[deleted]
A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
271–280 of 432 posts
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#272The problem with viewing LLMs as just sequence generators, and malbehaviour as bad sequences, is that it simplifies too much. LLMs have hidden state not necessarily directly reflected in the tokens being produced and it is possible for LLMs to output tokens in opposition to this hidden state to achieve longer term outcomes (or predictions, if you prefer). Is it too anthropomorphic to say that this is a lie? To say th…
Author of the original article here. What hidden state are you referring to? For most LLMs the context is the state, and there is no "hidden" state. Could you explain what you mean? (Apologies if I can't see it directly)
Yes, strictly speaking, the model itself is stateless, but there are 600B parameters of state machine for frontier models that define which token to pick next. And that state machine is both incomprehensibly large and also of a similar magnitude in size to a human brain. (Probably, I'll grant it's possible it's smaller, but it's still quite large.)
I think my issue with the "don't anthropomorphize" is that it's unclear to me that the main difference between a human and an LLM isn't simply the inability for the LLM to rewrite its own model weights on the fly. (And I say "simply" but there's obviously nothing simple about it, and it might be possible already with current hardware, we just don't know how to do it.)
Even if we decide it is clearly different, this is still an incredibly large and dynamic system. "Stateless" or not, there's an incredible amount of state that is not comprehensible to me.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#273LLMs are AHI, i.e. artificial human imitator.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author of the original article here. What hidden state are you referring to? For most LLMs the context is the state, and there is no "hidden" state. Could you explain what you mean? (Apologies if I can't see it directly)
Yes, strictly speaking, the model itself is stateless, but there are 600B parameters of state machine for frontier models that define which token to pick next. And that state machine is both incomprehensibly large and also of a similar magnitude in size to a human brain. (Probably, I'll grant it's possible it's smaller, but it's still quite large.) I think my issue with the "don't anthropomorphize" is that it's uncle…
Fair, there is a lot that is incomprehensible to all of us. I wouldn't call it "state" as it's fixed, but that is a rather subtle point.
That said, would you anthropomorphize a meteorological simulation just because it contains lots and lots of constants that you don't understand well?
I'm pretty sure that recurrent dynamical systems pretty quickly become universal computers, but we are treating those that generate human language differently from others, and I don't quite see the difference.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, as a person that knows in detail how LLMs work with probably unique alternative perspective in addition to the commonplace one, I found any claims of them not having emergent behaviors to be of the same fallacy as claiming that crows can't be black because they have DNA of a bird.
> the same fallacy as claiming that crows can't be black because they have DNA of a bird. What fallacy is that? I’m a fan of logical fallacies and never heard that claim before nor am I finding any reference with a quick search.
Good catch. No such fallacy exists. Contextually, the implied reasoning (though faulty) relies on the fallacy of denying the antecedent. The mons ponus - if A then B - does NOT imply not A then not B. So if you see B, that doesn't mean A any more than not seeing A means not B. It's the difference between a necessary and sufficient condition - A is a sufficient condition for B, but the mons ponus alone is not sufficient for determining whether either A or B is a necessary condition of the other.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
“ Determinism, in philosophy, is the idea that all events are causally determined by preceding events, leaving no room for genuine chance or free will. It suggests that given the state of the universe at any one time, and the laws of nature, only one outcome is possible.” Clearly computers are deterministic. Are people?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of... > Clearly computers are deterministic. Are people? Give an LLM memory and a source of randomness and they're as deterministic as people. "Free will" isn't a concept that typechecks in a materialist philosophy. It's "not even wrong". Asserting that free will exists is _isomorphic_ to dualism which is _isomorphic_ to assertions of ensoulment. I can't argue…
Some accounts of free will are compatible with materialism. On such views "free will" just means the capacity of having intentions and make choices based on an internal debate. Obviously humans have that capacity.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreeing with you, this is a "can a submarine swim" problem IMO. We need a new word for what LLMs are doing. Calling it "thinking" is stretching the word to breaking point, but "selecting the next word based on a complex statistical model" doesn't begin to capture what they're capable of. Maybe it's cog-nition (emphasis on the cog).
What does a submarine do? Submarine? I suppose you "drive" a submarine which is getting to the idea: submarines don't swim because ultimately they are "driven"? I guess the issue is we don't make up a new word for what submarines do, we just don't use human words. I think the above poster gets a little distracted by suggesting the models are creative which itself is disputed. Perhaps a better term, like above, would…
Depends on if you are talking about an llm or to the llm. Talking to the llm, it would not understand that "model a poem" means to write a poem. Well, it will probably guess right in this case, but if you go out of band too much it won't understand you. The hard problem today is rewriting out of band tasks to be in band, and that requires anthropomorphizing.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author of the original article here. What hidden state are you referring to? For most LLMs the context is the state, and there is no "hidden" state. Could you explain what you mean? (Apologies if I can't see it directly)
Yes, strictly speaking, the model itself is stateless, but there are 600B parameters of state machine for frontier models that define which token to pick next. And that state machine is both incomprehensibly large and also of a similar magnitude in size to a human brain. (Probably, I'll grant it's possible it's smaller, but it's still quite large.) I think my issue with the "don't anthropomorphize" is that it's uncle…
FWIW the number of parameters in a LLM is in the same ballpark as the number of nuerons in a human (roughly 80B) but neurons are not weights, they are kind of a nueral net unto themselves, stateful, adaptive, self modifying, a good variety of neurotransmitters (and their chemical analogs) aside from just voltage.
It's fun to think about just how fantastic a brain is, and how much wattage and data-center-scale we're throwing around trying to approximate its behavior. Mega-effecient and mega-dense. I'm bearish on AGI simply from an internetworking standpoint, the speed of light is hard to beat and until you can fit 80 billion interconnected cores in half a cubic foot you're just not going to get close to the responsiveness of reacting to the world in real time as biology manages to do. but that's a whole nother matter. I just wanted to pick apart that magnitude of parameters is not an altogether meaningful comparison :)
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#279From "Stochastic Parrots All the Ways Down"[1]
> Our analysis reveals that emergent abilities in language models are merely “pseudo-emergent,” unlike human abilities which are “authentically emergent” due to our possession of what we term “ontological privilege.”
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get the impression after using language models for quite a while that perhaps the one thing that is riskiest to anthropomorphise is the conversational UI that has become the default for many people. A lot of the issues I'd have when 'pretending' to have a conversation are much less so when I either keep things to a single Q/A pairing, or at the very least heavily edit/prune the conversation history. Based on my und…
This. If an AI spits out incorrect code then i immediately create a new chat and reprompt with additional context. 'Dont use regex for this task' is a common addition for the new chat. Why does AI love regex for simple string operations?
I used to do this as well, but Gemini 2.5 has improved on this quite a bit and I don't find myself needing to do it as much anymore.