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AI capability isn't humanness

research.roundtable.ai

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Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#41

Post by xg15 »

> LLMs process information very differently. They look at everything in parallel, all at once, and can use the whole context in one shot. Their “memory” is stored across billions of tiny weights, and they retrieve information by matching patterns, not by searching through memories like we do. Researchers have shown that LLMs automatically learn specific little algorithms (like copying patterns or doing simple lookups), all powered by huge matrix multiplications running in parallel rather than slow, step-by-step reasoning.

I think this is incorrect on two accounts: Yes, transformers and individual layers are parallel, but the entire network is not. On a first level, it's obviously sequential over generated tokens - but even generation of a single token is sequential in the number of layers that the information travels through.

Both those constraints are comparable to the way humans think I believe. (The human brain doesn't have neatly organized layers, but it does have "pathways" where certain brain regions project into other brain regions)

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#42

Post by dpark »

emp17344 wrote: post #24
dpark wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s unlikely sensory data contributes to intelligence in human beings. This is clearly untrue. All information a human ever receives is through sensory data. Unless your position is that the intelligence of a brain that was grown in a vat with no inputs would be equivalent to that of a normal person. Now, does rotating a coffee mug and feeling its weight, seeing it from different angles, etc. improve intelligence?…

>Unless your position is that the intelligence of a brain that was grown in a vat with no inputs would be equivalent to that of a normal person. Entirely possible - we just don’t know. The closest thing we have to a real world case study is Helen Keller and other people with significant sensory impairments, who are demonstrably unimpaired in a general cognitive sense, and in many cases more cognitively capable than t…

I think you are trying to argue for a very abstract notion of intelligence that is divorced from any practical measurement. I don’t know how else to interpret your claim that inputs are divorced from intelligence (and that we don’t know if the brain in a jar is intelligent).

This seems like a very philosophical standpoint, rather than practical. And I guess that’s fine, but I feel like the implication is that if an LLM is in some way intelligent, then it was exactly as intelligent before training. So we are talking about “potential intelligence“? Does a stack of GPU’s have “intelligence”?

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#43

Post by measurablefunc »

ACCount37 wrote: post #39
measurablefunc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's not weird, it's actually very mundane.

If your takeaway from the LLM breakthrough is "abstract thinking is actually quite mundane", then at least you're heading in the right direction. Some people are straight up in denial.

You have no idea what abstract thinking actually is but you are convinced the illusion presented by an LLM is it. Your ontology is confused but I doubt you are going to figure out why b/c that would require some abstract thinking which you're convinced is no more special than matrix arithmetic.

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#44

Post by omneity »

minraws wrote: post #38
omneity wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While an LLM is trained on trillions of tokens to acquire its capabilities, it does not actively retain or recall the vast majority of it, and often enough is not able to make deductive reasoning either (e.g. X owns Y does not necessarily translate to Y belongs to X). The acquired knowledge is a lot less uniform than you’re proposing and in fact is full of gaps a human would never make. And more critically, it is not…

I think you are proposing something that's orthogonal to the OP's point. They mentioned the training data is much higher for an LLM, LLM's recall not being uniform was never in question. No one expects compression to be without loss when you scale below knowledge entropy that exists in your training set. I am not saying LLMs do simple compression but just pointing a mathematical certainity. (And I think you don't nee…

The way I understood OP’s point is that because LLMs have been trained on the entirety of humanity’s knowledge (exemplified by the internet), then surely they know as much as the entirety of humanity. A cursory use of an LLM shows this is obviously not true, but I am also raising the point that LLMs are only summoning a limited subset of that knowledge at a time when answering any given prompt, bringing them closer to a human polymath than an omniscient entity, and larger LLMs only seem to improve on the “depth” of that polymath knowledge rather than the breadth of it.

