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Claude's Cycles [pdf]

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

271–280 of 376 posts

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#271
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put a loop around an LLM and, it can be trivially made Turing complete, so it boils down to whether thinking requires exceeding the Turing computable, and we have no evidence to suggest that is even possible.

> whether thinking requires exceeding the Turing computable I've never seen any evidence that thinking requires such a thing. And honestly I think theoretical computational classes are irrelevant to analysing what AI can or cannot do. Physical computers are only equivalent to finite state machines (ignoring the internet). But the truth is that if something is equivalent to a finite state machine, with an absurd numbe…

Hence why I finished the sentence "and we have no evidence to suggest that is even possible".

I think it's exceedingly improbable that we're any more than very advanced automatons, but I like to keep the door ajar and point out that the burden is on those claiming this to present even a single example of a function we can compute that is outside the Turing computable if they want to open that door..

> Physical computers are only equivalent to finite state machines (ignoring the internet)

Physical computers are equivalent to Turing machines without the tape as long as they have access to IO.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#272
post #3
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…

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.

Some knowledge is fundamental and has no recent cut-off. See also: there is nothing new under the sun.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "sufficiently accurate" do you mean identical? Because if so, it's not an imitation of intelligence at all, and the question is thus nonsensical.

"it's not an imitation of intelligence at all" But that is the key insight, how can you tell when an imitation of intelligence becomes the real thing?

When it stops hallucinating without explicit checks for that!

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#275
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear that AI could independently develop a cure for cancer and people would still say that it's not actually intelligent, just matrix multiplications giving a statistically probable answer! LLMs are at least designed to be intelligent. Our monkey brains have much less reason to be intelligent, since we only evolved to survive nature, not to understand it. We are at this moment extremely deep into what most people…

Last week I put "was val kilmer in heat" into the search box on my browser. The AI answer came back with "No, Val Kilmer was not in heat. Val Kilmer played Chris Shiherlis in the movie Heat but the film did not indicate that he was pregnant or in heat. His performance was nuanced and skilled and represents a high point of the film." I was not curious about whether he was pregnant. We are not only not close to human l…

It's clearly just a hallucination. Everyone knows there was never a movie called Heat, Val Kilmer did not play Chris Shiherlis in it, and he has always been pregnant.

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#276
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, a concept (which is an abstraction in more ways than one) is different from a textual representation. But LLMs don't operate on the textual description of a concept when they are doing their thing. A textual description (which is associated with other modalities in the training data) serves as an input format. LLMs perform non-linear transformations of points in their latent space. These transformations an…

> don't operate on the textual description of a concept when they are doing their thing. It could be mapping the text to some other internal representation with connections to mappings from some other text/tokens. But it does not stop text from being the ground truth. It has nothing else going on! The "hallucination" behavior alone should be enough to reject any claims that these are at least minimally similar to ani…

The internal representation happen to be useful not only for outputting text. What does it mean from your standpoint?

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#277
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

> Near the end of his life, Molaison regularly filled in crossword puzzles.[16] He was able to fill in answers to clues that referred to pre-1953 knowledge. As for post-1953 information, he was able to modify old memories with new informations. For instance, he could add a memory about Jonas Salk by modifying his memory of polio.[2]

That's fascinating!

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All that needed to be conveyed was that there are humans who cannot create new memories. That is enough to pose the philosophical question about these models having intelligence. Anything more is just adding an anecdote that isn't necessary.

I'm really happy they added the extra information about this specific case, as I did not previously knew it existed and it is a fascinating read

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#279
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't operate on the textual description of a concept when they are doing their thing. It could be mapping the text to some other internal representation with connections to mappings from some other text/tokens. But it does not stop text from being the ground truth. It has nothing else going on! The "hallucination" behavior alone should be enough to reject any claims that these are at least minimally similar to ani…

The internal representation happen to be useful not only for outputting text. What does it mean from your standpoint?

I didn't understand. Can you clarify?

Re: Claude's Cycles [pdf]

#280

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…

I view this as the chemical metabolism phase of artificial intelligent life. It is very random, without true individuals, but lots of reinforcing feedback loops (in knowledge, in resource earning/using, etc). At some point, enough intelligence will coalesce into individuals strong enough to independently improve. Then continuity will be an accelerator, instead of what it is now - a helpful property that we have to pu…

Do you think individual identity is fundamental to intelligence? I’m not so sure tbh. Even in humans, the concept of identity is a merely a useful fiction to feed our social behavior prediction circuits.
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