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Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Interview with gwern

#111

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

newmanpo wrote: post #104
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #84

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, l…

I take the Feynman view here; vain memory tricks are not themselves net new production, so just look known things up in the book. Appreciate the diversity in the effort, but engineering is making things people can use without having to know it all. Far more interesting endeavor than being a human Google search engine.

No, look. If a student (I'm not a professor, just a post-doc) doesn't know this stuff, I'll point them to the book so they can look it up, and move on. But the student will not tell me I'm "not even wrong" with the arrogance of fifty cardinals while at the same time pretending to be an expert [1]. It's OK to not know, it's OK to not know that you don't know, but arrogant ignorance is not a good look on anyone.

And there's a limit to what you need to look up in a book. The limit moves further up the more you work with a certain kind of tool or study a certain kind of knowledge. I have to look up trigonometry every single time I need it because I only use it sparingly. I don't need to look up SLD-Resolution, which is my main subject. How much would Feynman need to look up when debating physics?

So when someone like Feynman talks about physics, you listen carefully because you know they know their shit and a certain kind of nerd deeply appreciates deep knowledge. When someone elbows themselves in the limelight and demands everyone treats them as an expert, but they don't know the basics, what do you conclude? I conclude that they're pretending to know a bunch of stuff they don't know.

________________

[1] ... some do. But they're students so it's OK, they're just excited to have learned so much and don't yet know how much they don't. You explain the mistake, point them to the book, and move on.

Re: Interview with gwern

#112

Post by dilap »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #84

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, l…

Regarding your linked comment, my takeaway is that the very theoretical task of being able to recognize an infinite language isn't very relevent to the non-formal, intuitive idea of "intelligence"

Transformers can easily intellectually understand a^nb^n, even though they couldn't recognize whether an arbitrarily long string is a member of the language -- a restriction humans share!, since eventually a human, too, would lose track of the count, for a long enough string.

Re: Interview with gwern

#113

Post by keiferski »

mapt wrote: post #83
keiferski wrote: post #56

By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren't writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you. These AI predictions never, ever seem to factor in how actu…

With AI you need to think, long and hard, about the concept (borrowed from cryptography), "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be". Humanity is pinning its future on the thought that we will hit intractable information-theoretic limitations which provide some sort of diminishing returns on performance before a hard takeoff, but the idea that the currently demonstrated methods are high up on some…

I don’t disagree that it’ll change a lot of things in society.

But that isn’t the claim being made, which is that some sort of AI god is being constructed which will develop entirely without the influence of how real human beings actually act. This to me is basically just sci-fi, and it’s frankly kind of embarrassing that it’s taken so seriously.

Re: Interview with gwern

#114

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

dilap wrote: post #112
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #84

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, l…

Regarding your linked comment, my takeaway is that the very theoretical task of being able to recognize an infinite language isn't very relevent to the non-formal, intuitive idea of "intelligence" Transformers can easily intellectually understand a^nb^n, even though they couldn't recognize whether an arbitrarily long string is a member of the language -- a restriction humans share!, since eventually a human, too, wou…

I don't know what "intellectually understand" means in the context of Transformers. My older comment was about the ability of neural nets to learn automata from examples, a standard measure of the learning ability of a machine learning system. I link to a paper below where Transformers and RNNs are compared on their ability to learn automata along the entire Chomsky hierarchy and as other work has also shown, they don't do that well (although there are some surprising surprises).

>> Regarding your linked comment, my takeaway is that the very theoretical task of being able to recognize an infinite language isn't very relevent to the non-formal, intuitive idea of "intelligence"

That depends on who you ask. My view is that automata are relevant to computation and that's why we study them in computer science. If we were biologists, we would study beetles. The question is whether computation , as we understand it on the basis of computer science, has anything to do with intelligence. I think it does, but that it's not the whole shebang. There is a long debate on that in AI and the cognitive sciences and the jury is still out, despite what many of the people working on LLMs seem to believe.

Re: Interview with gwern

#115

Post by newmanpo »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #111
newmanpo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take the Feynman view here; vain memory tricks are not themselves net new production, so just look known things up in the book. Appreciate the diversity in the effort, but engineering is making things people can use without having to know it all. Far more interesting endeavor than being a human Google search engine.

No, look. If a student (I'm not a professor, just a post-doc) doesn't know this stuff, I'll point them to the book so they can look it up, and move on. But the student will not tell me I'm "not even wrong" with the arrogance of fifty cardinals while at the same time pretending to be an expert [1]. It's OK to not know, it's OK to not know that you don't know, but arrogant ignorance is not a good look on anyone. And th…

Ok so you’re arrogantly practicing English writing now and producing little more than a philosophy that just zigs around to maintain your narrative.

