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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#101

Post by imposter »

mellosouls wrote: post #100
kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

This read like poetry to me It's terrific, but the poetry is from the original it links to, in case you didn't realise. It's a brilliant and timely update though. Aside, there are various recorded versions including video on YouTube but this is my favourite, a radio play: They're Made Out of Meat https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/studio/segments/168264-...

[dead]

Re: They’re made out of weights

#102

Post by zkmon »

teiferer wrote: post #92
zkmon wrote: post #88

They are made out of data bits (memory) and switching bits (transistors/compute). Bits are made out of electric voltage and no voltage. Voltage is made out of flow of positive electric charges. Charges are made out of quarks ...

I have never thought of such a distinction between "bits" into "data bits" and "switching bits". From a circuit perspective that makes kinda sense, but from the abstract "bit" perspective, the "switching bit" is a mechanism that operates on bits which in the end are also data. In other words there is only one type of bit: the data bit, and the switching comes on top of it.

I was referring to transistor base bit - the way it 'switches' the circuit on/off. That bit is the primordial creator of 'logic', IF branching, compute and the intelligence.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#103

Post by phire »

noosphr wrote: post #4

It's not often I see something that's fractally wrong but here we are. There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer. There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 The point of the original sh…

The tokeniser is not a dictionary. It doesn't provide definitions, or give the LLM any kind of mapping at all.

At best, it's a wordlist. It gives the LLM some idea of what humans consider to be common words. But it doesn't tell the LLM anything at all about those words. And it's not even comprehensive, many words map to multiple tokens. Nor is it exclusively words, some of those tokens are punctuation, or modifiers, or control tokens. On multimodal LLMs, some of the tokens actually represent image and audio data.

The LLM doesn't get informed about any of this up front, it has to learn what every single token means from context.

You are technically right, that it's something in an LLM that's not weights; But it's not that structured. And really it's only there so the LLM can interact with the outside world.

> There are grammar rules

There is no dedicated "grammar rule" structure in the LLM or the tokeniser. It has to learn them all from context, they get encoded as part of the 80 layers of weights.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#104

Post by fc417fc802 »

vkazanov wrote: post #70
bulbar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be sure: The "neurons" in today's AI have nothing to do whatsoever with real neurons. What we can do is simulate very simple brains by simulating relatively few neurons as they appear in worms. In this sense we are multiple magnitudes away where the increasing complexity implies exponential increasing difficulty. I would think we are so far away that there will be unknown unknowns we encounter on the way.

Yes, physically absolutely nothing. But conceptually they seem to to form this very generic function from inputs to outputs that neurons also form.

Agree and add, don't confuse the substrate for the computation. Of course it's also clear that we don't quite have a full and definite picture of what the computation consists of in the case of a biological brain as evidenced by our continued failure to accurately simulate even the simplest of organisms.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#105

Post by shepherdjerred »

samrus wrote: post #39

I have to agree. It is messed up that transformers can just talk, and it been pretty normalized. We are only talking about the impact they will have and whether they can do what people say they can, but we arent talking about how crazy it is that they can talk

LLMs have really changed the world. I didn’t think something like then would be possible in my lifetime

Re: They’re made out of weights

#106

Post by clort »

eszed wrote: post #15
kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

Yeah, I currently suspect that consciousness is an emergent property. I read elsewhere (it's somewhere in my HN history, I'm sure) that the biggest compute we can currently muster is something like three or four magnitudes away from the number of neurons / connections (or their analog) that our brains have, so it may be a while until we can expect to see it in our machines. But, if the emergent phenomenon hypothesis…

Surely the number of neurons is not the whole story. Human brains have approximately 86 billion and are almost definitely conscious, but there are many other animals with a lot fewer (gorilla: 34 billion, dog: 2-3 billion, guinea pig: 240 million) which appear to be conscious also.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

Re: They’re made out of weights

#107

Post by fc417fc802 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #67
bulbar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the alternative is that our brain, somehow, is connected to some metaphysical aspect of reality which is what most religions believe.

Another alternative is that consciousness exists on the map, and unfortunately we're confusing that with the territory.

Aren't you saying the same thing? It seems like the metaphysical and the map would be analogous here.

Of course both of those suffer from the recursive problem of just kicking the can one level up. But I guess that's fundamentally unsolvable so who cares.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#108

Post by maxbond »

noosphr wrote: post #4

It's not often I see something that's fractally wrong but here we are. There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer. There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 The point of the original sh…

The story is not about how they function, it's about how we relate to them.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#109

Post by awesome_dude »

kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

Wait, aren't I the universe experiencing time as a lowly worker in cubicle 4C?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#110

Post by [deleted] »

noosphr wrote: post #4

It's not often I see something that's fractally wrong but here we are. There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer. There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 The point of the original sh…

[deleted]
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