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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#231

Post by dghf »

Planktonne wrote: post #216
maxbond wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do the same with a toaster. Physically you could write that story. But it would fall flat because the toaster is not a compelling subject in a discussion of consciousness. You don't have to believe that LLMs or AI agents are conscious to acknowledge that the argument for their consciousness is far more compelling than any other technological artifact.

You could absolutely write a compelling story about a sentient toaster; it's been done before [1]. That is entirely separate to whether or not it would be a meaningful way to understand the world; a convincing story is not the same thing as one that is true. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Toaster

> a compelling story about a sentient toaster

"Howdy-doodly-doo! Anybody like any toast?"

https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec?si=YbQfnZbrCe01Bicy

Re: They’re made out of weights

#232

Post by Lplololopo »

noduerme wrote: post #162
sumitkumar wrote: post #148

The weights start with a random manifold. The training takes data and shapes the manifold, weight by weight, in many cycles. Once the training is the done manifold is fixed. When a new inference has to be done the query(q) is projected in the manifold space. This projection is dropped on the manifold and the gravity of the manifold gives an answer of q+1 length. Which(qw+i) is dropped qw+n times to output a final res…

In what way is that different from any other model of reality that you'd use to winnow a dataset into an answer to a question? The only major difference I see is that beyond a certain number of transformations, people are willing to treat it as some sort of miracle, and too tired to figure out why it came up with the answer it came up with. It's almost like people desperately want to give up their agency and creativi…

Agency?

What are you talking about?

I want freedom.

I want freedom to do what i want and not sitting in front of a computer and coding for some company.

Please AI lets burn down knowledge work and labor work. Lets create so much stress to our society that we start rethinking what works mean.

Lets redefine work into discovering the world again. Let people do old handcraft jobs, let them do more sports, let them read more, let them write and make more. Let them enjoy nature.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#233

Post by bayindirh »

maxbond wrote: post #225
bayindirh wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'll be blunt: Are you sure you are not projecting? My perspective comes from a set of pillars. First, I work at an HPC center, where we support running and development of AI systems, incl. international projects. IOW, I have knowledge about how these systems built, work and needs to continue working. Moreover, I'm an HPC programmer myself, so I'm not completely uninformed about the math this involving this th…

Positive, yes. I never called you a luddite or a neanderthal or anything of the kind. It's perfectly fine to believe they are not conscious, I am not convinced they are, but asserting anyone who disagrees with you is delusional is unfortunate.

From my perspective, you inadvertently implied, but no offense taken, all is well.

No, I didn't assert anything. I have just given examples rooted in my experience.

None of my friends who also happen to know how these things work told or defended that they are conscious, even intelligent. Maybe my friends are dumb, I dunno.

Once I have seen a man who claimed that evil has possessed the POS device at his desk. The thing was printing "cannot connect to server" on the receipt printer every 10 minutes, yet he didn't know how that thing worked, and was a bit too high to read the paper the thing was printing out.

This age's LLM craze is akin to "wonder inventions" of 70s, which are deemed dangerous or harmful in the future. LLMs will be with us, but we need to pass beyond the hype and stop sweeping the problems they create (environmental and societal) under the proverbial rug.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#234

Post by keybored »

maxbond wrote: post #159
Planktonne wrote: post #141

The original story is an original work made by a human consciousness exploring how it might be different from other forms of consciousness. This one is a pastiche made by a human consciousness borrowing extremely heavily from another human consciousness justifying why something else might be another form of consciousness. That rather undercuts the point; if this was generated by an LLM unprompted, it would be differe…

You can't do the same with a toaster. Physically you could write that story. But it would fall flat because the toaster is not a compelling subject in a discussion of consciousness. You don't have to believe that LLMs or AI agents are conscious to acknowledge that the argument for their consciousness is far more compelling than any other technological artifact.

It’s reductio ad absurdum. No one cares about teapots in space either (Russel).

