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ML promises to be profoundly weird

aphyr.com

591–600 of 641 posts

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#591
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not irrelevant. GP made a comparison between what we're going through and the Industrial Revolution. Ignoring the negatives of that revolution - like by acting as though the "new world" was uninhabited/unused and so Europeans had a right to its resources - seems like a bad idea.

> like by acting as though the "new world" was uninhabited/unused and so Europeans had a right to its resources - seems like a bad idea. maybe it was a bad idea, but that's what happened.

Also doesn't justify doing the same damn thing again, which is exactly what all the people long on this technology fully expect to be allowed to do. Any further investment they have to do to ensure the outcome will just be chocked up to cost of doing business. And the capital funding all this is in so few hands, and in the hands in particular of such characters that don't concern themselves with not repeating atrocities of the past in new and interesting ways, that it is virtually guaranteed we're on the road to societal scale disruption. 'Tis the reason such inconvenient points are in need of being pounded home until they are impossible to ignore.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have absolutely no sense of perspective. We are all metabolically expensive meat machines whose only value is to propagate our genetic money shot. That we get to briefly entertain ourselves with consciousness and culture is IMO likely a mystery we will never solve without upgrading to running in a substrate more advanced than the MVP for sentience we currently pilot. Will we get there or will we wipe ourselves ou…

> You have absolutely no sense of perspective. > metabolically expensive meat machines Calm down. There is no meat. It's just a giant sponge of wave packets. Your take is the most S.V. conformist one there is: materialist reductionism, and it is doomed. Tell me you don't understand hitchhikers guide without telling me you don't understand hitchhikers guide. This is as bad as Thiel and ilk's inverted reading of LOTR.

Uh huh, tell me you absorb influencer talking points mindlessly without reading any of the source material without telling me. The Vogon Constructor Fleet was a satire of British bureaucracy on the surface but secretly it was dispatched to stop the question to the ultimate answer from being found (because of the job loss of course) so in that sense it's a better metaphor for Eliezer Yudkowsky with the Earth a metaphor for the quest to create the AGI. But I guess you didn't get that far with all those big words. Talk about inverted readings! Who knew you were the real Vogon? What a twist!

From my perspective, the most SV-aligned mindset is to run around in circles screaming that AI will destroy jobs to give the military/industrial complex cover to commit atrocities with Palantir and for tech billionaires to run wild with surveillance capitalism, but I know, silly me!

Same mindset that demanded safe spaces in schools over actually safe schools. And I don't really want to this caustic and sarcastic on the subject, but both the radically pro AI and radically anti AI factions, who both scream the loudest, really bring out my inner Marvin. The future is coming whether you want it or not. The question is how you will steer it. Get in its way and you'll just get steamrolled.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of private data that is locked up inside private internal databases is huge. This is especially true of regulated industries. There is a wealth of data - financial data showing how to budget for things, pricing data on various products that are B2B, standard operating procedures at mature companies that have gone through various revisions, designs for manufacturing plants so people don't keep reinventing a…

I think it's implied that they're not talking about private data when they say they've run out.

fair. I want to +1 the fact that there is a large amount of data unseen by LLMs.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like by acting as though the "new world" was uninhabited/unused and so Europeans had a right to its resources - seems like a bad idea. maybe it was a bad idea, but that's what happened.

Also doesn't justify doing the same damn thing again, which is exactly what all the people long on this technology fully expect to be allowed to do. Any further investment they have to do to ensure the outcome will just be chocked up to cost of doing business. And the capital funding all this is in so few hands, and in the hands in particular of such characters that don't concern themselves with not repeating atrocit…

> not repeating atrocities of the past in new and interesting ways

sorry, are you suggesting that colonialism and LLMs are equivalent in terms of atrocity? I don't feel like they're really comparable.

> 'Tis the reason such inconvenient points are in need of being pounded home until they are impossible to ignore.

and what do you think is going to happen here? People so basic that this will never happen. At best you gotta create a grassroots political movement with political representation and clear legal aims and get that past the electorate. However see how the casuals lap up generated content for how ambitious an vision that is. LLMs will prevail and even if public boycotts were extreme, it will just move further and further behind the curtain and the end outcome will still be the same.

