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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#501

Post by orthoxerox »

rudhdb773b wrote: post #120
beders wrote: post #79

Thank you for putting it so succinctly. I keep explaining to my peers, friends and family that what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency and that the term AI is just completely overloaded right now.

> what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency What makes you think natural brains are doing something so different from LLMs?

Two big ways in which human intelligence is different from LLM intelligence are:

1) human intelligence makes no sharp distinction between training and generation. Every time you ask a human a question it modifies its neural structure a little.

2) continuous operation: human intelligence deals with a continuous stream of multimedia data for sixteen hours a day and starts hallucinating when deprived of it.

There's also the fact that you can't branch or roll back human intelligence, but this is something most sci-fi novels tackle when discussing mind uploading first.

Are these two differences critical aspects of human intelligence or unfortunate limitations of its biological hardware? I do not know. If we somehow manage to simulate a human brain on silicon, we will get "computer" intelligence that learns like a human, but will we have to simulate the whole virtual world for it 16/7 and let it sleep for eight hours each day just to stop it from going mad?

Or will it be cheaper to fork and kill an uploaded math genius a billion times, pumping the same recycled sensory data into his or her mind, slipping a question into the auditory data, getting the answer and then switching the simulation off and trashing the copy? Will we consider this a bigger atrocity than doing the same to an LLM right now in 2026?

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#502

Post by Sharlin »

jsmo wrote: post #290
konschubert wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. The opposite is true. Central Europe was almost devoid of trees. Food was scarce as arable land bore little fruit without fertiliser. Society was Malthusian until the Industrial Revolution.

Can we interpret "abundant" in a Darwinian sense e.g. diversity of life? I would think the industrial farming revolution decreased crop variety over time same for animal lineages aside from the rapid increase in mixed poodle breeds.

Crop variety was decreased by the original farming revolution, about 10k years before the industrial revolution. Rather than eating whatever was available, the large majority of the caloric input of an agricultural society comes from a few staple crops optimized for overwinter storability and producing large yields and thus supporting a large number of people.

The industrial revolution didn’t qualitatively change farming. It just made it possible to have more of it thanks to machine labor. The same goes for the later agricultural revolutions.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#503

Post by Sharlin »

senko wrote: post #85
danieltanfh95 wrote: post #71

I think the discussion has to be more nuanced than this. "LLMs still can't do X so it's an idiot" is a bad line of thought. LLMs with harnesses are clearly capable of engaging with logical problems that only need text. LLMs are not there yet with images, but we are improving with UI and access to tools like figma. LLMs are clearly unable to propose new, creative solutions for problems it has never seen before.

> LLMs are not there yet with images https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing There's been a lot of progress there, it's just that an LLM that's best for, say coding, isn't going to be also the best for image edit.

To be clear, image generation models are not in general LLMs although most now use an LLM as a text encoder.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#504

Post by Sharlin »

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #71

I think the discussion has to be more nuanced than this. "LLMs still can't do X so it's an idiot" is a bad line of thought. LLMs with harnesses are clearly capable of engaging with logical problems that only need text. LLMs are not there yet with images, but we are improving with UI and access to tools like figma. LLMs are clearly unable to propose new, creative solutions for problems it has never seen before.

More nuanced than what? It’s just impossible to read the article as claiming "LLMs are idiots". Its whole point is that LLMs are simultaneously astonishingly smart and utterly stupid, and critically the boundary between those is complex and unintuitive which makes trusting their output so precarious.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#505

Post by orthoxerox »

jijji wrote: post #448

the authors reference to LLM's as "bullshit machines" is more true the less parameters you have trained in your model....as we scale up to trillions of parameters, add Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, this no longer is an accurate statement. Proof in point was yesterdays announcemnt of Mythos 5 model (10T parameters + MoE [1]) by anthropic where it seems to be so good at finding/exploiting vulnerabilities in so…

Well, Anthropic should let Aphyr try Mythos 5 for his Jepsen business, then.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#506

Post by Vachyas »

kgeist wrote: post #324
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…

>Raw parameter counts stopped increasing almost 5 years ago, and modern models rely on sophisticated architectures like mixture-of-experts, multi-head latent attention, hybrid Mamba/Gated linear attention layers, sparse attention for long context lengths, etc. Agree, I recently updated our office's little AI server to use Qwen 3.5 instead of Qwen 3 and the capability has considerably increased, even though the new mo…

What you described sounds plausible (expected, even).

But

>Raw parameter counts stopped increasing almost 5 years ago

Really? 5 years ago? Until just about 3 years ago OpenAI's latest offering was only ChatGPT 3.5

Most of the models people talk about now didn't even exist 3 years ago let alone 5.

Even now, I don't know if parameter count stopped mattering or just matters less

For example, I have no idea if the new Mythos is MoE but I'm pretty sure it's more parameters.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#507

Post by retsibsi »

jychang wrote: post #491
Retric wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> powered solely by human muscle Both animals and water power go way back. The early steam engine was measured in horsepower because that’s what it was replacing in mines. It couldn’t compete with nearby water power which was already being moved relatively long distances through mechanical means at the time. Hand waving this as unimportant really misunderstands just how limited the Industrial Revolution was.

Irrelevant. Here's Bret Devereaux (an actual historian) explaining this distinction and precisely why those are irrelevant in the context of the Industrial Revolution: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... > Diet indicators and midden remains indicate that there’s more meat being eaten, indicates a greater availability of animals which may include draft animals (for pulling plows) and must n…

I think I prefer the 'STEM people' approach of trying to say true things, rather than this superior approach of just saying things and then, when they turn out to be false, dismissing them as irrelevant. If the truth of the claim is irrelevant, why did you make it in the first place!

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#508

Post by HPsquared »

brohee wrote: post #498
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 not. Iceland and Easter Island were fully deforested way before the industrial age. Countless species went extinct in Britain and more examples abound.

Britain was a little bit industrialised even before the steam engine. There were windmills and water mills. Steam massively accelerated it, but industry did exist before.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#509

Post by navaed01 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #449
navaed01 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does feel like the collaborative, free open nature of the web has gone and the optimism that brought… it feels like no one would build Foursquare today. But then I wonder if I’m just old an jaded and to the younger generation creating content, for them the web is open and expressive- just in a different way

I still use swarm every day, and get teased for it all the time. "So Steve, you're a millennial. What does it mean to 'be the mayor' of something?"

I can relate to this so much! IMHO Foursquare genuinely did gve the better recommendations for food and drink and I still think this recommendation problem is far from solved.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#510

Post by tpm »

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…

> There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner.

Unless you mean 'an axe', way before that there were deforested areas where the need for trees was larger than the supply and there were enough humans to fell them.

> A few hundred years ago or less, a squirrel could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.

Yes, but that wasn't possible in other parts of the world much sooner.

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