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I'm becoming AI-blind

cymerys.com

461–470 of 533 posts

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are pattern prediction systems with a large training data set. It is not surprising that they can predict patterns, particularly for a well structured field like mathematics that is also amenable to automated proof checking to help steer it.

"Pattern prediction" is a very broad stroke. What's something AI can never do that would astonish you if it did?

"AI" is a vague term that encompasses both traditional GOFAI, LLMs, and future tech so your question is meaningless. Non-human intelligence is possible, if that's what you're actually asking.

What part of my statement do you take issue with: that LLMs are pattern predictors (that's literally what the algorithm that runs it does) or that mathematics is rules-based and checkable and therefore amenable to automated pattern prediction?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, maybe. Evidence around caveman shows this isn’t a big deal for token consumption (forcing it to respond in a way it was not tuned) and I don’t see a big difference either way. And maybe it increases intelligence in hard to measure ways. Lots of parameters in these models.

I feel I fight them less with this setup. They get so lost in their own invented bullshit they stop being useful pretty often without it. So I would take bets on that :)

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that expression before, but I don't think it can be presented and stated so matter of factly. Where does that put bzip?

There were experiments that zipped music pieces, I think, and then classified the compressed files by similarity. They got rather interesting resuls. But I do not remember much details. It was, I believe, about 20 years ago. Asked Google: "Clustering by compression".

That sounds like a really cool project, I will def give it a look.

I still think this has much more to do with the structure of language than the abstract conception I have of intelligence, and I would be interested in having conversation w/ someone for whom the opposite is true.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#464
LLM text and images have crept into so many places, and I've experienced quite a lot of existential dread this year from it. I've definitely felt what the author wrote about here.

Another trend, starting sometime last year, has been witnessing people reading scripts on camera: YouTube, public speeches, advertisements, and podcasts where a real human is reading from a script that is LLM-generated.

In the case of smaller video creators and podcasters, I then start wondering if they really think they can pretend that this is organic human speech? Or do they think I'm stupid and will continue to consume this slop without any critical thought..? Or do they think that their audience must know, and therefore consent to it, and so it's okay? In some cases, the person reading the LLM script is literally unaware that they're reading LLM text because a human scriptwriter handed them the page. I see this with advertising copy and a few YouTube channels.

Either way, it has led to quite a few instances where I got the LLM "ick", like I'm witnessing an LLM wearing a human skin, and it grosses me out so much.

As one final note: some of us assumed in ~2023 that LLMs would help to improve technical documentation. Thus far, 3 years after that prediction, I can say definitively that we've not ushered in an era of great documentation. We've got a steadily increasing percentage of documents that cause my eyes to glaze over because I don't know if a human expert ever once vetted it.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#465
post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My view is that these sorts of things are not possible for AI in general. Though we can create things and name them “will” and “desire”. Software deals with metaphors. Your Amazon shopping cart is a metaphor of a real shopping cart. You your desktop and your file system, etc. are metaphors of real items. But we don’t mistake the metaphor for its object, even from inanimate objects to their software counterparts (shop…

> My view is that these sorts of things are not possible for AI in general.

I wonder what it would take build an artificial system that has these qualities.

> Software deals with metaphors.

This is me wondering again: what's fundamentally different between software running on a machine compared to what's happening in our brains? In both cases you have energy flow following a pattern.

It's conceivable to create a system where energy flows in a particular way.

BTW, we navigate the world of an uncountable number of particles by creating models in our heads of what we think are large things out there. Approximations are made by both artificial and biological systems.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that expression before, but I don't think it can be presented and stated so matter of factly. Where does that put bzip?

bzip is not very intelligent, true, but it does develop some model of its input. It's not like there's a linear relationship between between compression ratio and IQ or anything.

I'm not arguing that compression algorithms don't produce models of their inputs, some even use neural nets or other stochastic predictors with correction terms etc.

This doesn't address the only part I really commented on, which is the connection between intelligence and compression.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#467
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…

not having any body, continuous sensory input (except ChatGPT-live gets streaming audio), episodic memory, on-the-job learning (live weight updates), any live feedback loops (like moving a motor updates proprioperception or turning physically changes what a streaming camera sees), really hurts these models' abilities to perform tasks of the kind you're waiting for.

They are very good at instruction-following and you can teach it a new task that fits in its context and it'll learn it and do it. Go ahead, you can make up some new brand new ruleset or behavior and instruct it to follow it and it will. That's amazing.

But it won't be any better at its new behavior after an hour or ten hours or ten days. It doesn't have the kind of adaptation that we expect.

What it is able to do already is pretty amazing, but what it lacks is also a great hindrance to seeing its full capabilities. We just have to wait until research labs add these missing components.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#468
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…

Oh my god thank you. I have been trying to put into words what is so draining about pair programming with claude, and “doing creative work to impart meaning to the words” is exactly it.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#469

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…

> But that is precisely what human mathematicians do, prove new theorems by combining ones proven earlier. This is only a very very small part of what human mathematicians actually do. This is just a lack of imagination and/or self awareness on your part.

There's gotta be nicer ways of saying that.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I imagine those latter two can be engineered, no? Ultimately yes, but not in modern AI systems.

I'm in the same boat, I think some aspects can be engineered, like intention and desire. I'm really curious if it's possible to go the full distance and make AI have experience like we do.

> make AI have experience like we do.

We'll probably have to go analog for that. The only known systems that certainly can experience are mammals (with apparently analog brains).

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