“Debating physics” in academia is little more than reciting preferred symbolic logic. The map is not the terrain; to borrow from Feynman again, who says in his lectures it’s not good to get hung up on such stuff. So you’re just making this about rhetorical competition, boring gamesmanship. Which like I said, isn’t the point of engineering. Dialectics don’t ship, they keep professors employed though.

Whichever way it’s written, physics still seems to work. So the value of STEM is more about the application than the knowing.

Re: Interview with gwern

#116

Post by raverbashing »

dilap wrote: post #112
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #84

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, l…

Regarding your linked comment, my takeaway is that the very theoretical task of being able to recognize an infinite language isn't very relevent to the non-formal, intuitive idea of "intelligence" Transformers can easily intellectually understand a^nb^n, even though they couldn't recognize whether an arbitrarily long string is a member of the language -- a restriction humans share!, since eventually a human, too, wou…

I agree with your assessment

Yes, LLMs are bad at this. A similar example: SAT solvers can't solve the pigeonhole problem without getting into a loop

It is an exceptional case that requires "metathinking" maybe, rather than a showstopper issue

(can't seem to be able to write the grammar name, the original comment from the discussion had it)

Re: Interview with gwern

#117

Post by newmanpo »

newmanpo wrote: post #104
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #84

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, l…

I take the Feynman view here; vain memory tricks are not themselves net new production, so just look known things up in the book. Appreciate the diversity in the effort, but engineering is making things people can use without having to know it all. Far more interesting endeavor than being a human Google search engine.

[flagged]

Re: Interview with gwern

#118

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #111
newmanpo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take the Feynman view here; vain memory tricks are not themselves net new production, so just look known things up in the book. Appreciate the diversity in the effort, but engineering is making things people can use without having to know it all. Far more interesting endeavor than being a human Google search engine.

No, look. If a student (I'm not a professor, just a post-doc) doesn't know this stuff, I'll point them to the book so they can look it up, and move on. But the student will not tell me I'm "not even wrong" with the arrogance of fifty cardinals while at the same time pretending to be an expert [1]. It's OK to not know, it's OK to not know that you don't know, but arrogant ignorance is not a good look on anyone. And th…

@newmanpo Your comment is [dead] so I can't directly reply to it, but you're assuming thing about me that are wrong. I say above I'm a post-doc. You should understand what this means: I'm the workhorse in an academic research lab where I'm expected to make stuff work, and then write papers about it. I write code and tell computers when to jump. I'm not a philosopher by any stretch of the term and just to be clear, a scientist is not a philosopher (not any more).

Edit: dude, come on. That's no way to have a debate. Other times I'm the one who gets all the downvotes. You gotta soldier on through it and say your thing anyway. Robust criticism is great but being prissy about downvotes just makes HN downvote you more.

Re: Interview with gwern

#119

Post by bmc7505 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #84

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, l…

FWIW, I’ve had a very similar encounter with another famous AI influencer who started lecturing me on fake automata theory that any CS undergrad would have picked up on. 140k+ followers, featured on the all the big podcasts (Lex, MLST). I never corrected him but made a mental note not to trust the guy.

Re: Interview with gwern

#120

Post by GistNoesis »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #101
nocobot wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it really? this is the most common example for context free languages and something most first year CS students will be familiar with. totally agree that you can be a great engineer and not be familiar with it, but seems weird for an expert in the field to confidently make wrong statements about this.

Thanks, that's what I meant. a^nb^n is a standard test of learnability. That stuff is still absolutely relevant, btw. Some DL people like to dismiss it as irrelevant but that's just because they lack the background to appreciate why it matters. Also: the arrogance of youth (hey I've already been a postdoc for a year, I'm ancient). Here's a recent paper on Neural Networks and the Chomsky Hierarchy that tests RNNs and…

a^nb^n can definitely be expressed and recognized with a transformer.

A transformer (with relative invariant positional embedding) has full context so can see the whole sequence. It just has to count and compare.

To convince yourself, construct the weights manually.

First layer :

zeros the character which are equal to the previous character.

Second layer :

Build a feature to detect and extract the position embedding of the first a. a second feature to detect and extract the position embedding of the last a, a third feature to detect and extract the position embedding of the first b, a fourth feature to detect and extract the position embedding of the last b,

Third layer :

on top that check whether (second feature - first feature) == (fourth feature - third feature).

The paper doesn't distinguish between what is the expressive capability of the model, and the finding the optimum of the model, aka the training procedure.

If you train by only showing example with varying n, there probably isn't inductive bias to make it converge naturally towards the optimal solution you can construct by hand. But you can probably train multiple formal languages simultaneously, to make the counting feature emerge from the data.

You can't deduce much from negative results in research beside it requiring more work.

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