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Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Interview with gwern

#161

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

dilap wrote: post #130
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

By intellectually understand, I just mean you can ask Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, "how can I recognize if a string is in a^n b^n? what is the language being described?" and it can easily tell you; if you were giving it an exam, it would pass. (Of course, maybe you could argue that's a famous example in its training set and it's just regurgitating, but then you could try making modifications, asking other questions…

>> (Of course, maybe you could argue that's a famous example in its training set and it's just regurgitating, but then you could try making modifications, asking other questions, etc, and the LLM would continue to respond sensibly. So to me it seems to understand...)

Yes, well, that's the big confounder that has to be overcome by any claim of understanding (or reasoning etc) by LLMs, isn't it? They've seen so much stuff in training that it's very hard to know what they're simply reproducing from their corpus and what not. My opinion is that LLMs are statistical models of text and we can expect them to learn the surface statistical regularities of text in their corpus, which can be very powerful, but that's all. I don't see how they can learn "understanding" from text. The null hypothesis should be that they can't and, Sagan-like, we should expect to see extraordinary evidence before accepting they can. I do.

>> Regarding computation and understanding: I just though it was interesting that you presented a true fact about the computational limitations of NNs, which could easily/naturally/temptingingly -- yet incorrectly (I think!) -- be extended into a statement about the limitations of understanding of NNs (whatever understanding means -- no technical definition that I know of, but still, it does mean something, right?).

For humans it means something- because understanding is a property we assume humans have. Sometimes we use it metaphorically ("my program understands when the customer wants to change their pants") but in terms of computation... again I have no clue.

I generally have very few clues :)

Re: Interview with gwern

#162

Post by endtime »

Quinzel wrote: post #9

I don’t believe Gwern lives as frugally as he’s described in this (if this even actually is the real Gwern). I’m 100% sure that he has a persona he likes to portray and being perceived as frugal is a part of that persona. When it comes to answering the question “who is gwern?” I reckon Gwern’s a plant a seed in people’s mind type of guy, and let them come up with the rest of the story. Still, I like a lot of his writ…

I met Gwern once, when he came to the NYC Less Wrong meetup. I don't think he was internet-famous yet. It was probably 12 years ago or so, but based on my recollection, I'm totally willing to believe that he lives very frugally. FWIW he wouldn't have looked out of place at an anime convention.

Re: Interview with gwern

#163

Post by Vecr »

kittikitti wrote: post #160

Why was this reposted? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42128876 This leads me to believe that the content and the subsequent posts are for self promotion purposes only.

It's not. I don't know if you think we're all Gwern, but he's provided a useful enough service for enough people that a discussion with more than 13 comments is worthwhile.

Re: Interview with gwern

#164

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #158
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I concede that if I try to separate engineers from scientists it sounds like I'm trying to gatekeep. In truth, I'm organising things in my head because I started out thinking of myself as an engineer, because I like to make stuff, and at some point I started thinking of myself as a scientist, malgré moi, because I also like to know how stuff works and why. I multiclassed, you see, so I am trying to understand exa…

I sure hope nobody ever remembers you being confidently wrong about something. But if they do, hopefully that person will have the grace and self-restraint not to broadcast it any time you might make a public appearance, because they're apparently bitter that you still have any credibility.

Point taken and I warned my comment would sound vituperative. Again, the difference is that I'm not an AI influencer, and I'm not trying to make a living by claiming an expertise I don't have. I don't make "public appearances" except in conferences where I present the results of my research.

And you should see the criticism I get by other academics when I try to publish my papers and they decide I'm not even wrong. And that kind of criticism has teeth: my papers don't get published.

Re: Interview with gwern

#165

Post by jessriedel »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #144

Great interview but I wasn't a fan of how they handled the voice. Whether a human voice actor or an AI "voice actor", it inserted cadence, emphasis and emotion that I have no way of knowing if it was Gwern's original intention or not. Reading the transcript of the interview would probably be better as you won't be mislead by what the voice actor added in or omitted.

> Reading a transcript of the interview would probably be better

I might be reading to much into the "a" (rather than "the"), but to be clear: there is a transcript at the bottom.

Re: Interview with gwern

#166

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #164
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure hope nobody ever remembers you being confidently wrong about something. But if they do, hopefully that person will have the grace and self-restraint not to broadcast it any time you might make a public appearance, because they're apparently bitter that you still have any credibility.

Point taken and I warned my comment would sound vituperative. Again, the difference is that I'm not an AI influencer, and I'm not trying to make a living by claiming an expertise I don't have. I don't make "public appearances" except in conferences where I present the results of my research. And you should see the criticism I get by other academics when I try to publish my papers and they decide I'm not even wrong. A…

Please be aware that your criticism has teeth too, you just don't feel the bite of them. You say I "should see" that criticism you receive on your papers, but I don't; it's delivered in private. Unlike the review comments you get from your peers, you are writing in public. I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate it if your peer reviewer stood up after your conference keynote and told the audience that they'd rejected your paper five years ago, described your errors, and went on to say that nobody at this conference should be listening to you.

