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Why do LLMs have emergent properties?

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Re: Why do LLMs have emergent properties?

#71

Post by lutusp »

RigelKentaurus wrote: post #59

I'm not a techie, so perhaps someone can help me understand this: AFAIK, no theoretical computer scientist predicted emergence in AI models. Doesn't that suggest that the field of theoretical computer science (or theoretical AI, if you will) is suspect? It's like Lord Kelvin saying that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible a decade before the Wright brothers' first flight.

> Doesn't that suggest that the field of theoretical computer science (or theoretical AI, if you will) is suspect?

Consider the story of Charles Darwin, who knew evolution existed, but who was so afraid of public criticism that he delayed publishing his findings so long that he nearly lost his priority to Wallace.

For contrast, consider the story of Alfred Wegener, who aggressively promoted his idea of (what was later called) plate tectonics, but who was roundly criticized for his radical idea. By the time plate tectonics was tested and proven, Wegener was long gone.

These examples suggest that, in science, it's not the claims you make, it's the claims you prove with evidence.

Re: Why do LLMs have emergent properties?

#72

Post by tinix »

cluckindan wrote: post #40
gond wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Here is an analogy: A car is a system which brings you from point A to B. No part of the car can bring you from point A to B. Not the seats, the wheels, not the frame, not even the motor. If you put the motor on a table, it won’t move one bit. The car, as a system, however does. The emergent property of a car, seen as a system, is that it brings you from one location to another. A system is the product of…

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

haha cool!

turned the car into a motorcycle.

here's an article with a photo for anyone who's interested: https://archive.is/y96xb

Re: Why do LLMs have emergent properties?

#73

Post by Workaccount2 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #67
Workaccount2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge there would be showing that humans have this thing called intelligence. You yourself are just outputting ephemeral actions that rise out of your subconscious. We have no idea what that system feeding our output looks like (except it's some kind of organic neural net) and hence there isn't really a basis for discriminating what is and isn't intelligent besides "if it solves problems, it has some degree o…

To return an old but still good analogy ... If you want to understand how birds fly, the fact that planes also fly is near useless. While a few common aerodynamic principles apply, both types of flight are so different from each other that you do not learn very much about one from the other. On the other hand, if your goal is just "humans moving through the air for extended distances", it doesn't matter at all that a…

I think that many birds gets too sensitive when discussing what "flight" means, heh

Re: Why do LLMs have emergent properties?

#74

Post by chasd00 »

RigelKentaurus wrote: post #59

I'm not a techie, so perhaps someone can help me understand this: AFAIK, no theoretical computer scientist predicted emergence in AI models. Doesn't that suggest that the field of theoretical computer science (or theoretical AI, if you will) is suspect? It's like Lord Kelvin saying that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible a decade before the Wright brothers' first flight.

I’m not even clear on the AI def of “emergent behavior”. The AI crowd mixes in terms and concepts from biology to describe things that are dramatically more simple. For example, using “neuron” to really mean a formula calculation or function. Neurons are a lot more than that and not even understood completely to begin with however developers use the term as if they have neurons implemented in software.

Maybe it’s a variation of the “assume a frictionless spherical horse” problem but it’s very confusing.

Re: Why do LLMs have emergent properties?

#75

Post by andy99 »

waynecochran wrote: post #30
jebarker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not significantly, as I understand it. There's certainly variation in LLM abilities with different initializations but the volume and content of the data is a far bigger determinant of what an LLM will learn.

So there is an "attractor" that different initializations end up converging on?

Different initialization converge to different places, e.g https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02757

For LLMs (as with other models), many local optima appear to support roughly the same behavior. This is the idea of the problem being under-specified ie many more equations than unknowns so there are many ways to get the same result.

Re: Why do LLMs have emergent properties?

#77

Post by john-h-k »

andy99 wrote: post #69
anon373839 wrote: post #66

I remain skeptical of emergent properties in LLMs in the way that people have used that term. There was a belief 3-4 years ago that if you just make the models big enough, they magically acquire intelligence. But since then, we’ve seen that the models are actually still pretty limited by the training data: like other ML models, they interpolate well between the data they’ve been trained on, but they don’t generalize…

Yes, deep learning models only interpolate, and essentially represent an effective way of storing data labeling effort. Doesn't mean they're not useful, just not what tech adjacent promoters want people to think.

> Yes, deep learning models only interpolate

What do you mean by this? I don’t think the understanding of LLMs is sufficient to make this claim

Re: Why do LLMs have emergent properties?

#78

Post by andy99 »

john-h-k wrote: post #77
andy99 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, deep learning models only interpolate, and essentially represent an effective way of storing data labeling effort. Doesn't mean they're not useful, just not what tech adjacent promoters want people to think.

> Yes, deep learning models only interpolate What do you mean by this? I don’t think the understanding of LLMs is sufficient to make this claim

An LLM is a classifier, there is lots of research into how deep learning classifiers work, that I haven't seen contradicted when applied to LLMs.

Re: Why do LLMs have emergent properties?

#79

Post by Retric »

gyomu wrote: post #68

The reasoning in the article is interesting, but this struck me as a weird example to choose: > “The real question is how can we predict when a new LLM will achieve some new capability X. For example, X = “Write a short story that resonates with the social mood of the present time and is a runaway hit” Framing a capability as something that is objectively measurable (“able to perform math on the 12th grade level”, “a…

It’s not about being “a runaway hit” as an objective measurement it’s about the things an LLM would need to achieve before that was possible. At first AI scores on existing tests seemed like a useful metric. However, tests designed for humans make specific assumptions that don’t apply to these systems making such tests useless.

AI is very good at gaming metrics so it’s difficult to list some criteria where achieving it is meaningful. A hypothetical coherent novel without spelling/grammar mistakes could in effect be a copy of some existing work that shows up in its corpus, however a hit requires more than a reskinned story.

Re: Why do LLMs have emergent properties?

#80

Post by andy99 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #67
Workaccount2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge there would be showing that humans have this thing called intelligence. You yourself are just outputting ephemeral actions that rise out of your subconscious. We have no idea what that system feeding our output looks like (except it's some kind of organic neural net) and hence there isn't really a basis for discriminating what is and isn't intelligent besides "if it solves problems, it has some degree o…

To return an old but still good analogy ... If you want to understand how birds fly, the fact that planes also fly is near useless. While a few common aerodynamic principles apply, both types of flight are so different from each other that you do not learn very much about one from the other. On the other hand, if your goal is just "humans moving through the air for extended distances", it doesn't matter at all that a…

A better bird analogy would be if we didn't understand at all how flight worked, and then started throwing rocks and had pseudo-intellectuals saying "how do we know that isn't all that flight is, we've clearly invented artificial flight".
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