Hey, it's not just weights! It's biases too!
They’re made out of weights
131–140 of 739 posts
Re: They’re made out of weights
#132It must have been kind of incredible early on to be exploring this tech and you’re suddenly getting what look like sentences.
I mean, Blake Lemoine went crazy
Re: They’re made out of weights
#133Re: They’re made out of weights
#134It'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,…
I see people give too much importance to specific engineering design choices of the current generation of LLMs. Tokenizer is not an absolutely essential part of the system. It’s just and adapter for text input/output. It can be eliminated completely and model can use bytes directly.
I think the short story captures this well. Weights (connections) are the essential and philosophically important part. They do the thinking, memory, singing etc.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I feel like someone confusing the map and territory can exist without needing to invoke the metaphysical. Maybe, I'm misunderstanding tho
If something happens "on the map" doesn't that imply the map to exist and be some sort of metaphysical thing? As opposed to a purely theoretical construction.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#136This 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…
For obvious survival reasons we evolved to have sensory/cognitive access to our own activity, self-monitoring, and self-modeling ourselves. The self-modeling, is in such a tight loop, it melds "ourselves" and our model of ourselves, our thinking and choices, and experience of our thinking and choices, into one component. Like you can't analyze half a wheel of a bicycle and be talking about the same thing. This awaren…
I think this is exactly it, but let me ask another question (which is not rhetorical, I really don't know). Does the fact that one can describe what consciousness is and where it came from in humans help them to detect it in non-human and/or non-biological entities?
Re: They’re made out of weights
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not especially. Depending on where you set your standards for "holding a conversation" you can satisfy the requirement with a classical markov chatterbot, a well-trained parrot, a copy of Eliza, or a telemarketer flowchart drawn on a sheet of paper. Only the markov bot is made out of "weights" in the sense of a statistical model. Parrots are intelligent animals, albeit with a limited capacity for vocabulary and synta…
Weights hold a better conversation at this point than the overwhelming majority of humans.
"I am more comfortable speaking to an LLM than a person" is something that should make you reassess yourself, not dismiss the rest of humanity.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#138Hey, it's not just weights! It's biases too!
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Re: They’re made out of weights
#139This 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…
Regarding consciousness , I like the explanation by neuroscientist Ramachandran: https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran07/ramachandran... In short, as far as I can remember: evolutionary, it makes sense to understand other humans, to feel what they feel(empathy - the mirror neurons system), and simulate their thinking and feelings. And once we have those systems, we can also use those on ourselves. And that's…
This way of thinking can only explain externally-visible parts of consciousness. It does nothing to address internal experience of being conscious and qualia. I don't think the internal experience has any bearing on physical reality (P-zombies would act the same externally) which makes this something outside of the realm of currently understood physics.