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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#461

Post by grantcas »

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…

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#462

Post by ambicapter »

hammock wrote: post #446
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…

The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally. There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner. There were more than enough fish until we developed the technology to pull massive indiscriminate amounts out of the ocean (and/or started polluting our rivers with industry). There was more than enough topsoil until we developed mechanized plows and artifi…

> The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally.

GP is saying it is not, and you're just reiterating what OP said as fact.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#463

Post by chairmansteve »

munificent wrote: post #173
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…

Agreed, totally! I still write and put stuff online. But it definitely feels different now. It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time. It's not enough to dissuade me from contribut…

There were a couple of threads on HN this week. "Do you have any unusual hobbies" and "How do you relax". I enjoyed them and was thinking of contributing. Then it occurred to me that my comments would be gold for targeting advertising at me. That is the distrust that has been bred by the data harvesters.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#464

Post by kilbey1 »

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…

I'm halfway through Foundation on Apple TV and this piece landed hard (you had me at Asimov) because of it. Asimov's whole deal with psychohistory is that you can predict what large populations do even when individuals are unpredictable. Seldon doesn't need anyone to be honest; he needs the math to converge on something real about how people actually behave.

LLMs are sort of the inverse of that. They produce text that looks like the statistical aggregate of human knowledge, but nothing underneath is converging on truth. Seldon's math worked because it modeled actual dynamics. LLMs work because they model plausible text. The "jagged competence frontier" Kingsbury describes: crushing multivariable calculus, failing a word problem, is exactly what you'd get from a system that learned the shape of correct answers without learning what makes them correct.

The part of Foundation that feels prescient right now isn't the predicting-the-future stuff. It's the part where everyone can see Empire is hollowing out and the response is to just...keep going. More spectacle, more confidence, less substance holding any of it up. Hmmm, wait...

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#465

Post by jychang »

ambicapter wrote: post #462
hammock wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally. There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner. There were more than enough fish until we developed the technology to pull massive indiscriminate amounts out of the ocean (and/or started polluting our rivers with industry). There was more than enough topsoil until we developed mechanized plows and artifi…

> The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally. GP is saying it is not, and you're just reiterating what OP said as fact.

It's sort of the exception that proves the rule.

This is where STEM people are weak- a lack of knowledge on history. In another forum, someone would have chipped in that England's virgin forests were fully deforested by 1150. And someone else would have pointed out that this deforestation produced the economic demand for coal that drove the Industrial Revolution in the first place.

Still, that kind of underscores OP's point. Yes, natural resources were not completely unlimited prior to the Industrial Revolution; Jonathan Swift predated Watt's steam engine, after all. Still... Neither were information resources 10 years ago. Intellectual property laws did exist prior to AI, of course. The legal systems in place are not completely ignorant of the reality.

However, there's an immense difference in scale between post-industrial strip mining of resources, and preindustrial resource extraction powered solely by human muscle (and not coal or nitrogylcerin etc). Similarly, there's a massive difference in information extraction enabled by AI, vs a person in 1980 poring over the microfilm in their local library.

The legal system and social systems in place prior to the Industrial Revolution proved unsuitable for an industrial world. It stands to reason that the legal system and social systems in today's society would be forced to evolve when exposed to the technological shift caused by AI.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#466

Post by mayama »

felipeerias wrote: post #412
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…

People had been hunting whales for centuries, but industrialisation gave them the means and the motivation to do so until near extinction.

Most of humanity survived on agriculture and sometimes hunting-gathering for last 10k years. People that survived on hunting whales is minuscule. Comparing those two is nonsensical.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#468

Post by slopinthebag »

dgb23 wrote: post #221
slopinthebag wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it says more about the amount of automation we left on the table in the last few decades. So much of the code LLM's can generate are stuff that we should have completely abstracted away by now.

Abstractions over what? A large amount of code is likely just idiosynchratic information processing, because we don’t agree on data models and meaning of terms and structure of protocols. Also we repeatedly choose easy and popular over alternatives that would require design and scrutiny. This is why things like language models and vector databases are useful. It’s basically the most expensive way possible to give up…

> A large amount of code is likely just idiosynchratic information processing, because we don’t agree on data models and meaning of terms and structure of protocols.

Yes this is a big part of what I'm talking about!

> Also we repeatedly choose easy and popular over alternatives that would require design and scrutiny.

Agreed!

But I'm also thinking of UI. We had stuff like winforms and Delphi ~3 decades ago and I yearn for the wysisyg. It's so incredibly stupid we keep reinventing the wheel on UI, and I say this as someone who has written UI code professionally for the last decade. I usually just "vibe code" it now, not because it's necessarily faster, but because I just can't be arsed to keep writing the same shit over and over again. It's all self inflicted, yes UI can be complicated, but we make it at least two orders of magnitude more complicated than it needs to be.

I'm working on my own tools for building UI's in a visual way, which is crucial for doing anything artistic. Insane that the best we have right now is stuff like Wix and Wordpress...

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#469

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Retric wrote: post #370
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…

> 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…

I believe running out of trees was always a local issue - there weren't enough trees where you were at because getting trees had to be gotten locally, you didn't go get trees from far away. So yes that was in constant tension, the thing is that the problem of having enough trees turned from a local problem to a global problem, with the side effects of not having enough trees globally that the world needed to maintain the environment humanity first conquered.

I think the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant is a reasonable description, resource depletion was always local before mass industrialization. Being able to exploit the world as opposed to just your local area is also a mark of efficiency.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#470

Post by bryanrasmussen »

d1l wrote: post #443
felipeerias wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People had been hunting whales for centuries, but industrialisation gave them the means and the motivation to do so until near extinction.

Read Moby Dick some time my friend.

The industrial revolution is generally understood to have started somewhere around 1760, Moby Dick took place in approximately 1830, about 10 years before what some historians mark as the end of the agrarian to Industrial shift that is generally termed the Industrial revolution

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

I get sort of wishy-washy from 1830 on, because lots of people put the end of the Industrial revolution as being 1900, but 1840 is a defensible and commonly held position.

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