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I'm becoming AI-blind

cymerys.com

361–370 of 533 posts

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ... including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection. But that is precisely what human mathematicians do, prove new theorems by combining ones proven earlier. I don't see any fundamental difference in functionality between human intellectual contributions vs performant ML ones (LLM or otherwise). W…

> But that is precisely what human mathematicians do, prove new theorems by combining ones proven earlier.

I’d say “understanding and building upon ones proven earlier”

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"nd then it gets taken out of the conversation so that it doesn't get sent to the agent the next turn (no context bloat). " Uh - dude - this means you're paying 10x in token costs because there's no caching. If you 're-write token history' then you can't cache tokens. It means for any reasonably long conversation, the llm has to reprocess the entire history as preflow on every prompt. Are you sure you're really doing…

Nope, you gotta understand. This is the move. It is appended at the end of every single message. It is never saved in the conversation that get sent back for inference. So you send it. But when you go back for inference, it’s at the top of the stack so all of the cashing works you’re not pre-filling every time or anything like that. It burns plus N tokens, where N is my prompt stack. It is not really that expensive.…

It should burn N + len(answer), because you have to re-cache the whole answer without the prompt stack.

Perhaps more persnickety, it pushes the LLM out of distribution - if it’s unnatural for it to write in plain language without the prompt stack, your prefix will be an unnatural conversation which can reduce intelligence in hard to measure ways, especially over long conversations.

Not saying don’t do it, clarity is perhaps worth the intelligence hit, but it’s not going to be a free lunch.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to think of it in reverse: not that LLMs are intelligent, but that humans are more empty than we…think we are.

I think that reveals your cynicism more than it provides any useful insight about intelligence.

No, it reveals that he is older than you. Not every insight needs to be useful.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn’t been passed and no one cares about it because it’s basically an end goal. No lab can hit it so they can’t juice the crazy Turing benchmark 3000 for marketing. If someone sat me down today with an LLM and a human and both were trying to prove to me they were human, and I can have conversations of arbitrary length, I’d get it right every time.

> It hasn’t been passed https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 From the abstract: "When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant. LLaMa-3.1, with the same prompt, was judged to be the human 56% of the time"

Low n, time bound, not reproduced. And look at their example conversations…

And people forget that sometimes humans message twice. An LLM can only respond. So it immediately fails here in a true Turing test. (You could loop the LLM but then I expect even more immediately obvious bot behaviour).

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#365
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this line of reasoning quite a bit and it’s a strange one to me. The arguer reduces the sheer complexity of human intelligence and language by saying “we are just running statistical models in our brains” and by doing so makes the leap that Llms are intelligent. It’s an incredible simplification of the human person, who has a deep inner life, a soul, desires, and a will. I don’t think the aversion to llms as in…

I tend to think of it in reverse: not that LLMs are intelligent, but that humans are more empty than we…think we are.

Wow I guess it takes one to know one?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The qualifier is there because it changes the outputs, so it’s necessarily true that some outputs will be worse. But it’s just as likely to make an output better. Take the example from the article. He complains that watermarking might sometimes, for example, choose to say “bananas” over “pineapples” because only the former is on the green list, potentially making an output less precise. But 1. It could do that regard…

> But it’s just as likely to make an output better. No, for any particular output token the model's true logits are definitionally the 'best' that the model can achieve. This is inherently probabilistic. The model's top-1 guess is not guaranteed to be optimal, but it should be so a proportionate fraction of the time. Same with the top-2, top-3, etc. Watermarking necessarily alters the output distribution away from th…

I think you can also just use the random number generator (seeded with a secret key) as the watermark. Then the probability distribution is exactly the same.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#368
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection. But that is precisely what human mathematicians do, prove new theorems by combining ones proven earlier. I don't see any fundamental difference in functionality between human intellectual contributions vs performant ML ones (LLM or otherwise). W…

I see this line of reasoning quite a bit and it’s a strange one to me. The arguer reduces the sheer complexity of human intelligence and language by saying “we are just running statistical models in our brains” and by doing so makes the leap that Llms are intelligent. It’s an incredible simplification of the human person, who has a deep inner life, a soul, desires, and a will. I don’t think the aversion to llms as in…

You mention LLMs are dead and don't have the complexity or inner life that people do. Is your opinion that these kinds of things are not possible for AI in general, or that these things might be possible but we're just not there yet with modern LLMs?

You mentioned LLMs don't have souls, desire, or a will. I imagine those latter two can be engineered, no?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This starts to feel like you're defining the word intelligence out of any meaning and out of any way we apply that word. So when LLMs can do all human knowledge work, and do it better than humans, we'll be in the mines listening to you go on about how it's actually just autocomplete or just math, a distinction that apparently means nothing.

> This starts to feel like you're defining the word intelligence out of any meaning and out of any way we apply that word. No. > So when LLMs can do all human knowledge work, and do it better than humans, we'll be in the mines listening to you go on about how it's actually just autocomplete or just math, a distinction that apparently means nothing. With a big "if" attached to it. People were saying "computers will pr…

> it can't jump to somewhere where it's not present its training data

That sounds like something that can be engineered, can't it? In other words, we can identify limitations in current transformer-based architectures, and we can also build new architectures over time.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that reveals your cynicism more than it provides any useful insight about intelligence.

No, it reveals that he is older than you. Not every insight needs to be useful.

> Not every insight needs to be useful.

Don’t they still need to be correct to be an insight? I don’t share his cynical opinion that “humans are more empty than we…think we are”.

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