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Claude's Cycles [pdf]

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

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Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#161

Post by nhecker »

lxgr wrote: post #5
mccoyb wrote: post #2

It's fascinating to think about the space of problems which are amenable to RL scaling of these probability distributions. Before, we didn't have a fast (we had to rely on human cognition) way to try problems - even if the techniques and workflows were known by someone. Now, we've baked these patterns into probability distributions - anyone can access them with the correct "summoning spell". Experts will naturally us…

Data sharing agreements permitting, today's inference runs can be tomorrow's training data. Presumably the models are good enough at labeling promising chains of thought already. I could totally imagine "free" inference for researchers under the condition that the reasoning traces get to be used as future training data.

The site arena.ai does exactly this already, as far as I can tell. (In addition to the whole ranking thing.)

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#162

Post by nhecker »

the_af wrote: post #153
littlestymaar wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily, as exhibited by the massive success of artificial data.

Could you elaborate?

EDIT: probably not relevant, after re-re-reading the comment in question.

Presumably littlestymaar is talking about all the LLM-generated output that's publicly available on the Internet (in various qualities but significant quantity) and there for the scraping.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#163

Post by mt_ »

mccoyb wrote: post #2

It's fascinating to think about the space of problems which are amenable to RL scaling of these probability distributions. Before, we didn't have a fast (we had to rely on human cognition) way to try problems - even if the techniques and workflows were known by someone. Now, we've baked these patterns into probability distributions - anyone can access them with the correct "summoning spell". Experts will naturally us…

I call them, entropy reducers.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#164

Post by teekert »

jdnier wrote: post #89

> I think Claude Shannon’s spirit is probably proud to know that his name is now being associated with such advances. Hats off to Claude! I didn't realize Claude was named after Claude Shannon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

Last time I asked Claude itself also didn’t know.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#165

Post by brcmthrowaway »

faxmeyourcode wrote: post #94

> Filip also told me that he asked Claude to continue on the even case after the odd case had been resolved. “But there after a while it seemed to get stuck. In the end, it was not even able to write and run explore programs correctly anymore, very weird. So I stopped the search.” Interesting snippet towards the end. I wonder if they were using claude.ai or claude code. Sounds like they ran out of context and entered…

What is dumb zone?

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#166

Post by roywiggins »

gpm wrote: post #136
roywiggins wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turing Machines don't need access to the entire tape all at once, it's sufficient for it to see one cell at a time. You could certainly equip an LLM with a "read cell", "write cell", and "move left/right" tool and now you have a Turing machine. It doesn't need to keep any of its previous writes or reads in context. A sliding context window is more than capacious enough for this.

You're right of course, but at the point where you're saying "well we can make a turing machine with the LLM as the transition function by defining some tool calls for the LLM to interact with the tape" it feels like a stretch to call the LLM itself turing complete. Also people definitely talk about them as "thinking" in contexts where they haven't put a harness capable of this around them. And in the common contexts…

Yeah, humans and LLMs and a TM transition function are all Turing complete in the same way, but it's also basically a useless fact. You could possibly train a sufficiently motivated rat to compute a TM transition function.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#167

Post by Trinicode »

tzumaoli wrote: post #128
jdnier wrote: post #89

> I think Claude Shannon’s spirit is probably proud to know that his name is now being associated with such advances. Hats off to Claude! I didn't realize Claude was named after Claude Shannon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

Trivia: Claude Shannon proposed the idea of predicting the next token (letter) using statistics/probabilities in the training data corpus in 1950: "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English" https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shannon1950.pdf

A letter is not a token, is it? Redundancy could hit 75% in long sentences, but Shannon was not predicting tokens or words, he was predicting letters (characters).

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#168

Post by roer »

pfdietz wrote: post #137
jdnier wrote: post #89

> I think Claude Shannon’s spirit is probably proud to know that his name is now being associated with such advances. Hats off to Claude! I didn't realize Claude was named after Claude Shannon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

It's like the diesel engine, which is named after Rudolf Engine.

Is this a joke I don't get? His name was Rudolf Diesel, right?

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#169

Post by computably »

rcarr wrote: post #54
Aerroon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit related: open weights models are basically time capsules. These models have a knowledge cut off point and essentially forever live in that time.

Not an expert but surely it's only a matter of time until there's a way to update with the latest information without having to retrain on the entire corpus?

On a technical level, sure, you could say it's a matter of time, but that could mean tomorrow, or in 20 years.

And even after that, it still doesn't really solve the intrinsic problem of encoding truth. An LLM just models its training data, so new findings will be buried by virtue of being underrepresented. If you brute force the data/training somehow, maybe you can get it to sound like it's incorporating new facts, but in actuality it'll be broken and inconsistent.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#170

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Filligree wrote: post #138
rcarr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an expert but surely it's only a matter of time until there's a way to update with the latest information without having to retrain on the entire corpus?

It’s an extremely difficult problem, and if you know how to do that you could be a billionaire. It’s not impossible, obviously—humans do it—but it’s not yet certain that it’s possible with an LLM-sized architecture.

> It’s not impossible, obviously—humans do it

It's still not at all obvious to me that LLMs work in the same way as the human brain, beyond a surface level. Obviously the "neurons" in neural nets resemble our brains in a sense, but is the resemblance metaphorical or literal?

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