I don't see how derailing conversations on hacker news by taking issue with a particular analogy to grind a colonial axe is really furthering that. At the end of the day, regardless of the perspective of our identity, we'll get fucked by network effects and rounded out of systems by those with more influence and power. Sometimes by those who even share our perspective. So to use perspective as a point of division just further fragments what needs to be a whole to enact change.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the court dropped the ball here. On the one hand, I think they were right that using existing works--copyrighted or otherwise--to train a model was transformable fair use. On the other hand, Anthropic and others trained their models on illicit copies of the works; they (more often than not) didn't pay the copyright holders. There's a doctrine in Fifth Amendment law called "fruit of the poisonous tree." The ge…

I mean, that is what the court said! Training on pirated data was not fair use. Training on legally acquired data is fair use. Anthropic legally acquired the data and re-trained on it before release.

It did not say that. See Judge Alsup's order (https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...), pp. 29-30, Section IV(B)(ii) ("The Pirated Library Copies").

"[T]he test requires that we contemplate the likely result were the conduct to be condoned as a fair use — namely to steal a work you could otherwise buy (a book, millions of books) so long as you at least loosely intend to make further copies for a purportedly transformative use (writing a book review with excerpts, training LLMs, etc.), without any accountability."

See also p. 31:

"The downloaded pirated copies used to build a central library were not justified by a fair use. Every factor points against fair use. Anthropic employees said copies of works (pirated ones, too) would be retained 'forever' for 'general purpose' even after Anthropic determined they would never be used for training LLMs. A separate justification was required for each use. None is even offered here except for Anthropic’s pocketbook and convenience."

Despite this consideration, the court still found for Anthropic on the question of fair use.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#596
post #552
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.

“The industrial revolution wasn’t really all that” is such a strange hill to die on.

How so, being precise and correct is IMO worth preserving in a world of handwaving slop.

The industrial revolution was from ~1760–1840, it was a major shift it doesn’t cover everything that happens between 1760 and now more did it overwhelm many existing trends.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The statement IS true anyways, the problem is that you failed to distinguish between an example and a universal claim. You want to argue on logic? I'm an engineer, I can argue on precision too: The (true!) statement is "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 e…

Is your counter argument that you’re not wrong just attacking a straw man? Because it really sounds to me like you are just clueless.

Strip mining goes back thousands of years, it’s a simpler technology than making tunnels. And no it wasn’t limited to human power to crack rock several more powerful methods existed.

Roman mining literally destroyed a mountain, operating within an order of magnitude of the largest mines today. That’s what makes what you say false. It’s not some minor quibble over details you are simply speaking from ignorance.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#598
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally the paragraph right before the one you quote is this: > I am generally outside the ML field, but I do talk with people in the field. One of the things they tell me is that we don’t really know why transformer models have been so successful, or how to make them better. This is my summary of discussions-over-drinks; take it with many grains of salt. I am certain that People in The Comments will drop a gazilli…

He is wrong about why transformers are popular. The most obvious reason is that transformers accept a sequence as an input and produce a sequence as an output. The vast majority of pre-transformer architectures only accepted a fixed input and output size. Before 2016 I was somewhat interested in ML, but my curiosity vanished because of the fixed input and output size limitations. RNNs including LSTMs at the time were…

Transformers do have a fixed input/output size though - that's what a context window is. It's just that, via scaling and algorithmic improvements, the length of usable context windows has increased to the point that they're much less of a bottleneck.

I think your points around parallelisation and the flexibility of quadratic attention are spot-on though.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#599
post #213

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…

"but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution" You're not the only one. The current Pope Leo XIV explicitly named himself after the the previous Leo, Pope Leo XIII, who was pope during the Industrial Revolution (1878-1903) and issued the influential Encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) in response to the upheaval. “Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encycli…

>RERUM NOVARUM

ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CAPITAL AND LABOR

Oh hohm. Such a great mouthpiece Pope Leo XIII was for extolling and providing cover for the excesses of the worst breed of capitalist. Whilst my experience with such religious writing is used to coming away from them not wholely satisfied one way or another, this particular piece was heavily biased toward the "Captain's of Industry" and capitalist civilizations of the time. Explicitly condemning the practices by which labor can usurp the yoke of the unjustly enriched, and no consideration whatsoever against the fact that as capital centralizes, there are fewer and fewer places to actually look for employment that isn't in one way or another unconscionable to the Soul. Which, thankfully, the fellow at least had the decency to recognize that one isn't at, nor should be at liberty to give one's soul up because the only people signing cheques are those that are most conditioned to being in service not to anyone else, but merely to themselves.

