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LLMs understand nullability

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Re: LLMs understand nullability

#101

Post by shafyy »

waldrews wrote: post #85
lsy wrote: post #74

The article puts scare quotes around "understand" etc. to try to head off critiques around the lack of precision or scientific language, but I think this is a really good example of where casual use of these terms can get pretty misleading. Because code LLMs have been trained on the syntactic form of the program and not its execution, it's not correct — even if the correlation between variable annotations and request…

I was going to say "so you believe the LLM's don't have the capacity to understand" but then I realized that the precise language would be something like "the presence of photons in this human's retinas in patterns encoding statements about LLM's having understanding correlates to the activation of neuron signaling chains corresponding to, and emission of, muscle activations engaging keyboard switches, which produce…

Countering the argument that LLMs are just gloriefied probability machines and do not undertand or think with "how do you know humans are not the same" has been the biggest achievement of AI hypemen (and yes, it's mostly men).

Of course, now you can say "how do you know that our brains are not just efficient computers that run LLMs", but I feel like the onus of proof lies on the makers of this claim, not on the other side.

It is very likely that human intelligence is not just autocomplete on crack, given all we know about neuroscience so far.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#102

Post by hatthew »

lsy wrote: post #74

The article puts scare quotes around "understand" etc. to try to head off critiques around the lack of precision or scientific language, but I think this is a really good example of where casual use of these terms can get pretty misleading. Because code LLMs have been trained on the syntactic form of the program and not its execution, it's not correct — even if the correlation between variable annotations and request…

I am slowly coming around to the idea that nobody should ever use the word "understand" in relation to LLMs, simply because everyone has their own definition of "understand", and many of these definitions disagree, and people tend to treat their definition as axiomatic. I have yet to see any productive discussion happen once anyone disagrees on the definition of "understand".

So, what word would you propose we use to mean "an LLM's ability (or lack thereof) to output generally correct sentences about the topic at hand"?

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#103

Post by nomonnai »

hatthew wrote: post #102
lsy wrote: post #74

The article puts scare quotes around "understand" etc. to try to head off critiques around the lack of precision or scientific language, but I think this is a really good example of where casual use of these terms can get pretty misleading. Because code LLMs have been trained on the syntactic form of the program and not its execution, it's not correct — even if the correlation between variable annotations and request…

I am slowly coming around to the idea that nobody should ever use the word "understand" in relation to LLMs, simply because everyone has their own definition of "understand", and many of these definitions disagree, and people tend to treat their definition as axiomatic. I have yet to see any productive discussion happen once anyone disagrees on the definition of "understand". So, what word would you propose we use to…

It's a prediction of what humans have frequently produced in similar situations.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#104

Post by kubav027 »

uh_uh wrote: post #81
lsy wrote: post #74

The article puts scare quotes around "understand" etc. to try to head off critiques around the lack of precision or scientific language, but I think this is a really good example of where casual use of these terms can get pretty misleading. Because code LLMs have been trained on the syntactic form of the program and not its execution, it's not correct — even if the correlation between variable annotations and request…

We don't really have a clue what they are and aren't capable of. Prior to the LLM-boom, many people – and I include myself in this – thought it'd be impossible to get to the level of capability we have now purely from statistical methods and here we are. If you have a strong theory that proves some bounds on LLM-capability, then please put it forward. In the absence of that, your sceptical attitude is just as sus as…

LLM also have no idea what it is capable of. This feels like difference to humans. Having some understanding of the problem also means knowing or "feeling" the limits of that understanding.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#105

Post by chihuahua »

Baeocystin wrote: post #96
uh_uh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't really have a clue what they are and aren't capable of. Prior to the LLM-boom, many people – and I include myself in this – thought it'd be impossible to get to the level of capability we have now purely from statistical methods and here we are. If you have a strong theory that proves some bounds on LLM-capability, then please put it forward. In the absence of that, your sceptical attitude is just as sus as…

I majored in CogSci at UCSD in the 90's. I've been interested and active in the machine learning world for decades. The LLM boom took me completely and utterly by surprise, continues to do so, and frankly I am most mystified by the folks who downplay it. These giant matrixes are already so far beyond what we thought was (relatively) easily achievable that even if progress stopped tomorrow, we'd have years of work to…

