Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

addxorrol.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 432 posts

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#371

Post by lukeschlather »

tdullien wrote: post #274
lukeschlather wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Meteorological simulations don't contain detailed state machines that are intended to encode how a human would behave in a specific situation.

And if it were just language, I would say, sure maybe this is more limited. But it seems like tensors can do a lot more than that. Poorly, but that may primarily be a hardware limitation. It also might be something about the way they work, but not something terribly different from what they are doing.

Also, I might talk about a meteorological simulation in terms of whatever it was intended to simulate.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#372

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

elliotto wrote: post #368
tdullien wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. What's the difference, in your perception, between an LLM and a large-scale meteorological simulation, if there is any? If you're willing to ascribe the possibility of consciousness to any complex-enough computation of a recurrence equation (and hence to something like ... "earth"), I'm willing to agree that under that definition LLMs might be conscious. :)

My personal views are an animist / panpsychist / pancomputationalist combination drawing most of my inspiration from the works of Joscha Bach and Stephen Wolfram ( https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-is-consciou... ). I think that the underlying substrate of the universe is consciousness, and human and animal and computer minds result in structures that are able to present and tell narratives about thems…

I'm a mind-body dualist and just happened to come across this list, and I think it's an interesting one. #1 we can answer Yes to, #2 through #6 are all strictly unknowable. The best we might be able to claim is some probability distribution that these things may or may not be conscious.

The intuitive one looks like 100% chance > P(#2 is conscious) > P(#6) > P(#3) > P(#4) > P(#5) > 0% chance, but the problem is solipsism is a real motherfucker and it's entirely possible qualia is meted out based on some wacko distance metric that couldn't possibly feel intuitive. There are many more such metrics out there than there are intuitive ones, so a prior of indifference doesn't help us much. Any ordering is theoretically possible to be ontologically privileged, we simply have no way of knowing.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#373

Post by chaps »

perching_aix wrote: post #322
chaps wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and what I was trying to do is learn a bit more about that alternative intuition of yours. Because it doesn't sound all that different from what's described in the OP, or what anyone can trivially glean from taking a 101 course on AI at university or similar.

So what? :)

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#374

Post by elliotto »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #372
elliotto wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal views are an animist / panpsychist / pancomputationalist combination drawing most of my inspiration from the works of Joscha Bach and Stephen Wolfram ( https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-is-consciou... ). I think that the underlying substrate of the universe is consciousness, and human and animal and computer minds result in structures that are able to present and tell narratives about thems…

I'm a mind-body dualist and just happened to come across this list, and I think it's an interesting one. #1 we can answer Yes to, #2 through #6 are all strictly unknowable. The best we might be able to claim is some probability distribution that these things may or may not be conscious. The intuitive one looks like 100% chance > P(#2 is conscious) > P(#6) > P(#3) > P(#4) > P(#5) > 0% chance, but the problem is solips…

I think you've fallen into the trap of Descartes' Deus deceptor! Not only is #1 the only question from my list we can definitely answer yes to, but due to this demon this question is actually the only postulate of anything at all that we can answer yes to. All else could be an illusion.

Assuming we escape the null space of solipsism, and can reason about anything at all, we can think about what a model might look like that generates some ordering of P(#). Of course, without a hypothetical consciousness detector (one might believe or not believe that this could exist) P(#) cannot be measured, and therefore will fall outside of the realm of a scientific hypothesis deduction model. This is often a point of contention for rationality-pilled science-cels.

Some of these models might be incoherent - a model that denies P(#1) doesn't seem very good. A model that denies P(#2) but accepts P(#3) is a bit strange. We can't verify these, but we do need to operate under one (or in your suggestion, operate under a probability distribution of these models) if we want to make coherent statements about what is and isn't conscious.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#375

Post by DennisP »

CharlesW wrote: post #10
szvsw wrote: post #3

So the author’s core view is ultimately a Searle-like view: a computational, functional, syntactic rules based system cannot reproduce a mind. Plenty of people will agree, plenty of people will disagree, and the answer is probably unknowable and just comes down to whatever axioms you subscribe to in re: consciousness. The author largely takes the view that it is more productive for us to ignore any anthropomorphic re…

> The flip side of all this is of course the idea that there is still something emergent, unplanned, and mind- like. For people who have only a surface-level understanding of how they work, yes. A nuance of Clarke's law that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is that the bar is different for everybody and the depth of their understanding of the technology in question. That bar is s…

I've seen some of the world's top AI researchers talk about the emergent behaviors of LLMs. It's been a major topic over the past couple years, ever since Microsoft's famous paper on the unexpected capabilities of GPT4. And they still have little understanding of how it happens.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#376

Post by sothatsit »

cmiles74 wrote: post #340
sothatsit wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think anthropomorphizing LLMs is useful, not just a marketing tactic. A lot of intuitions about how humans think map pretty well to LLMs, and it is much easier to build intuitions about how LLMs work by building upon our intuitions about how humans think than by trying to build your intuitions from scratch. Would this question be clear for a human? If so, it is probably clear for an LLM. Did I provide enough contex…

Take a look at the judge’s ruling in this Anthropic case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44488331 Here’s a quote from the ruling: “First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16). But Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for training o…

> First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16).

It sounds like the Authors were the one who brought this argument, not Anthropic? In which case, it seems like a big blunder on their part.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#377

Post by 2snakes »

orbital-decay wrote: post #124

>I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magical human-like powers to something that - in my mind - is just MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities. I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magical powers that can never be replicated to to something that - in my mind - is just a biological robot driven by a SNN with a bunch of hardwired stuff. Let alone attributing "human intell…

There is this thing called Brahman in Hinduism that is interesting to juxtapose when it comes to sentience, and monism.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#378

Post by nomel »

grey-area wrote: post #120
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #117

I 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…

On the contrary, anthropomorphism IMO is the main problem with narratives around LLMs - people are genuinely talking about them thinking and reasoning when they are doing nothing of that sort (actively encouraged by the companies selling them) and it is completely distorting discussions on their use and perceptions of their utility.

> people are genuinely talking about them thinking and reasoning when they are doing nothing of that sort

Do you believe thinking/reasoning is a binary concept? If not, do you think the current top LLM are before or after the 50% mark? What % do you think they're at? What % range do you think humans exhibit?

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#379

Post by positron26 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #332
positron26 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most certainly the conversation is extremely political. There are not simply different points of view. There are competitive, gladiatorial opinions ready to ambush anyone not wearing the right colors. It's a situation where the technical conversation is drowning. I suppose this war will be fought until people are out of energy, and if reason has no place, it is reasonable to let others tire themselves out reiterating…

If this tech is going to be half as impactful as its proponents predict, then I'd say it's still under-politicized. Of course the politics around it doesn't have to be knee-jerk mudslinging, but it's no surprise that politics enters the picture when the tech can significantly transform society.

Go politicize it on Reddit, preferably on a political sub and not a tech sub. On this forum, I would like to expect a lot more intelligent conversation.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#380

Post by BoorishBears »

tdullien wrote: post #263
barrkel wrote: post #5

The 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)

You wrote this article and you're not familiar with hidden states?
Post reply on HN