Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every computable system, even stateful systems, can be reformulated as a function. If IO can be functional, I don't see why mice can't.
So you think a rodent is a function?
I think that I am a function.
A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
291–300 of 432 posts
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One talking about a program's "behaviors", "actions" or "goals" doesn't mean they believe the program is sentient. Except that is exactly what we’re seeing with LLMs. People believing exactly that.
Perhaps a few mentally unhinged people do. A bit of anecdote: last year I hung out with a bunch of old classmates that I hadn't seen for quite a while. None of them works in tech. Surprisingly to me, all of them have ChatGPT installed on their phones. And unsurprisingly to me, none of them treated it like an actual intelligence. That makes me wonder where those who think ChatGPT is sentient come from. (It's a bit wor…
> Perhaps a few mentally unhinged people do.
This is a No True Scotsman fallacy. And it's radically factually wrong.
The rest of your comment is along the lines of the famous (but apocryphal) Pauline Kael line “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one was as bothered when we anthropomorphized crud apps simply for the purpose of conversing about "them". "Ack! The thing is corrupting tables again because it thinks we are still using api v3! Who approved that last MR?!" The fact that people are bothered by the same language now is indicative in itself. If you want to maintain distance, pre prompt models to structure all conversations to lack pronouns as betwee…
> You can have the model call you out for referring to the model as existing. This tickled me. "There ain't nobody here but us chickens". I have other thoughts which are not quite crystalized, but I think UX might be having an outsized effect here.
In addition to he/she etc. there is a need for a button for no pronouns. "Stop confusing metacognition for conscious experience or qualia!" doesn't fit well. The UX for these models is extremely malleable. The responses are misleading mostly to the extent the prompts were already misled. The sorts of responses that arise from ignorant prompts are those found within the training data in the context of ignorant questions. This tends to make them ignorant as well. There are absolutely stupid questions.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I kinda agree with both of you. It might be a required abstraction, but it's a leaky one. Long before LLMs, I would talk about classes / functions / modules like "it then does this, decides the epsilon is too low, chops it up and adds it to the list". The difference I guess it was only to a technical crowd and nobody would mistake this for anything it wasn't. Everybody know that "it" didn't "decide" anything. With AI…
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).
A machine that can imitate the products of thought is not the same as thinking.
All imitations require analogous mechanisms, but that is the extent of their similarities, in syntax. Thinking requires networks of billions of neurons, and then, not only that, but words can never exist on a plane because they do not belong to a plane. Words can only be stored on a plane, they are not useful on a plane.
Because of this LLMs have the potential to discover new aspects and implications of language that will be rarely useful to us because language is not useful within a computer, it is useful in the world.
Its like seeing loosely related patterns in a picture and keep derivating on those patterns that are real, but loosely related.
LLMs are not intelligence but its fine that we use that word to describe them.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#295Earlier 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…
> 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.
This is "simply" an acknowledgement of extreme ignorance of how human brains work.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#296It's human to anthropomorphize, we also do it to our dishwasher when it acts up. The nefarious part is how tech CEOs weaponize bullshit doom scenarios to avoid talking about real regulatory problems by poisoning the discourse.
What copyright law, privacy, monopoly? Who cares if we can talk about the machine apocalypse!!!
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#297People anthropomorphize just about anything around them. People talk about inanimate objects like they are persons. Ships, cars, etc. And of course animals are well in scope for this as well, even the ones that show little to no signs of being able to reciprocate the relationship (e.g. an ant). People talk to their plants even. It's what we do. We can't help ourselves. There's nothing crazy about it and most people a…
> LLMs are not conscious because unlike human brains they don't learn or adapt (yet). That's neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. In order to be conscious, learning may not be needed, but a perception of the passing of time may be needed which may require some short-term memory. People with severe dementia often can't even remember the start of a sentence they are reading, they can't learn, but they are cert…
You should note that "what is consciousness" is still very much an unsettled debate.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> of this You mean that LLMs are more than just the matmuls they're made up of, or that that is exactly what they are and how great that is?
Not making a qualitative assessment of any of it. Just pointing out that there are ways to build separate sets of intuition outside of using the "usual" presentation layer. It's very possible to take a red-team approach to these systems, friend.
They don't want to. It seems a lot of people are uncomfortable and defensive about anything that may demystify LLMs.
It's been a wake up call for me to see how many people in the tech space have such strong emotional reactions to any notions of trying to bring discourse about LLMs down from the clouds.
The campaigns by the big AI labs have been quite successful.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#299I have the technical knowledge to know how LLMs work, but I still find it pointless to not anthropomorphize, at least to an extent. The language of "generator that stochastically produces the next word" is just not very useful when you're talking about, e.g., an LLM that is answering complex world modeling questions or generating a creative story. It's at the wrong level of abstraction, just as if you were discussing…
These anthropomorphizations are best described as metaphors when used by people to describe LLMs in common or loose speech. We already use anthropomorphic metaphors when talking about computers. LLMs, like all computation, are a matter of simulation; LLMs can appear to be conversing without actually conversing. What distinguishes the real thing from the simulation is the cause of the appearance of an effect. Problems occur when people forget these words are being used metaphorically, as if they were univocal.
Of course, LLMs are multimodal and used to simulate all sorts of things, not just conversation. So there are many possible metaphors we can use, and these metaphors don't necessarily align with the abstractions you might use to talk about LLMs accurately. This is like the difference between "synthesizes text" (abstraction) and "speaks" (metaphor), or "synthesizes images" (abstraction) and "paints" (metaphor). You can use "speaks" or "paints" to talk about the abstractions, of course.
Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are we looking at the same thread? I see nobody claiming this. Anthropic does sometimes, their position is clearly wishful thinking, and it's not represented ITT. Try looking at this from another perspective - many people simply do not see human intelligence (or life, for that matter) as magic. I see nothing religious about that, rather the opposite.
I agree with you @orbital-decay that I also do not get the same vibe reading this thread. Though, while human intelligence is (seemingly) not magic, it is very far from being understood. The idea that a LLM is comparable to human intelligence implies that we even understand human intelligence well enough to say that.
LLMs are also not understood. I mean we built and trained them. But don't of the abilities at still surprising to researchers. We have yet to map these machines.