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Where the goblins came from

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651–660 of 699 posts

Re: Where the goblins came from

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have to try and imagine how Magnus Carlsen understands chess, since I also understand chess, and I operate with the assumption that other people are not zombies and possess a similar form of consciousness. My comment works regardless of the skill of the player. Imagine you have never played chess, you have no concept of the rules or how the game is played, yet you've learned the entirety of Stockfish's algori…

Again, please can you explain what "understanding" means, without being self-referential.

No, I am not going to be getting into a debate over definitions of words that we both know the meaning of.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means they have the same levers somewhere in the training process. Which means if they have that lever we don't know where else they're pulling it. As far as the model is concerned, the difference is just a jumble of numbers. Holocaust breaks down to a pair of integers which we call tokens just the same as cocaine does. We, as humans, ascribe different levels of meaning to those words, but as far as the model's co…

Do you have any actual examples of political history being actively censored by western models? Or are we just doing hypotheticals for fun?

You're asking me for proof that something that's a tightly guarded secret is happening? I don't work at OpenAI or anything so I don't know why you think I'd have that. As far as doing it for fun, no, this is a serious matter to me, is it not for you?

Still, if you ask ChatGPT or Claude details on what's going on in the western bank, Israel and Gaza, there's a specific viewpoint being pushed. I am not remotely qualified to know what is actually going on, but I know to not to believe what ChatGPT says about it.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#653
post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I always thought that Warhammer 40k techpriests were absurd. Strange obscure religious rituals to appease the machine spirit. But at this point I can actually see something like that. What is prompt engineering but a strange pseudo ritual. So praise the Omnissiah, I guess...

They've always resonated with me, maybe because I often work on legacy code. All this ancient technology that no one understands. Crazy rituals/incantations to get things done. People being afraid to skip steps, even if it probably isn't needed. The aversion to unconsecrated (non IT-supported) technology. The machine spirits were the only part that felt "too magical" to me, but now we're well on our way. The Omnissia…

Burn some "incense" to help you get in the zone. Bless the machine spirit!

Re: Where the goblins came from

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you think "word predictor" meaningfully describes an instruct model that has developed novel mathematical proofs that have eluded mathematicians for decades? edit: You cannot predict all the actions or words of someone smarter than you. If I could always predict Magnus Carlsen's next chess move, I'd be at least as good at chess as Magnus - and that would have to involve a deep understanding of chess,…

Magnus Carlsen understands chess, a machine designed to simply predict his next move would not necessarily understand chess. This is essentially the Chinese Room experiment. So I think "word predictor" makes sense here. A word predictor can be really really cool.

It’s an incoherent argument, or a meaningless semantic distinction.

There is no design of such a machine that does not encode a very deep understanding of the game.

Leela Chess Zero does understand chess. She plays at roughly 2300 strength with a search depth of 1 ply - purely on the strength of her gestalt evaluation of the position. Humans have learned a lot about chess from studying her (and AlphaZero’s) games. General, transferable knowledge she developed herself about - for example - the long term value of early rook pawn advances.

“Understanding” doesn’t imply anything about personhood or self reflection or awareness.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you think "word predictor" meaningfully describes an instruct model that has developed novel mathematical proofs that have eluded mathematicians for decades? edit: You cannot predict all the actions or words of someone smarter than you. If I could always predict Magnus Carlsen's next chess move, I'd be at least as good at chess as Magnus - and that would have to involve a deep understanding of chess,…

Terence Tao himself answers that question ( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01246-9 ) : " In almost any other application, the biggest Achilles heel of AI is that it makes unverifiable mistakes. But in mathematics, almost uniquely, you can automatically check the output — at least if the output is supposed to be the proof of a theorem, although that is not the only thing mathematicians do. So, AI companies…

That only explains why the post training is much more efficient - and thus where we have seen the most gains. It says nothing to support the notion that a stochastic parrot has “predicted” an original result.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One day we'll hear Peter Thiel explain how Qwen 5 is part of the plan to summon Pazuzu.

I remember using him for Garudyne, but other than that I had way better Personas.

I fused my Peter Thiel with Jack Frost, gave me an extra Matador summon.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does LLM need to do for you to consider it "smart"? To me they seem to be pretty damn smart, to put it mildly. They sometimes do stupid things - but so do smart people!

They aren’t smart, they approximate language constructs. They don’t have believes, ideas, etc. but have a few rounds of discussions with any LLMs and you see how they are probabilistic autocompletes based on whatever patterns from rounds of discussions you feed them

I use LLMs vastly differently from the actual auto-complete in my phone's messaging app. The comparison doesn't seem very informative. You can't do much with it.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magnus Carlsen understands chess, a machine designed to simply predict his next move would not necessarily understand chess. This is essentially the Chinese Room experiment. So I think "word predictor" makes sense here. A word predictor can be really really cool.

It’s an incoherent argument, or a meaningless semantic distinction. There is no design of such a machine that does not encode a very deep understanding of the game. Leela Chess Zero does understand chess. She plays at roughly 2300 strength with a search depth of 1 ply - purely on the strength of her gestalt evaluation of the position. Humans have learned a lot about chess from studying her (and AlphaZero’s) games. Ge…

It's not, and unfortunately you cannot just dismiss perhaps the greatest refutation of functionalism as being incoherent, you have to actually address the argument.

Take a person (Fred) with no experience of knowledge of chess. They don't know how the game works, how the pieces move, or any of the rules. They memorise an algorithm, say how Leela does its search and evaluation, and they can then look at a position on a board, run the calculations, and come up with a move. Fred can now play chess really strongly, and simultaneously has no understanding of chess. Now in the original experiment it was a room with a person, and the person used a book to reply in Chinese. But the same idea applies.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

Re: Where the goblins came from

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an incoherent argument, or a meaningless semantic distinction. There is no design of such a machine that does not encode a very deep understanding of the game. Leela Chess Zero does understand chess. She plays at roughly 2300 strength with a search depth of 1 ply - purely on the strength of her gestalt evaluation of the position. Humans have learned a lot about chess from studying her (and AlphaZero’s) games. Ge…

It's not, and unfortunately you cannot just dismiss perhaps the greatest refutation of functionalism as being incoherent, you have to actually address the argument. Take a person (Fred) with no experience of knowledge of chess. They don't know how the game works, how the pieces move, or any of the rules. They memorise an algorithm, say how Leela does its search and evaluation, and they can then look at a position on…

There is no algorithm that can be memorized. Leela's understanding is in the weights, not neural net algorithms.

I'm familiar with the Chinese room argument and I've never accepted it because what it describes isn't real. It imagines some algorithm for which there is no evidence. Show me this process running and then ask me if it understands Chinese.

To me this is as philosophically dubious as the notion of p-zombies.

Re: Where the goblins came from

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually understand AI quite well. It embeds questions and answers in a high dimensional space. Sometimes you get lucky and it splices together a good answer to a math problem that no one’s seriously looked at in 20 years. Other times it starts talking about Goblins when you ask it about math. Comparing it to an alien intelligence is ridiculous. McKenna was right that things would get weird. I believe he compared…

We understand the low level math quite well. We do not understand the source of emergent behavior. https://arxiv.org/html/2210.13382v5#abstract

There is no behaviour, there is only reflexes. Behaviour implies autonomous action; what we're seeing is only stimulus response.
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