For instance, it places the burden of the yoke of thrift equally on all men, without recognizing that that yoke provides exactly the spiritual cover required for the pernicious greedmonger to sleep soundly after condemning thousands to a situation where in their self-preservation is not guaranteed.

I see some mild concessions to the working class, which we have plenty of history from which to reason that even with a Papal acknowledgement, these words did not suffice to tilt the behavior of men away from ungodly and abusive treatment of their fellow men until such time as they were confronted with force. That the Pope of all people then doubled down by pointing out that "agitators would arise to foment violence and revolt" without taking into consideration that is the only language left that will be understood by the man whose heart has sufficiently hardened to enable him to with a stroke of a pen condemn thousands to millions, nay billions at a time to suffering. To usurp their livelihoods as his own to be rented back, ensuring that no ownership is onto his potential competitors conferred upon which could be built the means to diminish his own prosperity.

No... Pope Leo XIII, your encyclical is in places valid, but woefully out of date and in need of a massive update. Even in it's time, that wording would have been fairly what we today call "milquetoast" in terms of providing the necessary spiritual force to temper the excesses of man's vices. Our current day, is evidence enough of that. Where instead of true virtue and the ability of all to live prosperously, we have a divided class of those seeking desperately to get by, and those seeking desperately to ensure no one gets by them.

Whilst I'm not Catholic, I do do tend to honor the tradition of firmly worded letters nailed to their doors to keep them honest. This encyclical in it's time may have seemed fine, but with hindsight reeks of inadequacy and hedging, with excessive pandering to the already wealthy. This alone explains to me greatly why the labor movements of the late 1800's and early 1900's were not only as bad as they were, but absolutely necessary. If Leo XIV can't do any better than this, then it may once again come to bloodshed. The feedback loop is much tighter, and news travels much faster. Likely why the wealthy are doing everything they can to weight media outlets in their favor, and destroy any unregulated medium of anonymous communication. For these men are greedy, but not stupid. They know deep down the Lord dost tolerate the machinations of the Devil to test the tendencies of humankind, and they fear the inevitable outcome that will arise when the rest of mankind through privation is forced to harden their hearts as they (the wealthy) have. For in the eye's of one who has only their Soul left to bargain with, laid bare is the banal veil of Evil, and if one is to meet their Maker earlier than planned as a result of another man's artifice... Well. Justice doth favor action, whereas the banal finds fertile sustenance in the inaction of vacuous platitude debated endlessly.

Perhaps I am one of the Agitators of which the Pope spoke. Yet I feel no pause at any of the words I have hitherto written. So do with them what you will. If what we have to live with is supposed to be fine, I do not agree that anything about it is what one could conscionably call just.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know that they do not reason because we know the algorithm behind the curtain. The model is generating the next token via model weights and some randomness. That’s all. It not reasoning. Sometimes it has an appearance of reasoning, but not if you know how it works. It doesn’t matter that the model manufacturer marketing department slaps a “Reasoning!” sticker on the side of the model. It’s not actually doing that.…

>We know that they do not reason because we know the algorithm behind the curtain. In other words, we didn't put the "reasoning algorithm" in LLMs therefore they do not reason. But what is this reasoning algorithm that is a necessary condition for reasoning and how do you know LLMs parameters didn't converge on it in the process of pre-training?

Model parameters are weights, not algorithms. The LLM algorithm is (relatively) fixed: generate the next token according to the existing context, the model weights, and some randomization. That’s it. There is no more algorithm than that. The training parameters can shift the probabilities for predicting a token given the context, but there’s no more to it than that. There is no “reasoning algorithm” in the weights to converge to.
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