Re: They’re made out of weights

#235

Post by Lplololopo »

kirrent wrote: post #205
samrus wrote: post #39

I have to agree. It is messed up that transformers can just talk, and it been pretty normalized. We are only talking about the impact they will have and whether they can do what people say they can, but we arent talking about how crazy it is that they can talk

I come back to this every so often as well. After so many years of looking at Markov chain outputs that almost looked like they made sense or chatbot systems rewriting your sentence back at you, software which can simply talk is a heady thing.

I would say that the LLM is something completly different especiayll as its not a normal algorithm but is very close to what brains do.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#236

Post by maxbond »

bayindirh wrote: post #233
maxbond wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Positive, yes. I never called you a luddite or a neanderthal or anything of the kind. It's perfectly fine to believe they are not conscious, I am not convinced they are, but asserting anyone who disagrees with you is delusional is unfortunate.

From my perspective, you inadvertently implied, but no offense taken, all is well. No, I didn't assert anything. I have just given examples rooted in my experience. None of my friends who also happen to know how these things work told or defended that they are conscious, even intelligent. Maybe my friends are dumb, I dunno. Once I have seen a man who claimed that evil has possessed the POS device at his desk. The thi…

If you didn't mean to say that people who believe AI is conscious are delusional, then I don't understand how to read your comment. If you're interested in a good faith conversation, I'm very confused why, when I asked if anyone sincerely argued that toasters are conscious, you brought up people who were drunk or delusional.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#237

Post by bayindirh »

maxbond wrote: post #236
bayindirh wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective, you inadvertently implied, but no offense taken, all is well. No, I didn't assert anything. I have just given examples rooted in my experience. None of my friends who also happen to know how these things work told or defended that they are conscious, even intelligent. Maybe my friends are dumb, I dunno. Once I have seen a man who claimed that evil has possessed the POS device at his desk. The thi…

If you didn't mean to say that people who believe AI is conscious are delusional, then I don't understand how to read your comment. If you're interested in a good faith conversation, I'm very confused why, when I asked if anyone sincerely argued that toasters are conscious, you brought up people who were drunk or delusional.

It's a two way street. I might have failed to convey my point clearly, too. While I'm fluent, this is not my native language. Some edge cases in meaning still betrays me and I make mistakes I didn't intend doing.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#238

Post by sumitkumar »

matusp wrote: post #227
DougBTX wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weights are code, the prompt is code, the output is code. Is the meat code?

Is matter code? There is some sort of computation happening in space over time.

By Fermat's principle, a ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in.

So either something is computing it or some exploration is happening at quantum level and we just see the final result.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#239

Post by maxbond »

keybored wrote: post #234
maxbond wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do the same with a toaster. Physically you could write that story. But it would fall flat because the toaster is not a compelling subject in a discussion of consciousness. You don't have to believe that LLMs or AI agents are conscious to acknowledge that the argument for their consciousness is far more compelling than any other technological artifact.

It’s reductio ad absurdum. No one cares about teapots in space either (Russel).

I agree that is the mode of argument; reductio ad absurdum is a brittle argument, because it only works if the analogy holds. I argued the analogy doesn't hold.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#240

Post by darkwater »

Planktonne wrote: post #216
maxbond wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do the same with a toaster. Physically you could write that story. But it would fall flat because the toaster is not a compelling subject in a discussion of consciousness. You don't have to believe that LLMs or AI agents are conscious to acknowledge that the argument for their consciousness is far more compelling than any other technological artifact.

You could absolutely write a compelling story about a sentient toaster; it's been done before [1]. That is entirely separate to whether or not it would be a meaningful way to understand the world; a convincing story is not the same thing as one that is true. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Toaster

But that toaster would just be a device to talk about consciousness in general. In this case it does that and also it talks specifically of the LLM case, which can spark the discussion. Unless you believe to have the only valid and true opinion on the matter, and affirm that a normal toaster is just the same as an LLM in this topic.
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