Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude's Cycles [pdf]

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 376 posts

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#211

Post by BobbyJo »

bitexploder wrote: post #100
wang_li wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could have just said "they can't form new memories."

That is a descriptive surface level reduction. Now do the work to define what that actually means for the intelligence.

Nobody else in the thread is making an argument that relies on the distinction.

"Intelligence" is used most commonly to refer to a class or collection of cognitive abilities. I don't think there is a consensus on an exact collection or specific class that the word covers, even if you consider specific scientific domains.

LLMs have honestly been a fun way to explore that. They obviously have a "kind" of intelligence, namely pattern recall. Wrap them in an agent and you get another kind: pattern composition. Those kinds of intelligences have been applied to mathematics for decades, but LLMs have allowed use to apply them to a semantic text domain.

I wonder if you could wrap image diffusion models in an agent set up the same way and get some new ability as well.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#212

Post by qsera »

red75prime wrote: post #188
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hamiltonian paths and previous work by Donald Knuth is more than likely in the training data.

The specific sequence of tokens that comprise the Knuth's problem with an answer to it is not in the training data. A naive probability distribution based on counting token sequences that are present in the training data would assign 0 probability to it. The trained network represents extremely non-naive approach to estimating the ground-truth distribution (the distribution that corresponds to what a human brain migh…

>the distribution that corresponds to what a human brain might have produced..

But the human brain (or any other intelligent brain) does not work by generating probability distribution of the next word. Even beings that does not have a language can think and act intelligent.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#213

Post by qsera »

empath75 wrote: post #156
qsera wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is impossible to accurately imitate the action of intelligent beings without being intelligent. Wait what? So a robot who is accurately copying the actions of an intelligent human, is intelligent?

That was probably phrased poorly. If a robot can independently accurately do what an intelligent person would do when placed in a novel situation, then yes, I would say it is intelligent. If it's just basically being a puppet, then no. You tell me what claude code is more like, a puppet, or a person?

It is neither puppet or a person. It is a computer program.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#214

Post by goodmythical »

pdntspa wrote: post #210
wang_li wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could have just said "they can't form new memories."

Sure, if you want to speak with the precision of a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel

lol, as if pointing at a wikipedia article (without any relevant discussion of the contents therein) is some kind of conversational excellence.

Or perhaps you were referring to the impact of the two in that the "sledgehammer" of "they can't make new memories" is a lot more effective than the tiny scalpel of "if you do a wikipedia search this is a single one of the relevant articles"

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#215

Post by losvedir »

wang_li wrote: post #68
morleytj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very good point. For anyone not familiar with anterograde amnesia, the classical case is patient H.M. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison ), whose condition was researched by Brenda Milner.

Or you could have just said "they can't form new memories."

Or "like the dude in Memento".

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#216

Post by CobrastanJorji »

OneManyNone wrote: post #159
bachmeier wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interpretation is that Claude did what Knuth considers to be the "solution". Doing the remaining work and polishing up the proof are not necessary to have a solution from this perspective.

Claude did not find a proof, though. It found an algorithm which Knuth then proved was correct.

Yes, and his point is that finding that algorithm was, to Knuth, the interesting part. Getting from that to a proof was the boring bit.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#217

Post by atleastoptimal »

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…

The obvious answer is that continual learning is going to be solved

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#218

Post by xienze »

dtj1123 wrote: post #39
bitexploder wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most fundamental argument that they are not, directly, an intelligence. They are not ever storing new information on a meaningful timescale. However, if you viewed them on some really large macro time scale where now LLMs are injecting information into the universe and the re-ingesting that maybe in some very philosophical way they are a /very/ slow oscillating intelligence right now. And as we narrow tha…

Would you consider someone with anterograde amnesia not to be intelligent?

I would consider them to not be a good choice for a role that requires remembering new information...

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#219

Post by HDThoreaun »

cbovis wrote: post #93
throw310822 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The training data If the prompt is unique, it is not in the training data. True for basically every prompt. So how is this probability calculated?

The prompt is unique but the tokens aren't. Type "owejdpowejdojweodmwepiodnoiwendoinw welidn owindoiwendo nwoeidnweoind oiwnedoin" into ChatGPT and the response is "The text you sent appears to be random or corrupted and doesn’t form a clear question." because the prompt doesnt correlate to training data.

Or because the text you send was random and doesnt form a clear quesiton?

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#220

Post by marcus_holmes »

bitexploder wrote: post #99
beepbooptheory wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, why can't both things be true? "Intelligence" is just what you call something and someone else knows what you mean. Why did AI discourse throw everyone back 100 years philosophically? Its like post-structuralism or Wittgenstein never happened.. It's so much less important or interesting to like nail down some definition here (I would cite HN discourse the past three years or so), than it is to recognize what it…

I think you can look at it dispassionately from a systems perspective. There is not /really/ a quantifiable threshold for capital I Intelligence. But there is a pretty well agreed set of properties for biological intelligence. As humans, we have conveniently made those properties match things only we have. But you can still mechanistically separate out the various parts of our brain, what they do, and how they intera…

> The other thing is, human intelligence is the only real intelligence we know about.

There's a long and proud history of discounting animal intelligence, probably because if we actually thought animals were intelligent we'd want to stop eating them.

Octopodes are sentient. Cetaceans have well-developed language. Elephants grieve their dead. Anyone who has owned a dog knows that it has some intelligence and is capable of communicating with us. There's a ton of other intelligences that we know about.

> As humans, we have conveniently made those properties match things only we have.

I think this is the key point. Machine intelligence is not going to look like human intelligence, any more than animal intelligence does. We can't talk to the dolphins, not because they're not smart and don't have language, but because we can't work out their language. Though I'm not sure what we'd even say to them, because they live in a world we'll never understand, and vice versa. When Claude finally reaches consciousness, it's not going to look like a human consciousness, and actually talking to that consciousness is going to be difficult because we won't share a reality.

An LLM is a tool. I can just about stretch to it being an Artificial Intelligence, but I prefer to continue being specific and call it an LLM rather than an AI. It is not conscious or self-aware. It fakes self-awareness because as a tool the thing it does is have conversations with humans, and humans often ask it questions about itself. But I don't think anyone actually believes it is self-aware. Not least because the only time it thinks is when prompted.

Post reply on HN