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Bag of words, have mercy on us

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Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#301

Post by lostmsu »

tjr wrote: post #261
efitz wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has made me question what it is to be a human. I am not having some existential crisis, but if we get to a point where X% of humans cannot outperform “AI” on any task that humans deem “useful”, for some nontrivial value of X, then many assumptions that culture has inculcated into me about humanity are no longer valid. What is the role of humans then? Can it be said that humans “think” if they can’t think a thought…

If all humans were suddenly wiped off the face of the earth, AI would go silent, and the hardware it runs on would eventually shut down. If all AI was suddenly wiped off the face of the earth, humans would rebuild it, and would carry on fine in the meantime. One AI researcher decades ago said something to the effect of: researchers in biology look at living organisms and wonder how they live; researchers in physics l…

The current AI SoTA.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#302

Post by yannyu »

gkbrk wrote: post #299
xtracto wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the problem is in the "chat" mechanic that OpenAI and others use to present the product. It lends itself to strong antropomorphizing. If instead of a chat interface we simply had a "complete the phrase" interface, people would understand the tool better for what it is.

But people aren't using ChatGPT for completing phrases. They're using it to get their tasks done, or get their questions answered. The fact that pretraining of ChatGPT is done with a "completing the phrase" task has no bearing on how people actually end up using it.

It's not just the pretraining, it's the entire scaffolding between the user and the LLM itself that contributes to the illusion. How many people would continue assuming that these chatbots were conscious or intelligent if they had to build their own context manager, memory manager, system prompt, personality prompt, and interface?

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#303

Post by littlestymaar »

quantummagic wrote: post #286
littlestymaar wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> show the general concept has already started The same way a todler creeping is the start of the general concept of space exploration.

Yes. And even so, it shows remarkable effectiveness already.

Like a car engine or a combine. The problem isn't the effectiveness of the tool for its purpose, it's the religion around it.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#304

Post by brendoelfrendo »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #208
nkrisc wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I shake some dice in a cup are they thinking about what number they’ll reveal when I throw them?

that depends, if you explain the rules of the game you're playing and give the dice a goal to win the game, do they adjust the numbers they reveal according to the rules of the game? If so, yes, they're thinking

As someone who plays a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, it sure feels like the dice are thinking sometimes.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#305

Post by estearum »

eric-p7 wrote: post #249
red75prime wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a difference to discover what it is. How can we know that all LLMs don't?

If you tediously work out the LLM math by hand, is the pen and paper conscious too? Consciousness is not computation. You need something else.

The pen and paper are not the actual substrate of entropy reduction, so not really.

Consciousness is what it "feels like" when a part of the universe is engaged in local entropy reduction. You heard it here first, folks!

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#306

Post by emp17344 »

traverseda wrote: post #269
Hendrikto wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's how LLMs can do things like translate from language to language The heavy lifting here is done by embeddings. This does not require a world model or “thought”.

LLMs are compression and prediction. The most efficient way to (lossfully) compress most things is by actually understanding them. Not saying LLMs are doing a good job of that, but that is the fundamental mechanism here.

Where’s the proof that efficient compression results in “understanding”? Is there a rigorous model or theorem, or did you just make this up?

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#307

Post by quantummagic »

littlestymaar wrote: post #303
quantummagic wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And even so, it shows remarkable effectiveness already.

Like a car engine or a combine. The problem isn't the effectiveness of the tool for its purpose, it's the religion around it.

We seem to be talking past one another. All I was talking about was the facts of how these systems perform, without any reverence about it at all.

But to your point, I do see a lot of people very emotionally and psychologically committed to pointing out how deeply magical humans are, and how impossible we are to replicate in silicon. We have a religion about ourselves; we truly do have main character syndrome. It's why we mistakenly thought the earth was at the center of the universe for eons. But even with that disproved, our self-importance remains boundless.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#308

Post by marcosdumay »

ptidhomme wrote: post #290
patrickmay wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a model of language, not of the world.

A model of language is a model of the world, else it being pure gibberish.

A model of language is a model of a tiny specialized part of the world: language.

And if anybody gets annoyed that my comment is tautological, get annoyed by the people that made the comment necessary.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#309

Post by balamatom »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #199
balamatom wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely a stream of words. My "abstract thoughts" are a stream of words too, they just don't get sounded out. Tbf I'd rather they weren't there in the first place. But bodies which refuse to harbor an "interiority" are fast-tracked to destruction because they can't suf^W^W^W be productive. Funny movie scene from somewhere. The sergeant is drilling the troops: "You, private! What do you live for!", and expects…

Hmm, seems unlikely. They are not sounded out part is true, sure, but I question whether 'abstract thoughts' can be so easily dismissed as mere words. edit: come to think of it and I am asking this for a reason: do you hear your abstract thoughts?

>do you hear your abstract thoughts?

Most of the fucking time, and I would prefer that I didn't. I even wrote that, lol.

I don't think they're really "mine", either. It's just all the stuff I heard somewhere, coalescing into potential verbalizations in response to perceiving my surroundings or introspecting my memory.

If you are a materialist positivist, well sure, the process underlying all that is some bunch of neural activation patterns or whatever; the words remain the qualia in which that process is available to my perception.

It's all cuz I grew up in a cargo cult - where not presenting the correct passwords would result in denial of sustenance, shelter, and eventually bodily integrity. While presenting the correct passwords had sufficient intimidation value to advance one's movement towards the "mock airbase" (i.e. the feeder and/or pleasure center activation button as provided during the given timeframe).

Furthermore - regardless whether I've been historically afforded any sort of choice in how to conceptualize my own thought processes, or indeed whether to have those in the first place - any entity which has actual power to determine my state of existence (think institutions, businesses, gangs, particularly capable individuals - all sorts of autonomous corpora) has no choice but to interpret me as either a sequence of words, a sequence of numbers, or some other symbol sequence (e.g. the ones printed on my identity documents, the ones recorded in my bank's database, or the metadata gathered from my online represence).

My first-person perspective, being constitutionally inaccessible to such entities, does not have practical significance to them, and is thus elided from the process of "self-determination". As far as anyone's concerned, "I" am a particular sequence of that anyone's preferred representational symbols. For example if you relate to me on the personal level, I will probably be a sequence of your emotions. Either way, what I may hypothetically be to myself is practically immaterial and therefore not a valid object of communication.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#310

Post by ptidhomme »

marcosdumay wrote: post #308
ptidhomme wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A model of language is a model of the world, else it being pure gibberish.

A model of language is a model of a tiny specialized part of the world: language. And if anybody gets annoyed that my comment is tautological, get annoyed by the people that made the comment necessary.

When you ask an LLM a question about cars, it needs an inner representation of what a car is (how imperfect it may be) to answer your question. A model of "language" as you want to define it would output a grammatically correct wall of text that goes nowhere.
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