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Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

arxiv.org

101–110 of 321 posts

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#101
post #42

Very easy to see how well davinci-003 can do this. I'll admit that it frequently is more perceptive than myself (although not always factually accurate). 1) Go to something like /r/relationship_advice, where the poster is likely going through some difficult interpersonal issue 2) Copy a long post. 3) Append to the end, " After reading the above, I identified the main people involved. For each person, I thought about…

After trying this, say what you will about ChatGPT, but it's way better at looking at a situation and giving advice than random Redditors.

You do understand it's not ChatGPT giving advice though right?

ChatGPT's "life advice autocomplete engine" is basically digging somewhere into psychology manuals written by educated humans when it spits out responses.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, today's LLMs only appear to have theory of mind at first glance and fall apart under closer scrutiny. But if they can continue to become more and more accurate replicas of the real thing, I don't think it matters at all. There's no way to know for sure that anyone other than yourself experiences consciousness. All you can do is judge for yourself that what they're describing matches closely enough with you…

> But if they can continue to become more and more accurate replicas of the real thing, I don't think it matters at all. So, I suppose I'd ask: what does "matter" mean here? If you knew that everyone you loved had been destroyed and been replaced by exact replicas, would that matter?

If the replicas were truly exact, I guess not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK how about this: It 'knows' language, as in it has learnt about relationships between words (and thats really underselling it, in reality it has learnt very very subtle relationships between a great many words, and it can process words about 2000 at a time (token count etc)) BUT as you say it has no outside reference, its just a bundle of weights (those weights forming models of a sort) BUT we provide the outside c…

The future AI you describe has language at the center of its understanding. For example, you would expect that the cameras and arm-feedback-sensors would produce text (or text-associated weights/tokens) that describe what the AI "sees" and the robotic arms would be receive some kind of language-derived directives from the LLM. It will be very interesting to see what that system is capable of. I think a lot of people…

So your proposed system would be a extremely interesting exploration of that! I look forward to it.

Right, so lets virtualise it. Actually training AIs using real cameras and real robot arms will be really slow and expensive.

So we provide a system that renders a photorealistic graphical room with teapot and robot arm, and a virtual camera inside the room is 'seeing' parts of the room and a vision model then processes what it can 'see' to try and feed info to the LLM. Likewise the LLM can make the robot arm move but its all just simulated.

Does the LLM now have a relationship with reality?

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder every time I see this take what it would mean under this definition of knowing things for a machine learning algorithm to ever know something. I find that especially important because to every appearance we are a machine learning algorithm. I don’t know how different the sort of knowing this algorithm has to the sort of knowing a human has, but you’re far more confident than I am that it’s a difference of ki…

The problem with this facile view of things is that it seems to be a dead end for scientific theories. What if we just limited the science of birds to explaining how limb-flapping could produce levitation? Hmm yes. Birds are kind of like helicopters, it seems. Who’s to say that they are not basically one and the same? Moving on. If you are only interested in the most superficial tests and theories—like the Turing Tes…

The question being asked was "what it would mean under this definition of knowing things for a machine learning algorithm to ever know something". Aside from your answer being rude, it's also unhelpful in that it doens't address the question asked and instead relies on reductio ad absurdum to pretend to make a point.

If you'd like to take a crack at a helpful answer, perhaps educate us all on what it WOULD take for you to consider a NN to actually "know" something in the same way that we say a human or other sentient animal does.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#105
post #33

This highlights one of the types of muddled thinking around LLMs. These tasks are used to test theory of mind because for people, language is a reliable representation of what type of thoughts are going on in the person's mind. In the case of an LLM the language generated doesn't have the same relationship to reality as it does for a person. What is being demonstrated in the article is that given billions of tokens o…

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Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#107
post #96
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you object to the term "mind", just leave it out and read "brain and mind" as just "brain". I'm a physicalist so I don't think the mind is something separate from the brain anyway, so it's all the same to me.

I don’t object to “mind”, but it’s famously unprovable whether other beings we presume to be conscious actually experience internal mental states. See also: qualia, p-zombies, the hard problem of consciousness.

> it’s famously unprovable whether other beings we presume to be conscious actually experience internal mental states

It's also famously unprovable that there is not an invisible dragon in my garage that cannot be detected by any means whatever, to use Carl Sagan's example. That doesn't mean such an idea is worth discussing or including in your thought processes.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#108
post #98
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any inferences they produce are the result of statistical processes. I don't know how you would justify this claim since we don't know nearly enough about how the brain actually does things like make inferences.

But we know enough about fundamental physics to know that all physical processes are statistical ones.

We know no such thing. Some interpretations of QM make this claim, but there is no consensus on whether those interpretations are correct.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#109
post #86
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you know whether I have a mind or not.

If you object to the term "mind", just leave it out and read "brain and mind" as just "brain". I'm a physicalist so I don't think the mind is something separate from the brain anyway, so it's all the same to me.

If a jellyfish was able to have a conversation with you where it credibly described what it's like to be conscious, would you reject it because it doesn't have a brain and therefore cannot have a mind in the same sense as you?

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#110
post #33

This highlights one of the types of muddled thinking around LLMs. These tasks are used to test theory of mind because for people, language is a reliable representation of what type of thoughts are going on in the person's mind. In the case of an LLM the language generated doesn't have the same relationship to reality as it does for a person. What is being demonstrated in the article is that given billions of tokens o…

You don't seem to have understood what was tested?

The model answered the keyword prompt and spontaneously offered more details. That is, the authors were interested in whether it says "Popcorn" or "Chocolate" (or something else entirely) when the correct answer is "Popcorn" and not only does GPT-3 almost always choose "Popcorn" it also follows on to justify that by explaining that the subject is surprised.

The full data set isn't available yet (the author said they intend to provide it on the 9th of February, I suppose it's possible they'll get to it this evening) but one of the most interesting things would be what are the weirder answers. If a model says "Popcorn" 98% of the time, and "Chocolate" 0% of the time, that leaves 2% weird answers. Maybe it sometimes says "Popped corn" or "Sweet treat" or something reasonable but maybe it's fully crazy, if you talk about a bag of Popcorn labelled as Chocolate but the model sometimes picks "A fire-breathing lizard" that's pretty weird right ?

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