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LLMs understand nullability

dmodel.ai

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Re: LLMs understand nullability

#41

Post by darkerside »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #36
wongarsu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We spent 40 years moving the goal posts on what constitutes AI. Now we seem to have found an AI worthy of that title and instead start moving the goal posts on "consciousness", "understanding" and "intelligence".

> Now we seem to have found an AI worthy of that title and instead start moving the goal posts on "consciousness", "understanding" and "intelligence". We didn't "find" AI, we invented systems that some people want to call AI, and some people aren't convinced it meets the bar It is entirely reasonable for people to realize we set the bar too low when it is a bar we invented

What should the bar be? Should it be higher than it is for the average human? Or even the least intelligent human?

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#42

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

wongarsu wrote: post #30
nativeit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, this is more about the discussion of this article than the article itself. The moving goal posts that acolytes use to declare consciousness are becoming increasingly cult-y.

We spent 40 years moving the goal posts on what constitutes AI. Now we seem to have found an AI worthy of that title and instead start moving the goal posts on "consciousness", "understanding" and "intelligence".

> We spent 40 years moving the goal posts on what constitutes AI.

Who is "we"?

I think of "AI" as a pretty all-encompassing term. ChatGPT is AI, but so is the computer player in the 1995 game Command and Conquer, among thousands of other games. Heck, I might even call the ghosts in Pac-man "AI", even if their behavior is extremely simple, predictable, and even exploitable once you understand it.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#43

Post by fwip »

robotresearcher wrote: post #7
EncomLab wrote: post #2

This is like claiming a photorestor controlled night light "understands when it is dark" or that a bimetallic strip thermostat "understands temperature". You can say those words, and it's syntactically correct but entirely incorrect semantically.

You declare this very plainly without evidence or argument, but this is an age-old controversial issue. It’s not self-evident to everyone, including philosophers.

Philosophers are often the last people to consider something to be settled. There's very little in the universe that they can all agree is true.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#44

Post by sega_sai »

One thing that is exciting in the text is an attempt to go away from describing whether LLM 'understands' which I would argue an ill posed question, but instead rephrase it in terms of something that can actually be measured.

It would be good to list a few possible ways of interpreting 'understanding of code'. It could possibly include: 1) Type inference for the result 2) nullability 3) runtime asymptotics 4) What the code does

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#45

Post by fwip »

handfuloflight wrote: post #38
mubou wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't approximate human thought , though. They approximate language . That's it. Please, I'm begging you, go read some papers and watch some videos about machine learning and how LLMs actually work. It is not "thinking." I fully realize neural networks can approximate human thought -- but we are not there yet, and when we do get there, it will be something that is not an LLM, because an LLM is not capable of tha…

Isn't language expressed thought?

Language can be a (lossy) serialization of thought, yes. But language is not thought, nor inherently produced by thought. Most people agree that a process randomly producing grammatically correct sentences is not thinking.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#46

Post by drodgers »

nativeit wrote: post #28
nativeit wrote: post #26

We’re all just elementary particles being clumped together in energy gradients, therefore my little computer project is sentient—this is getting absurd.

Sorry, this is more about the discussion of this article than the article itself. The moving goal posts that acolytes use to declare consciousness are becoming increasingly cult-y.

Who cares about consciousness? This is just a mis-direction of the discussion. Ditto for 'intelligence' and 'understanding'.

Let's talk about what they can do and where that's trending.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#47

Post by LordDragonfang »

nativeit wrote: post #24
fallingknife wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or like saying the photoreceptors in your retina understand when it's dark. Or like claiming the temperature sensitive ion channels in your peripheral nervous system understand how hot it is.

Describing the mechanics of nervous impulses != describing consciousness.

Which is the point, since describing the mechanics of LLM architectures do not inherently grant knowledge of whether or not it is "conscious"

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#48

Post by acchow »

wongarsu wrote: post #30
nativeit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, this is more about the discussion of this article than the article itself. The moving goal posts that acolytes use to declare consciousness are becoming increasingly cult-y.

We spent 40 years moving the goal posts on what constitutes AI. Now we seem to have found an AI worthy of that title and instead start moving the goal posts on "consciousness", "understanding" and "intelligence".

> Now we seem to have found an AI worthy of that title and instead start moving the goal posts on "consciousness"

The goalposts already differentiated between "totally human-like" vs "actually conscious"

See also Philosophical Zombie thought experiment from the 70s.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#49

Post by LordDragonfang »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #19
aSanchezStern wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people don't think we have any good evidence that our brains aren't essentially the same thing: a stochastic statistical model that produces outputs based on inputs.

Thats probably the case 99% of the time. But that 1% is pretty important. For example, they are dismal at math problems that aren't just slight variations of problems they've seen before. Here's one by blackandredpenn where ChatGPT insisted the solution to problem that could be solved by high school / talented middle school students was correct, even after trying to convince it it was wrong. https://youtu.be/V0jhP7gi…

> For example, they are dismal at math problems that aren't just slight variations of problems they've seen before.

I know plenty of teachers who would describe their students the exact same way. The difference is mostly one of magnitude (of delta in competence), not quality.

Also, I think it's important to note that by "could be solved by high school / talented middle school students" you mean "specifically designed to challenge the top ~1% of them". Because if you say "LLMs only manage to beat 99% of middle schoolers at math", the claim seems a whole lot different.

Re: LLMs understand nullability

#50

Post by arkh »

wongarsu wrote: post #30
nativeit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, this is more about the discussion of this article than the article itself. The moving goal posts that acolytes use to declare consciousness are becoming increasingly cult-y.

We spent 40 years moving the goal posts on what constitutes AI. Now we seem to have found an AI worthy of that title and instead start moving the goal posts on "consciousness", "understanding" and "intelligence".

The original meaning of mechanical Turk is about a chess hoax and how it managed to make people think it was a thinking machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

The current LLM anthropomorphism may soon be known as the silicon Turk. Managing to make people think they're AI.

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