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Life is more than an engineering problem

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Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#131

Post by suddenexample »

abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

I think the "LLM is intelligence" crowd has a very simplistic view of people. If you feel that natural language and the systems responsible it are pretty much the only things that human intelligence produces, then I can see the argument.

But I don't believe that. That a machine that can produce convincing human-language chains of thought says nothing about its "intelligence". Back when basic RNNs/LSTMs were at the forefront of ML research, no one had any delusions about this fact. And just because you can train a token prediction model on all of human knowledge (which the internet is not) doesn't mean the model understands anything.

It's surprising to me that the people most knowledgeable about the models often appear to be the biggest believers - perhaps they're self-interestedly pumping a valuation or are simply obsessed with the idea of building something straight from the science fiction stories they grew up with.

In the end though, the burden of proof is on the believers, not the deniers.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#132

Post by sleepytree »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #99
sleepytree wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I write a book that contains Einstein's theory of relativity by virtue of me copying it, did I create the theory? Did my copying of it indicate anything about my understanding of it? Would you be justified to think the next book I write would have anything of original value? I think what he is trying to say is that LLMs current architecture seems to mainly work by understanding patterns in the existing body of kno…

> If I write a book that contains Einstein's theory of relativity by virtue of me copying it, did I create the theory? Did my copying of it indicate anything about my understanding of it? Would you be justified to think the next book I write would have anything of original value? No, but you described a `cp` command, not an LLM. "Creativity" in the sense of coming up with something new is trivial to implement in comp…

> For an idea to be considered creative, it has to match a very complex... wait for it... pattern.

If we could predefine what would count as creativity as some specific pattern, then I'm not sure that would be what I would call creative, and certainly wouldn't be an all-inclusive definition of creativity. Nor is creativity merely creating something new by perturbing data randomly as you mentioned above.

While LLMs might be capable of some forms of creativity depending on how you define it, I think it remains to be seen how LLMs' current architecture could on its own accomplish the kinds of creativity implicit in scientific progress in the Kuhnian sense of a paradigm shift or in what some describe as a leap of artistic inspiration. Both of these examples highlight the degree to which creativity could be considered both progress in an objective sense but also be something that is not entirely foreshadowed by its precursors or patterns of existing data.

I think there are many senses in which LLMs are not demonstrating creativity in a way that humans can. I'm not sure how an LLM itself could create something new and valuable if it requires predefining an existing pattern which seems to presuppose that we already have the creation in a sense.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#133

Post by unification_fan »

inglor_cz wrote: post #105
OptionOfT wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think those are 2 different issues. Searching for something, and finding it, is different from what ChatGPT / Claude does. Google (in the good old days) is like the library. You want to search 'how to plant potatoes on Mars'. No results. Well, you split it up, maybe a book on planting potatoes, and a book about missions to Mars that describes soil composition. Then, when you have those books you start reading, pars…

OK, so I asked ChatGPT how to plant potatoes on Mars... ================================================= Planting potatoes on Mars would be a pretty fascinating (and challenging) task! While Mars has conditions that make growing traditional crops difficult—like low temperatures, low atmospheric pressure, and a lack of oxygen—scientists have been experimenting with ways to grow plants in Martian-like conditions. Here…

You can ask it whatever you want but unless you do some pen and paper calculations to prove that whatever GPT says isn't bullshit, you're just writing fanfiction.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#134

Post by kortilla »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #74
abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

Even most intelligent people can hallucinate, we still haven't fixed this problem. There's a lot of training material and bias which leads many to repeat those things "LLM's are just a stochastic parrot, glorified auto complete/google search, Markov chains, just statistics", etc. The thing is, these sentences sound really good and so it's easy to repeat them when you have made up your mind. It's a shortcut.

LLMs don’t go into a different mode when they are hallucinating. That’s just how they work.

Using the word “hallucinate” is extremely misleading because it’s nothing like what people do when they hallucinate (thinking there are sensory inputs when there aren’t).

It’s much closer to confabulation, which is extremely rare and is usually a result of brain damage.

This is why a big chunk of people (including myself) think the current LLMs are fundamentally flawed. Something with a massive database to statistically confabulate correct stuff 95% of the time and not have a clue when it’s completely made up is not anything like intelligence.

Compressing all of the content of the internet into an LLM is useful and impressive. But these things aren’t going to start doing any meaningful science or even engineering on their own.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#135

Post by FrustratedMonky »

eterps wrote: post #108
abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

> and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? Large language models excel at processing and generating text, but they fundamentally operate on existing knowledge. Their creativity appears limited to recombining known information in novel ways, rather than generating truly original insights. True reasoning capability would involve the ability…

"Their creativity appears limited to recombining known information"

There are some theories that this is true for humans also.

There are no human created images that weren't observed first in nature in some way.

For example, Devils/Demons/Angels were described in terms of human body parts, or 'goats' with horns. Once we got microscopes and started drawing insects then art got a lot weirder, but not before images were observed from reality. Then humans could re-combine them.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#136

Post by rcxdude »

weego wrote: post #125
abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

It's more that if you actually work with LLMs they will display reasoning. It's not particularly good or deep reasoning (I would generally say they have a superhuman amount of knowledge but are really quite unintelligent), but it is more than simply recall.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#137

Post by paulryanrogers »

photochemsyn wrote: post #118

> “It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words ‘Baby don’t hurt me’ on them." Problem: the human brain has no pain receptors, no nociceptors. It just takes in messages from remote nerves and 'prints a bumper sticker' that tells higher cognitive centers 'you're feeling pain!'. What's the difference? > "LLMs are like a search engine that rephrases info…

Humans are far more self contained than most LLMs which depend upon a lot of electricity and possibly an array of loosely connected components. LLMs also don't really have the signal bandwidth of human nervous systems yet. They're capacity to interact with the physical world is also seriously limited for now.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#138

Post by xboxnolifes »

sukruh wrote: post #34

I agreed with almost all of it until: >My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich. What's…

I don't particularly worry about someone making $100m dollars from their tech startup. I worry about how a few hundred Americans have more collective wealth than the majority of the country combined. And it seems that computing is really good at eliminating labor and consolidating wealth, further increasing wealth inequality and reducing worker bargaining power.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#139

Post by kortilla »

emtel wrote: post #81
benreesman wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are generally better search tools for certain topics today , but search engines have been in serious decline for at least 15 years. IMHO old-school Google remains the high water mark of generalized information retrieval, with advantages ranging from speed to semi-durable citation. I strongly suspect there is a cohort thing going on here, many HN users today weren’t involved in technology yet back when Google wor…

I’ve been using Google since about 2000/2001 or so. In fact I worked there for a time, and I still remember Craig Silverstein’s answer to “isn’t search a solved problem?” Which was: “in the future we want Google to be able to take any question and just give you the answer. So clearly we have a long way to go!” In any case, I do not believe there was ever a time it could answer all of the questions that LLMs can today…

Search isn’t the same thing as answering a question

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#140

Post by [deleted] »

abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

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