The funny thing is that 1/3 of people think LLMs are dumb and will never amount to anything. Another third think that it's already too late to prevent the rise of superhuman AGI that will destroy humanity, and are calling for airstrikes on any data center that does not submit to their luddite rules. And the last third use LLMs for writing small pieces of code.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#106

Post by codedokode »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #53
mubou wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't approximate human thought , though. They approximate language . That's it. Please, I'm begging you, go read some papers and watch some videos about machine learning and how LLMs actually work. It is not "thinking." I fully realize neural networks can approximate human thought -- but we are not there yet, and when we do get there, it will be something that is not an LLM, because an LLM is not capable of tha…

> it will be something that is not an LLM I think it will be very similar in architecture. Artificial neural networks already are approximating how neurons in a brain work, it's just at a scale that's several orders of magnitude smaller. Our limiting factor for reaching brain-like intelligence via ANN is probably more of a hardware limitation. We would need over 100 TB to store the weights for the neurons, not to men…

> not to mention the ridiculous amount of compute to run it.

How does the brain computes the weights then? Or maybe your assumption than brain is equivalent to a mathematical NN is wrong?

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#107

Post by aSanchezStern »

btown wrote: post #34

There seems to be a typo in OP's "Visualizing Our Results" - but things make perfect sense if red is non-nullable, green is nullable. I'd be really curious to see where the "attention" heads of the LLM look when evaluating the nullability of any given token. Does just it trust the Optional[int] return type signature of the function, or does it also skim through the function contents to understand whether that's corre…

Thanks for pointing that out, it's fixed now.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#108

Post by dambi0 »

cess11 wrote: post #73
empath75 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way you can tell whether a human understands something other than by asking them a question and judging their answer? Nobody interrogates each other's internal states when judging whether someone understands a topic. All we can judge it based on are the words they produce or the actions they take in response to a situation. The way that systems or people arrive at a response is sort of an implementation…

No, most people absolutely use non-linguistic, involuntary cues when judging the responses of other people. To not do that is commonly associated with things like being on the spectrum or cognitive deficiencies.

The fact we have labels for communication problems caused by failure to understand non-verbal cues doesn’t tell us that non-verbal cues are necessary for understanding

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#109

Post by mlinhares »

shafyy wrote: post #101
waldrews wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say "so you believe the LLM's don't have the capacity to understand" but then I realized that the precise language would be something like "the presence of photons in this human's retinas in patterns encoding statements about LLM's having understanding correlates to the activation of neuron signaling chains corresponding to, and emission of, muscle activations engaging keyboard switches, which produce…

Countering the argument that LLMs are just gloriefied probability machines and do not undertand or think with "how do you know humans are not the same" has been the biggest achievement of AI hypemen (and yes, it's mostly men). Of course, now you can say "how do you know that our brains are not just efficient computers that run LLMs", but I feel like the onus of proof lies on the makers of this claim, not on the other…

BuT iT CoUlD Be, cAn YoU PrOvE ThAT IT is NOt?

I'm having a great experience using Cursor, but i don't feel like trying to overhype it, it just makes me tired to see all this hype. Its a great tool, makes me more productive, nothing beyond that.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#110

Post by 6510 »

arkh wrote: post #50
wongarsu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We spent 40 years moving the goal posts on what constitutes AI. Now we seem to have found an AI worthy of that title and instead start moving the goal posts on "consciousness", "understanding" and "intelligence".

The original meaning of mechanical Turk is about a chess hoax and how it managed to make people think it was a thinking machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk The current LLM anthropomorphism may soon be known as the silicon Turk. Managing to make people think they're AI.

The mechanical Turk did something truly magical. Everyone stopped moaning that automation was impossible because most machines (while some absurdly complex) were many orders of magnitude simpler than chess.

The initial LLMs simply lied about everything. If you happened to know something it was rather shocking but for topics you knew nothing about you got a rather convincing answer. Then the arms race begun and now the lies are so convincing we are at viable robot overlords.

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