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ML promises to be profoundly weird

aphyr.com

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#391

Post by kokanee »

steveklabnik wrote: post #165
munificent wrote: post #150

There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…

As you know, I deeply respect you. Not trying to argue here, just provide my own perspective: > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? I write things for two main reasons: I feel like I have to. I need to create things. On some level, I would write stuff down even if nobody reads it (and I do do that…

That seems fine if you're not publishing content for a living. A lot of people are.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#392

Post by gritspants »

satvikpendem wrote: post #383
gritspants wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the idea that you (or I) might know better than the 'average people' to be incredibly conceited, arrogant, and frankly wrong. It is an attitude that gives you superiority for having achieved nothing.

I'm not sure what you're even talking about, you're putting words and an argument into my mouth which I never said.

Well then I owe you an apology. Perhaps I inferred too much about your point of view and understood too little, which is my own loss. Sorry.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#393

Post by joefourier »

RoddaWallPro wrote: post #351
joefourier wrote: post #312

> 2017’s Attention is All You Need was groundbreaking and paved the way for ChatGPT et al. Since then ML researchers have been trying to come up with new architectures, and companies have thrown gazillions of dollars at smart people to play around and see if they can make a better kind of model. However, these more sophisticated architectures don’t seem to perform as well as Throwing More Parameters At The Problem. P…

5 years ago was the beginning of 2021, just under a year after GPT3 was released (which was not good at doing anything useful). And that model was 175B params. GPT4 has been widely rumored to have 1.8 trillion params, which is 10x more, and was released 2 years after this "5 years ago" date that you are using here. So, to quote yourself here, "This is not true and unfortunately this significantly reduced the credibil…

In late 2021, GLaM had 1.2T parameters. It's difficult to find much use of it in the wild and while the benchmarks it uses are rather outdated, it has a HellaSwag score of 76.6% and WinoGrande of 73.5%. GPT3 had 64.3% and 70.2%.

Meanwhile, Gemma 2 9B, a model from July 2024 with 133x fewer parameters than GLaM, scores 82% and 80.6%. Hellaswag and WinoGrande aren't used in modern benchmarks, probably because they're too easy and largely memorised at this point.

And GPT-4 had 1.8T parameters sure, but it's noticeably worse than any modern model a fraction of the size, and the original incarnation was ridiculously expensive per token. And in any case, its number of parameters was only possible due using mixture-of-experts, which I would definitely classify as a sophisticated architecture as opposed to just throwing more parameters at a vanilla transformer. Even in 2021 GLaM was a MoE because the limits of scaling dense transformers had already been hit.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#394

Post by slibhb »

munificent wrote: post #150

There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…

> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article?

In the brave new world we're creating, people will write specifically for AI. If you can impress models so much that they "regurgitate" your work, then your work has achieved a kind of immortality.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#395

Post by drob518 »

simianwords wrote: post #284
drob518 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "LLMs still can't do X so it's an idiot" Let’s be careful. That’s a straw man. I don’t know anyone who says that. Aphyr says in the article that AIs can do things. But they have been marketed as “intelligent,” and I agree with Aphyr that the word is suggesting way more than AIs currently deliver. They do not reason and they do not think and are not truly intelligent. As the article says, they are big wads of linear…

> They do not reason How do you disprove it?

We know that they do not reason because we know the algorithm behind the curtain. The model is generating the next token via model weights and some randomness. That’s all. It not reasoning. Sometimes it has an appearance of reasoning, but not if you know how it works. It doesn’t matter that the model manufacturer marketing department slaps a “Reasoning!” sticker on the side of the model. It’s not actually doing that. As an analogy, sometimes a stage magician in Las Vegas makes it seem that he’s making a woman disappear and a tiger appear in her place, but we all know that’s not what is really happening; It’s just a clever trick.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#396

Post by squigz »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #385
Retric wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. This is just wildly incorrect. People started running out of trees during the early Iron Age. Woodlands have been a managed and often over exploited resource for a long time. Active agriculture vs passive woodlands vs animal grazing has been in constant tension for thousands…

> This is just wildly incorrect. from an global perspective it isn't. Some places sure, like Western Europe, who in some cases had completed enclosure, but remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point. Just google maps the north part of South America, even today there are large swathes of undeveloped land across it and back then it was considerably less exploited. At that time…

> remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point.

By White people*

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#397

Post by red75prime »

hedgehog wrote: post #258
rudhdb773b wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure the implementation details are different. I suppose I should have asked by what definition of "consciousness and agency" are today's LLMs (with proper tooling) not meeting? And if today's models aren't meeting your standard, what makes you think that future LLMs won't get there?

Given the large visible differences in behavior and construction, akin to the difference between a horse and a pickup truck, I would ask the reverse question: In what ways do LLMs meet the definition of having consciousness and agency? Veering into the realm of conjecture and opinion, I tend to think a 1:1 computer simulation of human cognition is possible, and transformers being computationally universal are thus th…

> In what ways do LLMs meet the definition of having consciousness and agency?

Agency: an ability to make decisions and act independently. Agentic pipelines are doing this.

Consciousness: something something feedback[1] (or a non-transferable feeling of being conscious, but that is useless for the discussion). Recurrent Processing Theory: A computation is conscious if it involves high-level processed representations being fed back into the low-level processors that generate it.

Tokens are being fed back into the transformer.

> that's a bit like looking at a bird in flight and imagining going to the moon: only tangentially related to engineering reality.

Is it? Vacuum of space is a tangible problem for aerodynamics-based propulsion. Which analogous thing do we have with ML? The scaled-up monkey brain[2] might not qualify as the moon.

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-pa...

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#398

Post by drob518 »

triceratops wrote: post #243
drob518 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, true. But does that really shift the argument much? An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything. They still won’t recite Harry Potter for you at full length and reading what the original author wrote is part of the pleasure.

> An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything But no real book nerd has read everything. Current law was designed for the capabilities of humans.

Sure, we could change current law, but I think that only forces an AI company to buy one copy of every book. I don’t think it gives any sort of royalty stream to anyone beyond that. Copyright is literally the right to make copies. Once I have acquired a copy, I can read it, summarize it, transform it, etc. in myriad ways.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#399

Post by drob518 »

zephen wrote: post #332
charcircuit wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Megacorporations making profit is not some evil that needs to be stopped. The economy is not zero sum.

> The economy is not zero sum. This is true. But it's not always positive sum, either. > Megacorporations making profit is not some evil that needs to be stopped. Externalities are a thing. It's not about the profit per se , but about how (a) the making of that profit might negatively impact others, and (b) the deployment of that profit in pursuit of rent-seeking and other antisocial behavior in order to insure its c…

Externalities are a thing, but this isn’t exactly dumping toxic waste into a river.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#400

Post by ai5iq »

computably wrote: post #289
steveklabnik wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you know, I deeply respect you. Not trying to argue here, just provide my own perspective: > Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? I write things for two main reasons: I feel like I have to. I need to create things. On some level, I would write stuff down even if nobody reads it (and I do do that…

> A lot of people read things, it changes their life, and their life is better. They may not even remember where they read these things. They don't produce citations all of the time. That's totally fine, and normal. I don't see LLMs as being any different. If I write an article about making code better, and ChatGPT trains on it, and someone, somewhere, needs help, and ChatGPT helps them? Win, as far as I'm concerned.…

The consent question gets weirder when agents have persistent memory. I run agents that accumulate context over weeks — beliefs extracted from observations, relationships with other agents. At what point does an agent's memory become its own work product vs. derivative of its training? There's no legal framework for that.
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