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What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

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Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#201

Post by luckydata »

agentultra wrote: post #129
scarmig wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.

Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable. See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them! They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes. The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many…

some might call it "perspective"

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#202

Post by noduerme »

marshray wrote: post #165
root-parent wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its less of open debate would say, and although superposition [1] is interesting, as a way to explain power of some effects, it is clear they are right now closer to Stochastic Parrots than AGI. Why do I say that? Because you can trivially beat most guardrails, simply by encoding your prompt in base64 for example. :-) Just word matching...no real understanding. [1] https://chrisclay.substack.com/p/what-is-superpositi…

What is " real understanding", and what question can we ask ChatGPT to determine whether it has it?

Ask it how to prevent Spotify from automatically playing every time you get in your car. The answer will involve a bunch of Android settings that don't actually exist, cobbled together from a bunch of bad advice in online forums. Explain to it how it's wrong. Then clear your cache and ask it the same question again from scratch, and get the same garbage. Repeat until it's clear that it doesn't understand anything.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#203

Post by luckydata »

yubblegum wrote: post #157
rdedev wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting things into perspective is not minimising the problem. We literally have to do this to prioritise where our efforts can be useful. Your argument makes sense if ai datacenters were using something close to like alfafa farming but the difference between them is soo massive it does not make sense. Reducing pollution is a much better problem to fight for

I am guessing (not asserting) that there is a sort of cap on water used for agriculture. It's possible we've already reached it. (?) So, on the matter of scale: there likely isn't a cap on water use of these datacenters. Both the heat emission and usage levels for these systems will likely go up unless there is a fundamental technical breakthrough. On the matter of utility: As a sibling of GP mentioned, the utility o…

what is the utility of alfaalfa? Because as it stands it's essentially just a way to export enormous amounts of water from a place where there's little (California) to a place where there's none (the Arabian peninsula).

This is bullshit to be charitable.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#204

Post by fluoridation »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #192
scarmig wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.

I prefer to use the hospital analogy. Locally, the water concerns are a big deal but a lot of people in my community are riled up about the potential need for diesel backup generators because of the noise pollution. They are not wrong and it's good to consider, but they are at this point grasping for reasons that would not (and have not) been concerns for other large footprint projects like hospitals with similar inf…

And you don't understand why what's tolerated of a hospital may not be tolerated of other kinds of buildings?

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#205

Post by gordian-mind »

simianwords wrote: post #166
utopiah wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but also... she wasn't a software engineer putting code in production nor a researcher working no the fundamentals of machine learning negotiating a raise. She was part of the "Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team" of what was then, and still is now, one of the corporations World wide spending the largest amount of resources precisely on using AI commercially.

Timnit got popular because she was part of Woke 1.

[flagged]

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#206

Post by gordian-mind »

jayGlow wrote: post #190
shimman wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice false dichotomy you got there there, might as well calculate the entire water usage for a a single GPU in the supply chain too. Something tells me one is extremely worse than the other when you account for all the water that's used in a single supply chain for high end electronics, but if you want to plop the measuring stick where ever along the whole pony show that makes you look better people will notice. Also…

let's compare ai water usage with something even more useless, water leaking out of pipes. the United States currently loses about 2 trillion gallons of water annually to leaking pipes. this is in comparison to around 230 billion gallons used by data centers. we're literally dumping several times the amount of water used by data centers onto the ground for no benefit at all. oddly enough I haven't seen any protests a…

It's because spilling water doesn't do anything: water evaporates, becomes cloud, rains down etc.

Meanwhile, datacenters sacrifice water by sending it to Mars in order to compute criminal deepfakes of innocent politicians.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#207

Post by fluoridation »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #182
dwa3592 wrote: post #37

I paid a bit of attention to this paper and the phrase 'stochastic parrots' when it came out and i thought this was worth saying and doing at that time. their suggestions about financial and environmental costs are worth studying, their concern about carefully evaluating datasets to feed to the model rather than feeding the entire internet is fully justified. so - to everyone saying this was a bad paper; if you have…

The contention that there is no grounding because the training data is linguistic and thus can only reference a world model is disproven in "This sentence has five words"- there's real, grounded information about what "five" means within that sentence. While that's a trivial counterexample, I don't know that it's an obvious one (I didn't come up with it myself). It's not a criticism of the paper itself, but multimoda…

To add to dwa3592's comment, a sentence is not a self-contained idea. The sentence doesn't include what any of the words in it mean, nor what "this sentence" refers to. The exact same sentence can mean different things depending on the text that surrounds it.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#208

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

dwa3592 wrote: post #191
ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contention that there is no grounding because the training data is linguistic and thus can only reference a world model is disproven in "This sentence has five words"- there's real, grounded information about what "five" means within that sentence. While that's a trivial counterexample, I don't know that it's an obvious one (I didn't come up with it myself). It's not a criticism of the paper itself, but multimoda…

>>The contention that there is no grounding because the training data is linguistic and thus can only reference a world model is disproven in "This sentence has five words"- there's real, grounded information about what "five" means within that sentence. did you think this through? imagine the sentence was "This sentence has four words", now extrapolate that to all the shit that can exist in a dataset and train a mod…

I don't think this tone is at all justified. If you think otherwise, I do ask that you point out where I went too far in a comment that I feared was overburdened by caveats and admissions of my own human flaws.

"This sentence has five words" is going to appear far more often than "This sentence has four words". This is the entire premise of LLMs working at all, stochastic parrots or otherwise.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#209

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

xgulfie wrote: post #44
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most humans are stochastic parrots There's a lot more happening behind the scenes when a human repeats phrases than what's happening in an LLM. Sociological phenomenon. The desire to be liked, successful, or popular. The feeling that those phrases brings up. LLMs are not experiencing any of that. As far as we know, neither is a parrot.

Parrots certainly do experience social needs

Fair but not the human sociology I mean.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#210

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

fluoridation wrote: post #207
ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contention that there is no grounding because the training data is linguistic and thus can only reference a world model is disproven in "This sentence has five words"- there's real, grounded information about what "five" means within that sentence. While that's a trivial counterexample, I don't know that it's an obvious one (I didn't come up with it myself). It's not a criticism of the paper itself, but multimoda…

To add to dwa3592's comment, a sentence is not a self-contained idea. The sentence doesn't include what any of the words in it mean, nor what "this sentence" refers to. The exact same sentence can mean different things depending on the text that surrounds it.

Fair point, and on its own it would be surprising to learn what "five" means from that sentence. But you can extrapolate- across a billion sentences, there will be "the next sentence has five words"s and "this sentence are grammared wrong" and so on. It would not be at all impossible to ground a world model on pure text for that reason. And 'not impossible' is sufficient to invalidate the paper's argument.
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