Re: Interview with gwern

#167

Post by sourcepluck »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #137
sourcepluck wrote: post #67

I clicked on the video asking myself, wait, how does the title make sense, how is he anonymous if he's doing videos? Then when I saw the frankly very creepy and offputting image and voice, thinking he'd been anonymised through some AI software, thought, oh no, this kind of thing isn't going to become normal is it. Then - plot twist - I scroll down to read the description and see that that voice is an actual human voi…

Ah, that was a human voice over? I really wish they hadn't done the voice thing as I found it distracting. The emotion felt all off and misleading. I guess it's better than an AI voice at least but a traditional voice mask would have been better IMO

Yes, someone called "Chris Painter", who could easily be a nice person, I suppose. Maybe the generic U.S. "non-offensive" male A.I. accent is based off his voice originally, and we're coming full circle?

Re: Interview with gwern

#168

Post by michaelt »

sourcepluck wrote: post #143
michaelt wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living on ramen by choice? Sure, you do you. But living on ramen + $12k/year + no healthcare + collapsing floor? That's sounding a lot like poverty to me.

I'm aware that it sounds like poverty. I'm just saying it's going to depend on the details. To people who live ordinary western lifestyles, everything outside of that sounds weird. - ramen =/= cheap pot noodle type things. Ramen restaurants in Japan attest to this. It'll depend on context what that actually means in this case. - 12k/year =/= no money, numbers like that make no sense outside of context. It depends on…

> 12k/year =/= no money [...] live in a hut with no rent, you grow food, you've no kids, no mortgage, no car, etc, these all matter.

I agree that 12k goes a long way when you're a subsistence farmer, living alone in a collapsing hut in the middle of nowhere, with no health insurance.

Nonetheless, that's sounding a lot like poverty to me.

Re: Interview with gwern

#169

Post by Vecr »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #137
sourcepluck wrote: post #67

I clicked on the video asking myself, wait, how does the title make sense, how is he anonymous if he's doing videos? Then when I saw the frankly very creepy and offputting image and voice, thinking he'd been anonymised through some AI software, thought, oh no, this kind of thing isn't going to become normal is it. Then - plot twist - I scroll down to read the description and see that that voice is an actual human voi…

Ah, that was a human voice over? I really wish they hadn't done the voice thing as I found it distracting. The emotion felt all off and misleading. I guess it's better than an AI voice at least but a traditional voice mask would have been better IMO

He's Gwern, he knows that wouldn't provide what he wants.

Re: Interview with gwern

#170

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #158
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I concede that if I try to separate engineers from scientists it sounds like I'm trying to gatekeep. In truth, I'm organising things in my head because I started out thinking of myself as an engineer, because I like to make stuff, and at some point I started thinking of myself as a scientist, malgré moi, because I also like to know how stuff works and why. I multiclassed, you see, so I am trying to understand exa…

I sure hope nobody ever remembers you being confidently wrong about something. But if they do, hopefully that person will have the grace and self-restraint not to broadcast it any time you might make a public appearance, because they're apparently bitter that you still have any credibility.

Can I say a bit more about criticism on the side? I've learned to embrace it as a necessary step to self-improvement.

My formative experience as a PhD student was when a senior colleague attacked my work. That was after I asked for his feedback for a paper I was writing where I showed that my system beat his system. He didn't deal with it well, sent me a furiously critical response (with obvious misunderstandings of my work) and then proceeded to tell my PhD advisor and everyone else in a conference we were attending that my work is premature and shouldn't be submitted. My advisor, trusting his ex-student (him) more than his brand new one (me), agreed and suggested I should sit on the paper a bit longer.

Later on the same colleague attacked my system again, but this time he gave me a concrete reason why: he gave me an example of a task that my system could not complete (learn a recursive logic program to return the last element in a list from a single example that is not an example of the base-case of the recursion; it's a lot harder than it may sound).

Now, I had been able to dismiss the earlier criticism as sour grapes, but this one I couldn't get over because my system really couldn't deal with it. So I tried to figure out why- where was the error I was making in my theories? Because my theoretical results said that my system should be able to learn that. Long story short, I did figure it out and I got that example to work, plus a bunch of other hard tests that people had thrown at me in the meanwhile. So I improved.

I still think my colleague's behaviour was immature and not becoming of a senior academic- attacking a PhD student because she did what you 've always done, beat your own system, is childish. In my current post-doc I just published a paper with one of our PhD students where we report his system trouncing mine (in speed; still some meat on those old bones otherwise). I think criticism is a good thing overall, if you can learn to use it to improve your work. It doesn't mean that you'll learn to like it, or that you'll be best friends with the person criticising you, it doesn't even mean that they're not out to get you; they probably are... but if the criticism is pointing out a real weakness you have, you can still use it to your advantage no matter what.

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