Again just my impression from exposure to many LLMs at various states of training (my last sentence was not an appeal to expertise)

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#45

Post by mylifeandtimes »

gmuslera wrote: post #10

LLMs are language models. We interact with them using language, all of that, but also only that. That doesn't mean that they have "common sense", context, same motivations, agency, or even reasoning like us. But as we interact with other people using mostly language, and since the start of internet a lot of those interactions happen in way similar to how we interact with AI, the difference is not so obvious. We are f…

> But as we interact with other people using mostly language,

Didn't they used to say that 90% of communication is non-verbal?

Look, that was a while ago, when people met IRL. So maybe not as true today.

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#46

Post by ACCount37 »

measurablefunc wrote: post #43
ACCount37 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your takeaway from the LLM breakthrough is "abstract thinking is actually quite mundane", then at least you're heading in the right direction. Some people are straight up in denial.

You have no idea what abstract thinking actually is but you are convinced the illusion presented by an LLM is it. Your ontology is confused but I doubt you are going to figure out why b/c that would require some abstract thinking which you're convinced is no more special than matrix arithmetic.

If I wanted worthless pseudo-philosophical drivel, I'd ask GPT-2 for some. Otherwise? Functional similarity at this degree is more than good enough for me.

By now, I am fully convinced that this denial is "AI effect" in action. Which, in turn, is nothing but cope and seethe driven by human desire to remain Very Special.

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#47

Post by ACCount37 »

hathawsh wrote: post #40
ACCount37 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which must be doing some heavy lifting. Humans ship with all the priors evolution has managed to cram into them. LLMs have to rediscover all of it from scratch just by looking at an awful lot of data.

OTOH, all that data is built on patterns that evolved from many years of evolution, so I think the LLM benefits from that evolution also.

Sure, but LLMs are trying to build the algorithms of the human mind backwards, converge on similar functionality based on just some of the inputs and outputs. This isn't an efficient or a lossless process.

The fact that they can pull it off to this extent was a very surprising finding.

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#48

Post by measurablefunc »

ACCount37 wrote: post #46
measurablefunc wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no idea what abstract thinking actually is but you are convinced the illusion presented by an LLM is it. Your ontology is confused but I doubt you are going to figure out why b/c that would require some abstract thinking which you're convinced is no more special than matrix arithmetic.

If I wanted worthless pseudo-philosophical drivel, I'd ask GPT-2 for some. Otherwise? Functional similarity at this degree is more than good enough for me. By now, I am fully convinced that this denial is "AI effect" in action. Which, in turn, is nothing but cope and seethe driven by human desire to remain Very Special.

Which matrix arithmetic did you perform to find that gold nugget of insight?

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#49

Post by skybrian »

I like "ghosts" as a simple metaphor for what you chat with when you chat with AI. Usually we chat with Casper the Friendly Ghost, but there are a lot of other ghosts that can be conjured up.

Some people are obsessed with chatting with ghosts. It seems like a rational adult couldn't be seriously harmed by chatting with a ghost, but there are news reports showing that some people get possessed.

It's a better metaphor than parrots, anyway.

more:

https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/animals-vs-ghosts/

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#50

Post by emp17344 »

dpark wrote: post #42
emp17344 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unless your position is that the intelligence of a brain that was grown in a vat with no inputs would be equivalent to that of a normal person. Entirely possible - we just don’t know. The closest thing we have to a real world case study is Helen Keller and other people with significant sensory impairments, who are demonstrably unimpaired in a general cognitive sense, and in many cases more cognitively capable than t…

I think you are trying to argue for a very abstract notion of intelligence that is divorced from any practical measurement. I don’t know how else to interpret your claim that inputs are divorced from intelligence (and that we don’t know if the brain in a jar is intelligent). This seems like a very philosophical standpoint, rather than practical. And I guess that’s fine, but I feel like the implication is that if an L…

Intelligence isn’t rigorously defined or measurable, so any conversation about the nature of intelligence will be inherently philosophical. Like it or not, intelligence just is an abstract concept.

I’m trying to illustrate that the constraints that apply to LLMs don’t necessarily apply to humans. I don’t believe human intelligence is reliant upon sensory input.

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