[deleted]
Bag of words, have mercy on us
11–20 of 362 posts
Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us
#12Give it time. The first iPhone sucked compared to the Nokia/Blackberry flagships of the day. No 3G support, couldn't copy/paste, no apps, no GPS, crappy camera, quick price drops, negligible sales in the overall market. https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
The first VHS sucked when compared to Beta video
And it never got better, the superior technology lost, and the war was won through content deals.
Lesson: Technology improvements aren't guaranteed.
Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us
#13Nice essay but when I read this > But we don’t go to baseball games, spelling bees, and Taylor Swift concerts for the speed of the balls, the accuracy of the spelling, or the pureness of the pitch. We go because we care about humans doing those things. My first thought was does anyone want to _watch_ me programming?
I mean, I like to watch Gordon Ramsey... not cook, but have very strong discussions with those that dare to fail his standards...
Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us
#14Give it time. The first iPhone sucked compared to the Nokia/Blackberry flagships of the day. No 3G support, couldn't copy/paste, no apps, no GPS, crappy camera, quick price drops, negligible sales in the overall market. https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
The first VHS sucked when compared to Beta video And it never got better, the superior technology lost, and the war was won through content deals. Lesson: Technology improvements aren't guaranteed.
Your analogy makes no sense. VHS spawned the entire home market, which went through multiple quality upgrades well above beta. It would only make sense if in 2025 we were using vhs everywhere and that the current state of the art for LLMs is all there ever is.
Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us
#15Nice essay but when I read this > But we don’t go to baseball games, spelling bees, and Taylor Swift concerts for the speed of the balls, the accuracy of the spelling, or the pureness of the pitch. We go because we care about humans doing those things. My first thought was does anyone want to _watch_ me programming?
I vaguely remember a site where you could watch random people live streaming their programming environment, but I think twitch ate it, or maybe it was twitch -- not sure, but was interesting
[added] It was livecoding.tv - circa 2015 https://hackupstate.medium.com/road-to-code-livecoding-tv-e7...
Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us
#16Give it time. The first iPhone sucked compared to the Nokia/Blackberry flagships of the day. No 3G support, couldn't copy/paste, no apps, no GPS, crappy camera, quick price drops, negligible sales in the overall market. https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
The first VHS sucked when compared to Beta video And it never got better, the superior technology lost, and the war was won through content deals. Lesson: Technology improvements aren't guaranteed.
Beta was not the superior technology, and it lost for very good reasons.
Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us
#17Nice essay but when I read this > But we don’t go to baseball games, spelling bees, and Taylor Swift concerts for the speed of the balls, the accuracy of the spelling, or the pureness of the pitch. We go because we care about humans doing those things. My first thought was does anyone want to _watch_ me programming?
No, but watching a novelist at work is boring, and yet people like books that are written by humans because they speak to the condition of the human who wrote it. Let us not forget the old saw from SICP, “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” I feel a number of people in the industry today fail to live by that maxim.
That old saw is patently false.
Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us
#18Every day I see people treat gen AI like a thinking human, Dijkstra's attitudes about anthropomorphizing computers is vindicated even more. That said, I think the author's use of "bag of words" here is a mistake. Not only does it have a real meaning in a similar area as LLMs, but I don't think the metaphor explains anything. Gen AI tricks laypeople into treating its token inferences as "thinking" because it is traine…
Yea bag of words isn’t helpful at all. I really do think that “superpowered sentence completion” is the best description. Not only is it reasonably accurate it is understandable, everyone has seen autocomplete function, and it’s useful. I don’t know how to “use” a bag of words. I do know how to use sentence completion. It also helps explains why context matters.
Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us
#19I am unsure myself whether we should regard LLMs as mere token-predicting automatons or as some new kind of incipient intelligence. Despite their origins as statistical parrots, the interpretability research from Anthropic [1] suggests that structures corresponding to meaning do exist inside those bundles of numbers and that there are signs of activity within those bundles of numbers that seem analogous to thought.
That said, I was struck by a recent interview with Anthropic’s Amanda Askell [2]. When she talks, she anthropomorphizes LLMs constantly. A few examples:
“I don't have all the answers of how should models feel about past model deprecation, about their own identity, but I do want to try and help models figure that out and then to at least know that we care about it and are thinking about it.”
“If you go into the depths of the model and you find some deep-seated insecurity, then that's really valuable.”
“... that could lead to models almost feeling afraid that they're gonna do the wrong thing or are very self-critical or feeling like humans are going to behave negatively towards them.”
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/team/interpretability
Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us
#20I am unsure myself whether we should regard LLMs as mere token-predicting automatons or as some new kind of incipient intelligence. Despite their origins as statistical parrots, the interpretability research from Anthropic [1] suggests that structures corresponding to meaning do exist inside those bundles of numbers and that there are signs of activity within those bundles of numbers that seem analogous to thought. T…
>research from Anthropic [1] suggests that structures corresponding to meaning exist inside those bundles of numbers and that there are signs of activity within those bundles of numbers that seem analogous to thought.
Can you give some concrete examples? The link you provided is kind of opaque
>Amanda Askell [2]. When she talks, she anthropomorphizes LLMs constantly.
She is a philosopher by trade and she describes her job (model alignment) as literally to ensure models "have good character traits." I imagine that explains a lot