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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#101

Post by bayindirh »

pyridines wrote: post #89
bayindirh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just filled to the brim with relations between things. It's good at searching a very large meaning space and create correlations. What it does is to cover great distances and find related things in that large space which needs a long time and large corpus of knowledge to find the connection. This is not intelligence. It's just a good correlation engine with a very big albeit lossy database of things.

The very fact that it is able to search within a meaning-space demonstrates that it understands semantics, to some extent. Philosophically, that is profound, for something that is just one big matrix multiplication. Drawing connections between things in meaning-space is surely a facet of intelligence.

It’s not intelligence if you are the one who gives the correlations to the model in the pre-training. It’s Word2Vec, applied. Model doesn’t learn anything. You embed these correlations and build it from there. It just searches the space.

As my AI professor said in the first lecture: “All AI is advanced search”.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#102

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

mattbruv wrote: post #81
davidgh wrote: post #43

My son is currently learning Romanian and I was trying to help him with verbs. I don’t know Romanian but recalled when learning a foreign language for the first time it really helped me to break down how a verb form or tense worked in English, then learn the equivalent in the new language. So I wanted to make some charts and pages that he could use as learning resources. I used Claude to help. I don’t know how to qui…

> I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components. Bullshit?

No no no. Harry Frankfurt wrote at length the difference between liars (who care about the truth, and twist it) and bullshitters (who don’t care about the truth, but just the way they’re received).

This is some third category of untruth. Almost more sinister than the other two altogether.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#103

Post by figers »

pyridines wrote: post #87
figers wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

watch this and see if you think it has intelligence by the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8

This looks interesting, but would you mind saying a sentence or two about why before I commit to an hour-long video? It looks like it shows how they work internally, which is sort of a non sequitur. Brains also work mechanistically. I'm claiming that any system which is able to do what AIs do must necessarily have some sort of intelligence.

fair reply to an hour video, Scott is just so good to hear his talk is better than I can explain it...

go to 24 minutes and 07 seconds.

it's statistically determining what the next word should be based on all the text it's been trained on. It's not intelligence and he shows what probability it puts on each word that it chooses, but also shows a lot of the other words it was thinking of using. In a later part he shows how it uses words that are not the highest probability (and you question why did it go this route, it's not more correct), but the user never sees this, they see what they think is the correct answer always...

he also shows how context you feed it has a lot to do with what it returns... to the point he can get it to return the capital of France is Marseille, just by typing Marseille a bunch of times before the question. Human intelligence doesn't get confused like that.

And it's not a "hallucination", it's just probability of the next token prediction based on the information it's been trained on and fed, it's not intelligence.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#104

Post by pitched »

davidgh wrote: post #43

My son is currently learning Romanian and I was trying to help him with verbs. I don’t know Romanian but recalled when learning a foreign language for the first time it really helped me to break down how a verb form or tense worked in English, then learn the equivalent in the new language. So I wanted to make some charts and pages that he could use as learning resources. I used Claude to help. I don’t know how to qui…

> I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.

The best I’ve heard of this is peeling the onion. The first pass is always very high-level and you have to make it go deeper. That can be done manually with follow-on prompts but I like using subagents, each with a different angle on the problem.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#105

Post by rnd33 »

causal wrote: post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

Completely agree. AI is very impressive in many ways but there is something deeply wrong that is hard to put into words. The output is probable but never true, if that makes sense.

I think this is also the mechanism behind why AI generated videos and images are so captivating at first. I remember when Midjourney first launched and it was hours and hours of a brain-melting "Wooooooow". But once you get used to it and start to identify the patterns the brain quickly labels most AI-generated content as blank space.

If the image or text wasn't created by a human, then there was no intent behind the content, there is no message or novel information conveyed, and it reads as noise.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#106

Post by pitched »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #102
mattbruv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components. Bullshit?

No no no. Harry Frankfurt wrote at length the difference between liars (who care about the truth, and twist it) and bullshitters (who don’t care about the truth, but just the way they’re received). This is some third category of untruth. Almost more sinister than the other two altogether.

I think, they don’t care about truth at all, just whether the reviewer rates it highly. Otherwise, it would be deleted after that round of training. It values test-taking ability over critical thinking.

My two favourite words for this are “conditioned” and “catechized” where the latter is a bit more on the nose but way more obscure.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#107

Post by Planktonne »

blakesterz wrote: post #4

"There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. " I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good. And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who r…

You've got it backwards, I think. The people in tech are the ones falling for this endlessly.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#108

Post by rnd33 »

bayindirh wrote: post #80
pyridines wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.

It's just filled to the brim with relations between things. It's good at searching a very large meaning space and create correlations. What it does is to cover great distances and find related things in that large space which needs a long time and large corpus of knowledge to find the connection. This is not intelligence. It's just a good correlation engine with a very big albeit lossy database of things.

Intelligence is compression, compression requires subtraction, and for some reason LLMs are not good at subtracting. To create a coherent model you kinda have to subtract correlations until only the essential parts are still there.

What I don't understand is why LLMs haven't been able to do this yet, if it's the harness or some orchestration layer above the LLM that is needed. Because fundamentally if you can identify correlations then it's just another small step to prioritize and remove lower value or irrelevant correlations.

I wonder if what's needed is to introduce subtraction tokens in some sense, and in post-training reward the model on that.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#109

Post by GPerson »

causal wrote: post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

People should notice that it is constantly inventing plausible jargon, some of which may or may not have been used in some specific context.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#110

Post by GPerson »

TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #59
causal wrote: post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. No matter how much investors and tech companies want you to believe that they are on the verge of super intelligence, nothing I've seen to date can…

I mean this in the kindest way possible, but you are wrong that the math solutions are that easily dismissed. And there are many more than are publicized. A specific math problem I wanted solved for 3 years did not get solved by any model until fable and, and I tried it on every model and know the literature surrounding it well.
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