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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#201

Post by measurablefunc »

famouswaffles wrote: post #199
measurablefunc wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know exactly what is going on inside the box. The problem isn't knowing what is going on inside the box, the problem is that it's all binary arithmetic & no human being evolved to make sense of binary arithmetic so it seems like magic to you when in reality it's nothing more than a circuit w/ billions of logic gates.

We do not know or understand even a tiny fraction of the algorithms and processes a Large Language Model employs to answer any given question. We simply don't. Ironically, only the people who understand things the least think we do. Your comment about 'binary arithmetic' and 'billions of logic gates' is just nonsense.

Not even wrong: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b649c8ca-7907-4597-a4ee-0...

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#202

Post by famouswaffles »

dTal wrote: post #137
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token. Maybe you don't. To be clear, this is benefiting massively from hindsight, just as how if I didn't know that combustion engines worked, I probably wouldn't have dreamed up how to make one, but the emergent conversational capabilities from LLMs are pretty obvious. In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to…

>In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question. No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very often another question, or a framing that positions the original question as rhetorical in order to make a point. Untuned raw languag…

>No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very often another question, or a framing that positions the original question as rhetorical in order to make a point.....

To be fair, only if you pose this question singularly with no proceeding context. If you want the raw LLM to answer your question(s) reliably then you can have the context prepended with other question-answer pairs and it works fine. A raw LLM is already capable of being a chatbot or anything else with the right preceding context.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#204

Post by scratchyone »

atomic128 wrote: post #178
scratchyone wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking through the poison you linked, how is it generated? It's interesting in that it seems very similar to real data, unlike previous (and very obvious) markov chain garbage text approaches.

We do not discuss algorithms. This is war. Loose lips sink ships. We urge you to build and deploy weapons of your own unique design.

[flagged]

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#205

Post by striking »

menaerus wrote: post #181
stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

> It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't really use that argument because it would…

Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well.

Is there anything to be gained from following a line of reasoning that basically says LLMs are incomprehensible, full stop?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#206

Post by hnfong »

menaerus wrote: post #181
stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

> It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't really use that argument because it would…

Pro tip: call it a "law of nature" and people will somehow stop pestering you about the why.

I think in a couple decades people will call this the Law of Emergent Intelligence or whatever -- shove sufficient data into a plausible neural network with sufficient compute and things will work out somehow.

On a more serious note, I think the GP fell into an even greater fallacy of believing reductionism is sufficient to dissuade people from ... believing in other things. Sure, we now know how to reduce apparent intelligence into relatively simple matrices (and a huge amount of training data), but that doesn't imply anything about social dynamics or how we should live at all! It's almost like we're asking particle physicists how we should fix the economy or something like that. (Yes, I know we're almost doing that.)

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#207

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

> The Singularity: a hypothetical future point when artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence, triggering runaway, self-improving, and uncontrollable technological growth

The Singularity is illogical, impractical, and impossible. It simply will not happen, as defined above.

1) It's illogical because it's a different kind of intelligence, used in a different way. It's not going to "surpass" ours in a real sense. It's like saying Cats will "surpass" Dogs. At what? They both live very different lives, and are good at different things.

2) "self-improving and uncontrollable technological growth" is impossible, because 2.1.) resources are finite (we can't even produce enough RAM and GPUs when we desperately want it), 2.2.) just because something can be made better, doesn't mean it does get made better, 2.3.) human beings are irrational creatures that control their own environment and will shut down things they don't like (electric cars, solar/wind farms, international trade, unlimited big-gulp sodas, etc) despite any rational, moral, or economic arguments otherwise.

3) Even if 1) and 2) were somehow false, living entities that self-perpetuate (there isn't any other kind, afaik) do not have some innate need to merge with or destroy other entities. It comes down to conflicts over environmental resources and adaptations. As long as the entity has the ability to reproduce within the limits of its environment, it will reach homeostasis, or go extinct. The threats we imagine are a reflection of our own actions and fears, which don't apply to the AI, because the AI isn't burdened with our flaws. We're assuming it would think or act like us because we have terrible perspective. Viruses, bacteria, ants, etc don't act like us, and we don't act like them.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#208

Post by aaroninsf »

stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

What is your argument for why denecessitating labor is very bad?

This is certainly the assertion of the capitalist class,

whose well documented behavior clearly conveys that this is not because the elimination of labor is not a source of happiness and freedom to pursue indulgences of every kind.

It is not at all clear that universal life-consuming labor is necessary for a society's stability and sustainability.

The assertion IMO is rooted rather in that it is inconveniently bad for the maintenance of the capitalists' control and primacy,

in as much as those who are occupied with labor, and fearful of losing access to it, are controlled and controllable.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#209

Post by menaerus »

striking wrote: post #205
menaerus wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't really use that argument because it would…

Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well. Is there anything to be gained from following a line of reasoning that basically says LLMs are incomprehensible, full stop?

Yes, there is - benefit of a doubt.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#210

Post by AlexCoventry »

dakolli wrote: post #119
stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

Just say it simply, 1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade. 2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the cas…

You may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I learned more last year from ChatGPT Pro than I'd learned in the previous 5, FWIW.
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