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They’re made out of weights

maxleiter.com

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#351

Post by raincole »

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

> subjective experience and agency, amongst other things

In other words, souls? I'm sorry if that sounds accusing, but to me it sounds like you're talking about souls that are independent to the physical world, just with more 'scientific-y' wording.

(I fully understand that some people believe souls exist.)

Re: They’re made out of weights

#352

Post by bawana »

I wonder which AI wrote this story? If you feed this story to each model and ask each if they wrote it, would each reply in the affirmative?

Can an AI recognize its own output? Is its sense of time limited by its context window? Or is this the fundamental difference between ai and humanity - a sense of self?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#353

Post by tim333 »

foobarian wrote: post #348
lobofta wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vegan ML engineer here. In total agreement with you. People are just moving the goal post to keep themselves protected from the obvious conclusion: there is nothing really all that special about us humans. Perhaps subjective experience is simply the internal state of a self supervised continuous learning algorithm and we don't like that conclusion very much.

It's too bad it's so hard to pin down a definition, but in practice I feel like most animals with brains experience degrees of qualia. Some mornings after a night of poor sleep when I wake up super-slow I wonder if that's how animals experience thinking. My biggest problem with "brains are machines" arguments is that there is a risk there is unknown physics at work that is not representable as a Turing machine. What…

They know quite a lot about how neurons work to the extent they can replace bits of brains with artificial retinas or cochleas and interface with devices like neuralink. It's unlikely there is a quantum field effect of the type you mention powering things, although of course atoms and the like obey quantum mechanics in the normal way.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#354

Post by yencabulator »

ozgung wrote: post #134
phire wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tokeniser is not a dictionary. It doesn't provide definitions, or give the LLM any kind of mapping at all. At best, it's a wordlist. It gives the LLM some idea of what humans consider to be common words. But it doesn't tell the LLM anything at all about those words. And it's not even comprehensive, many words map to multiple tokens. Nor is it exclusively words, some of those tokens are punctuation, or modifiers,…

I see people give too much importance to specific engineering design choices of the current generation of LLMs. Tokenizer is not an absolutely essential part of the system. It’s just and adapter for text input/output. It can be eliminated completely and model can use bytes directly. I think the short story captures this well. Weights (connections) are the essential and philosophically important part. They do the thin…

A tokenizer is roughly and approximately Huffman-coding sequences of input (bytes of English etc) into shorter sequences (list of tokens), as a performance optimization.

As you said, it's not in any way intrinsic to the LLM, though it may be a very necessary optimization on today's hardware.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#355

Post by ACCount37 »

sixeyes wrote: post #343
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two meanings to "the body is a complex machine" and I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. 1) The abstract "dictionary" version: It'd be technically correct to say that the body is a machine under the definition of "A machine is a thermodynamic system that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action.". 2) But there's also the less abstract/technical: "The body is alike…

oh yeah! i recall a paper linked here not so long ago, where it was shown that the dendrites of a neuron do computations themselves. The "weight per neuron" is very simplistic then. At the very least, each actual neuron is a network of weights. https://www.quantamagazine.org/neural-dendrites-reveal-their...

I'm partial to "modern ML weights are much closer to 1:1 capacity mapping to synapse count than to neuron count". A single biological neuron is closer to 100 or even 1000 weights worth of ANN than to 1 weight worth of ANN.

In which case: modern LLMs are still running in a capacity-starved regime!

Even Mythos 5, the 10-trillion monster LLM, the scaling law boogeyman, the harbinger of Vera Rubin NVL72, doesn't quite rise to 100T-to-1000T of synapses. Anything the light of today's AI touches still lives in the shadow of what evolution has managed to cram into a single human skull.

We're arguing about the limitations of AI while our best AIs are still very subhuman in the scale dimension. The one dimension we know how to push. And it's already this tight.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#356

Post by bobson381 »

IanCal wrote: post #300
larodi wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago. The whole idea of sentience "on the other side of the wire" is wrong, as there is neither wire, nor other side. We think there is, but the DB just expounds the query and repurposes this information into views, that we give notion and meaning to. LLMs are the same, do not be mistaken. One other importa…

> If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago. If we agree that silicon can perform calculations, then beaches must have been working out log tables long ago.

a la https://xkcd.com/505/

Re: They’re made out of weights

#357

Post by maxbond »

iainmerrick wrote: post #298
maxbond wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said you couldn't write any arbitrary compelling story about a toaster, I said that this specific hypothetical story, where you rewrite "They're made of meat!" to be about a toaster, would not be compelling. I am doing my best to communicate with you but to be honest you are not hearing me (across both responses), and I am out of words.

Just wanted to say, I appreciate your patience and good sense in this thread. It's difficult to tell who's trolling -- probably best to go with the charitable assumption that everyone is honestly trying to convey their opinion, but mostly talking past each other. Unfortunately these discussions about the nature of consciousness never go anywhere useful. I think I'm probably in the same boat as you, roughly: a) LLMs a…

I don't think I was quite as patient as I should have been, but I do appreciate it.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#358

Post by CuriouslyC »

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

The problem with the stuff you cite is that it is coming from consciousness via an anthropomorphic perspective. The priors baked in are poisoning the logic.

The question we have to answer is "Why do we think we're magical matter uniquely blessed with consciousness?" If you go far enough down the rabbit hole on that question, the answer you will come to is either "we're not" or "because god" (with a lot of pseudo-scientific bullshit wrapped around the "because god" to make it palatable for the nonreligious).

Panpsychism (or a deeper form, such as idealism) is actually the solution favored strongly by Occam's Razor over the variants of "because god" (such as magical emergence).

Given panpsychism, AI is already conscious, like everything else, though no claims are made about the correlation between the internal experience of that consciousness and the tokens that are being printed on the screen.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#359

Post by yencabulator »

JdeBP wrote: post #150
simonh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A list of words isn’t a dictionary. What a dictionary adds over a list of words is all the relationships between the words needed to interpret them and use them, and all of that is in the weights.

We should tell the Unix people that they've been giving /usr/share/dict the wrong name for over three decades. (-:

I mean, they did, and we have, and we've also stopped doing that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_(Unix)

Re: They’re made out of weights

#360

Post by derektank »

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

>Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things

Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? They seem pretty machine-like to me. I certainly don’t think individual cells have any subjective experience or sense of agency. I would be curious to know where your intuitions diverge here, because if the mind is an emergent phenomenon from machines (cells) then it seems quite likely that a mind could emerge from other, different machines.

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