51–56 of 56 posts
It just predicts the next word.
It just predicts the next word.
It's interesting to watch a new religion spinning up in real time. People know how it works, but somehow also ignore that and go crazy believing it must be conscious or intelligent or whatever they want to ascribe. We collectively made fun of that guy at google, i thought, but now somehow the collective has moved on to believing that matrix multiplication is sentient
It's annoyingly arrogant to assume people could only be impressed having ignored that.
It's impressive to me not by ignoring that at all. Matrix multiplication is apparently capable of producing poetry, jokes, insults, abstract ideas, etc (to some level at least) - but in your mind it's a pixar movie? Words arise from a team of angels pulling levers?
Fascination is not from thinking LLM are advanced as us - fascination is from wondering how much more complicated are we than that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am saying that GP's claim of "just because it only uses some basic math, it cannot be sentient/conscious/intelligent" does not seem valid to me. The only way such a claim could be made, as far as I can see, would be to point to a specific mechanism that is needed for sentience/consciousness/intelligence to arise, which goes beyond the mechanisms a neural network uses. I.e., they could only make that claim if they k…
Searching this thread for the string "just because it only uses some basic math, it cannot be sentient/conscious/intelligent" I can only find it in your comment. That's your interpretation of what the OP said, not what they said, is that correct? I think you should not try to interpret in that way and only stick to what the other person has said, otherwise we will all lose the thread of the conversation. In any case,…
He is saying neither. He is observing that OP has introduced the assumption that their brain is doing something that can't be done with matrix multiplication and is pointing out that there is no evidence to back such an assumption up.
> but now somehow the collective has moved on to believing that matrix multiplication is sentient
The OP clearly feels that matrix multiplication is insufficient for sentience. Presumably the OP views themselves and other humans as sentient. Therefore the OP is implying that human brains do things which cannot be reduced to or wholly represented by matrix multiplication (plus the various nonlinear activation functions and other implementation details of current ML models).
That seems like a highly suspect assumption.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly though, with no theory of mind or consciousness you have no way to assert in either direction. To borrow the religion analogy, there's the opposite fallacy of claiming the negative case "I know for a fact God isn't real", by stating you know what these kinds of information processing systems are doing fundamentally cannot yield intelligence or some kind of consciousness.
Maybe we don't know it in the limit, but we've had langauge models for a very long time and nobody ever said anything about, say, n-gram models, or Hidden Markov Models, being "intelligent" or "conscious". Even the people who first proposed the idea of language modelling (precisely as an alternative to trying to model meaning, which we have no idea how to do) didn't propose them as models of intelligence, or sentienc…
Other than all the downright uncanny output.
Personally I doubt current LLMs are sufficient for sentience but that's purely a hunch on my part. Many people such as yourself seem quite overconfident of something that feels like a form of human exceptionalism to me - the idea that such a simple bit of math couldn't possibly be sufficient for sentience. As far as I can tell such a belief is wholly unfounded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Searching this thread for the string "just because it only uses some basic math, it cannot be sentient/conscious/intelligent" I can only find it in your comment. That's your interpretation of what the OP said, not what they said, is that correct? I think you should not try to interpret in that way and only stick to what the other person has said, otherwise we will all lose the thread of the conversation. In any case,…
> Are you saying that the OP's brain is doing "something that couldn't be done with "matrix multiplications", or are you saying it isn't doing something like that? He is saying neither. He is observing that OP has introduced the assumption that their brain is doing something that can't be done with matrix multiplication and is pointing out that there is no evidence to back such an assumption up. > but now somehow the…
Where was this assumption, about the brain and matrix multiplication, introduced? As far as I can tell, "the brain" was introduced to the conversation by mckirk, not the OP.
>> That seems like a highly suspect assumption.
Which one? Can you please quote from the OP's comment? You and the other poster are constantly bringing up things that someone is supposed to have said, but that nobody has said yet, in this thread, and it is very confusing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we don't know it in the limit, but we've had langauge models for a very long time and nobody ever said anything about, say, n-gram models, or Hidden Markov Models, being "intelligent" or "conscious". Even the people who first proposed the idea of language modelling (precisely as an alternative to trying to model meaning, which we have no idea how to do) didn't propose them as models of intelligence, or sentienc…
> There is no other evidence of any sort that LLMs may be intelligent Other than all the downright uncanny output. Personally I doubt current LLMs are sufficient for sentience but that's purely a hunch on my part. Many people such as yourself seem quite overconfident of something that feels like a form of human exceptionalism to me - the idea that such a simple bit of math couldn't possibly be sufficient for sentienc…
Instead of trying to guess what I think, why not ask me directly, and say what you think, also? Just throwing around weird accusations of half-explained "overconfidence", or "human exceptionalism" (what is that, now?) doesn't really help anyone understand what you are disagreeing with, or what you are agreeing with.
>> Other than all the downright uncanny output.
I don't find the output of ChatGPT, or any other of the language models that have exploded into the hype zone lately "uncanny". I've done plenty of language modelling and while the output of those recent LLMs is grammatically smoother than earlier systems, and they can handle longer-term dependencies, they are not anything new. Their output is "uncanny" only if you've never seen anything like that before. Which is, of course, the case with most people who didn't know about language modelling before they heard about GPT-something, and who are now posting in droves on the web to say how surprised they are.