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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

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Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#381

Post by scarface_74 »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #320
scarface_74 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am saying that most people who come on HN and say “there is no such thing as serverless and there are servers somewhere” think they are sounding smart when they are adding nothing to the conversation. I’m sure you knew that your code was running on computers somewhere even when you first started and wasn’t running in a literal “cloud”. It’s about as tiring as people on HN who know just a little about LLMs thinking…

> I’m sure you knew that your code was running on computers somewhere even when you first started and wasn’t running in a literal “cloud”. Meh, I just knew that the browser would display HTML if I wrote it, and that uploading the HTML files made them available on my domain. I didn’t really think about where the files went, specifically. Try asking an average high school kid how cloud storage works. I doubt you’ll get…

If we can’t count on people on Hacker News to know that code runs on computers, what is this forum for?

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#382

Post by fenomas »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #320
scarface_74 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am saying that most people who come on HN and say “there is no such thing as serverless and there are servers somewhere” think they are sounding smart when they are adding nothing to the conversation. I’m sure you knew that your code was running on computers somewhere even when you first started and wasn’t running in a literal “cloud”. It’s about as tiring as people on HN who know just a little about LLMs thinking…

> I’m sure you knew that your code was running on computers somewhere even when you first started and wasn’t running in a literal “cloud”. Meh, I just knew that the browser would display HTML if I wrote it, and that uploading the HTML files made them available on my domain. I didn’t really think about where the files went, specifically. Try asking an average high school kid how cloud storage works. I doubt you’ll get…

> an invitation to beginning coders to think about

If that's how it's phrased, and it's in a spot where that's on-topic, then obviously nobody would mind.

This subthread is talking about cases where there's a technical conversation going on and somebody derails it to argue about terminology.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#383

Post by floam »

j0057 wrote: post #318
LeonardoTolstoy wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a submarine do? Submarine? I suppose you "drive" a submarine which is getting to the idea: submarines don't swim because ultimately they are "driven"? I guess the issue is we don't make up a new word for what submarines do, we just don't use human words. I think the above poster gets a little distracted by suggesting the models are creative which itself is disputed. Perhaps a better term, like above, would…

A submarine is a boat and boats sail.

Submarines dive.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#384

Post by pepa65 »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #21
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #16

My question: how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work. What seems intuitively logical to me is that we have brains evolved through evolutionary process via random mutations yielding in a structure that has its own evolutionary reward based algorithms designing it yielding a structure that at any point is trying to predict next actions to maximise survival/procreation, of course with a lot of s…

> My question: how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work. It is similar to how human brains operate. LLMs are the (current) culmination of at least 80 years of research on building computational models of the human brain.

Sorry, that's just complete bullshit. How LLMs work in no way models how processes in the human brain works.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#385

Post by medvezhenok »

lelanthran wrote: post #359
Xss3 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day a good friend of mine with mental health issues remarked that "his" chatgpt understands him better than most of his friends and gives him better advice than his therapist. It's going to take a lot to get him out of that mindset and frankly I'm dreading trying to compare and contrast imperfect human behaviour and friendships with a sycophantic AI.

> The other day a good friend of mine with mental health issues remarked that "his" chatgpt understands him better than most of his friends and gives him better advice than his therapist. The therapist thing might be correct, though. You can send a well-adjusted person to three renowned therapists and get three different reasons for why they need to continue sessions. No therapist ever says "Congratulations, you're p…

Yup, this problem is why I think all therapists should ideally know behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology (there is at least a plausibly objective measure there which is dissonance between the ancestral environment in which the brain developed and the modern day environment. And at least some amount of psychological problems can be explained by it).

I am a fan of the « Beat Your Genes » podcast, and while some of the prescriptions can be a bit heavy handed, most feel intuitively right. It’s approaching human problems as intelligent mammal problems, as opposed to something in a category of its own.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#386

Post by msvana »

This reminds me of the idea that LLMs are simulators. Given the current state (the prompt + the previously generated text), they generate the next state (the next token) using rules derived from training data.

As simulators, LLMs can simulate many things, including agents that exhibit human-like properties. But LLMs themselves are not agents.

More on this idea here: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/agi-s...

This perspective makes a lot of sense to me. Still, I wouldn't avoid anthropomorphization altogether. First, in some cases, it might be a useful mental tool to understand some aspect of LLMs. Second, there is a lot of uncertainty about how LLMs work, so I would stay epistemically humble. The second argument applies in the opposite direction as well: for example, it's equally bad to say that LLMs are 100% conscious.

On the other hand, if someone argues against anthropomorphizing LLMs, I would avoid phrasing it as: "It's just matrix multiplication." The article demonstrates why this is a bad idea pretty well.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#388

Post by donkeybeer »

godelski wrote: post #363
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't a simple brute force. When Claude was working this morning, it was pretty clearly only playing a file when it actually needed to see packets get decoded, otherwise it would simply open and close the document. Similarly, it would only seek or fast forward when it was debugging specific issues related to those actions. And it even "knew" which test files to open for specific channel layouts. Yes this is still…

> It wasn't a simple brute force. I think you misunderstood me. "Simple" is the key word here, right? You agree that it is still under the broad class of "brute force"? I'm not saying Claude is naively brute forcing. In fact, with lack of interpretibility of these machines it is difficult to say what kind of optimization it is doing and how complex that it (this was a key part tbh). My point was to help with this > I…

I have no idea why some people take so much offense to rhe fact humans are just another machine, there's no reason why another machine can't surpass it here as in all other aveneus machines have already. Many of the reasons people give for llms not being conscious are just as applicable to humans too.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#389

Post by seanhunter »

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…

Exactly. We use anthropomorphic language absolutely all the time when describing different processes for this exact reason - it is a helpful abstraction that allows us to easily describe what’s going on at a high level.

“My headphones think they’re connected, but the computer can’t see them”.

“The printer thinks it’s out of paper, but it’s not”.

“The optimisation function is trying to go down nabla f”.

“The parking sensor on the car keeps going off because it’s afraid it’s too close to the wall”.

“The client is blocked, because it still needs to get a final message from the server”.

…and one final one which I promise you is real because I overheard it “I’m trying to airdrop a photo, but our phones won’t have sex”.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#390

Post by perching_aix »

chaps wrote: post #373
perching_aix wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :)

Nothing? """:)"""

Was just confusing because your phrasing implied different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle

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