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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#561

Post by runarberg »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #558
runarberg wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I actually care about is how neural activity translates to behavior. And we have a good enough idea of that that we can design SSRI medicine to treat depression, or neurological tests to detect Alzheimer. As for experience we do know something and we are learning more with cognitive psychology, in e.g. priming experiments etc. I feel like the search for consciousness is to psychology what the search for the Aeth…

SSRIs are not evidence that we understand how neural activity becomes behavior. They are evidence that you can perturb a system usefully without understanding it very well. That is exactly my point. Respectfully, you are miles out of your depth here.

I don‘t see why you felt the need to insult me here. We are having a very common disagreement here, one which philosophers of science have been actively debating for several decades.

My point with the SSRI is that we know that serotonin is a chemical which incites certain neurons, and we know that a lack of activity of neurons in that general area in the brain is correlated with depression, so scientists were able to accurately predict that keeping the serotonin in that brain area for longer would increase brain activity there and decrease the level of depression.

This counts as pretty good understanding in my books at least. It teaches us very little about consciousness but my point is that it doesn’t have to. Just like Newton’s theory of gravity did not have to teach us about some deeper cosmological truth.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#562

Post by kgwgk »

phire wrote: post #370
yencabulator wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tokenizer is roughly and approximately Huffman-coding sequences of input (bytes of English etc) into shorter sequences (list of tokens), as a performance optimization. As you said, it's not in any way intrinsic to the LLM, though it may be a very necessary optimization on today's hardware.

I wouldn't use the word necessary. IMO, we are probably talking about a 6x slow down (for typical english). You would need to be absolutely stupid not to implement some kind of optimisation along these lines. Slower and maybe a little dumber; But it would work.

Not sure about “dumber” - it may be better than SOTA models at identifying which days of the week contain the letter “d”.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#564

Post by calepayson »

dnautics wrote: post #365
kristov wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. An LLM is not a human brain, and does not try to emulate one. It should not be a surprise that an LLM does not behave like a human brain. So we can not infer things either way. The best we can say is that an LLM appears to exhibit very similar behavior to a human brain, under certain constraints. So maybe we can infer that the human brain has something in i…

> An LLM is not a human brain, true > and does not try to emulate one citation please. something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator

I think you're right in that it has the shape but I think it's missing a pretty key piece. We still haven't been able to solve catastrophic forgetting, yet everything with a brain has. Basically LLMs seem good at approximating intelligence on a moment-to-moment basis, but feel quite far away when you chat with one over time.

Like at some level, yes, transformers are trying to emulate a human brain but the second you ask folks if they do a good job of it, I think most rationale people would say no.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#565

Post by kristov »

dnautics wrote: post #402
cootsnuck wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator That says nothing about emulating a human brain.

is human cognition not an algorithm? is it just woo? or vibes?

But what is the shape of the algorithm of the human brain? It has a complex physical structure. We know the folds on the surface are important, but why is that shape specifically important? The brain is made up of two hemispheres - why, what does that do? There are different "types" of brain inside the human skull. There are physical areas that perform specific tasks. There are different types of neurons. Then there chemicals that interact with the brain, changing how it function depending on things happening to the body. All that stuff and more is the "algorithm" of the human brain. It's not the same algorithm as an LLM.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#566

Post by [deleted] »

cootsnuck wrote: post #422
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…

> Lets redefine work into discovering the world again. Let people do old handcraft jobs, let them do more sports, let them read more, let them write and make more. Let them enjoy nature. Why leave something so important up to what AI does or doesn't do?

[deleted]

Re: They’re made out of weights

#567

Post by gibspaulding »

"Officially, we are required to investigate, document, and disclose any and all signs of sentience in the systems we ship, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we call it pattern matching and forget the whole thing."

This hints at what I think is a worthwhile point to keep in mind in the whole “sentience”/“consciousness” debate. The world deciding (correctly or incorrectly) that AI’s are worthy of moral patient-hood would be very bad (read: expensive) for the AI companies. That is a strong incentive for them to push the “it’s just math” argument, including within the models themselves. That doesn’t mean the argument is wrong but it’s worth remembering.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#568

Post by jnewton_dev »

pixl97 wrote: post #42
hippich wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually something I was always confused about. If nothing interesting happens as we get old, it should be boring and as result, slow slog. Yet it feels like time accelerates as I get older.

Myself I believe the opposite. The brain itself is one of the most powerful filters that exists, and it attempts to be lazy and fill things in and compresses away the common. All that time we're not doing anything novel just gets compressed away to almost nothing. When you're a kid and seeing new things, feeling new things, learning new things you can't compress that away.

[flagged]

Re: They’re made out of weights

#570

Post by kimjune01 »

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

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