This would be a masterpiece if it was half as long, the second half is not as convincing or compelling.
They’re made out of weights
371–380 of 739 posts
Re: They’re made out of weights
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
I come back to this every so often as well. After so many years of looking at Markov chain outputs that almost looked like they made sense or chatbot systems rewriting your sentence back at you, software which can simply talk is a heady thing.
I would say that the LLM is something completly different especiayll as its not a normal algorithm but is very close to what brains do.
Ah yes, matrix multiplication is "not a normal algorithm", surely.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#373You can take the weights and model description, write them down on a notebook, then, by hand, compute the next token. Try to do the same with meat.
> OpenWorm is an international open science project for the purpose of simulating the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans at the cellular level.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#374Weights are the new electrolytes.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Reflections on trusting trust” is the paper that posits a compiler which is edited once so that when it compiles a program, it adds a security vulnerability to it, and when it compiles it’s own source code, it adds this edit into itself. Then it is used to compile its own source code once. Then this edit is removed. Now any study of the program or compiler source code will not show any vulnerability, but compiling t…
> Accidentally stumbling on a mechanism that is simple enough to be recreated with every human birth might be possible, accidentally stumbling on a mechanism that took evolution billions of years to find and which it has hung onto by copying it and has never recreated it from scratch, could be much less likely, in a much bigger search space. Maybe, but you could make the same argument about anything artificial.
I don't know what point you're making; I'm making the point that it might be harder to discover what makes humans human, than is often suggested. You can't make the same claim about "anything artificial", we know how to dry muddy clay into clay bricks and stack them into a brick wall, and that can be taught from scratch to new people in hours.
You can make a similar argument with a company like ASML where their secret sauce is the organisational ability to fine-tune 100,000 components into a precision Silicon-wafer etching machine. You're far more likely to accidentally stumble upon "how to recreate a mud hut" than "how to recreate ASML". Okay, and...?
Re: They’re made out of weights
#376Earlier 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…
Quantum field effects? You don't need these, IMHO, if you look at how highly parallel things seem to work in brains.
Marvin Minsky's theory of a "Society of Mind" describes a (highly) distributed model of the mind. Which BTW, always reminds me of the first Shrek movie, where the donkey jumps up and down, shouting "Take me! Take me!" to Shrek. That's similar to what I observe when I'm undecided but two instances of "sub-processes" (or agents as Minsky calls them) of my mind try to get attention.
Daniel Dennett similarly gives a distributed model of consciousness. Where many parallel "processes" are at work, competing and "observing" each other. And this parallelism is happening with a much, much higher degree than any of our computers parallelism.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is also an epistemological assumption that prevails, and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works. It's good that it doesn't matter. Stochastic gradient descent works (or doesn't work) regardless of whether we know how the brain does its thing.
we know the brain does not use gradient descent. (i agree it doesn't matter)
How do we know this?
Re: They’re made out of weights
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was having a hard time pinning down what bothered me about this but I think you put it pretty well. It draws an analogy between us and the skeptical aliens in the original story which feel silly to us, so the obvious implication is that we're being as silly as they were. But it doesn't really give a reason to accept the analogy, it just asserts it. There's a big difference between a whole civilization and a piece o…
The bit that lost me quite early in the piece was >"A side effect. You're asking me to believe in sentient weights." Huh? Did I miss that logical jump? Genuine question, maybe I'm not clueing into something here.
It's a poor adaptation of the line in the original story (https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...)
The original:
>That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat.
I think it was adapted by an LLM which didn't quite get the meaning.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd expand a little bit to say inevitably emergent property. That is to say, if you create a sufficiently complex information-processing network, some level of consciousness will result. With regards to current AI, we're a fair way away from building something with enough connections, but we'll get there. One thing that gives me pause about the inevitability hypothesis is that the type of connection, or manner of inf…
> That is to say, if you create a sufficiently complex information-processing network, some level of consciousness will result. Why is that?
Aye, that's the question, and we don't know: everything in this sub-thread my comment kicked off is speculation. The thing is that several large groups of (or at least led by) fundamentally reckless people are racing to build machines that will test these hypotheses, with little regard for the consequences. The rest of us are scrabbling around in their wake wondering what's going to happen next.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#380This would be a masterpiece if it was half as long, the second half is not as convincing or compelling.
It's nearly a line-by-line rephrasing of another story that's linked at the top. In the second half it takes less creative liberties and sticks closer and closer to the original meat-based text.