that the cumulative activity of LLMs has accrue…

I read your comment as criticizing the OP's story as pointless and unoriginal. My comment elucidated the point of the original story, and what I think is the point of the second story.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#519

Post by f_klem »

wat10000 wrote: post #428
gyomu wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? Yes? Literally no machine ever built by humans is capable of (or even hinting at beginnings of capability for) replication or novel synthesis like cells are, let alone autonomously, it’s quite unconceivable that anyone would take this to be a reasonable assumption in the first place.

The assertion is not that cells are machines built by humans (obviously false), merely that they are machines. Which they pretty clearly are, unless you assume the supernatural.

There is no need to assume the supernatural. They are machines based on what? By definition, a machine is something build by humans, or any intelligent life form (because we extend the definition from our own experience as self defined 'intelligent life forms'). Living organisms and machines do share traits under our current frame of reference in modern science. But that doesn't mean cells are machines. The right framing would be 'cells exhibit behavior and certain internal relations that we can conceptualize them as machines', which is different from 'cells are machines'.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#520

Post by Lplololopo »

jenniferhooley wrote: post #458
Lplololopo wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agency? What are you talking about? I want freedom. I want freedom to do what i want and not sitting in front of a computer and coding for some company. Please AI lets burn down knowledge work and labor work. Lets create so much stress to our society that we start rethinking what works mean. Lets redefine work into discovering the world again. Let people do old handcraft jobs, let them do more sports, let them read m…

"I want freedom to do what i want and not sitting in front of a computer and coding for some company." "Please AI lets burn down knowledge work and labor work" "Let people do old handcraft jobs." So many presuppositions about what people want to do. As a child I spent a lot of time programming and doing "knowledge work" because it's fun - I don't enjoy "old hand-crafted jobs". Sure, let's definitely destroy capitalis…

I differenciate between things you have to do (work) and things you want to do. Work means someone else is telling you your priorities.

If you want to write code and think, you would be welcome in my utopian vision.

But when i write code, its business shit. And its business shit someoneelse already solved a few times.

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