Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cargo Cult AI

queue.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 191 posts

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#81

Post by celestialcheese »

kerkeslager wrote: post #73
esafak wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magic is that which can not be explained. Could you explain GPT-4's results if you saw them a few years ago?

Setting aside the silliness of that definition of magic, there's a huge leap between "I can't explain it" and "It can't be explained". There are plenty of explanations of how LLMs work, by their creators, incidentally.

Yet there are emergent behaviours from these LLMs that are both surprising and not immediately understood. [1][2][3] Everyone has theories, of course, but still pretty "magic" considering these behaviours weren't theorised in papers prior to observation.

1 - https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/emergence 2 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.07682.pdf 3 - https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-e...

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#82

Post by albertzeyer »

kerkeslager wrote: post #60
cs702 wrote: post #18

Echoing many who now find themselves blindsided by the emergent abilities and rapid adoption of LLMs, the OP: * complains that we still lack a "comprehensive theory to explain what intelligence is or how it emerges from first principles," * argues that deep neural nets like LLMs may not be capable of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and * contends that achieving AGI will require "new algorithmic paradigms." Ric…

> Echoing many who now find themselves blindsided by the emergent abilities and rapid adoption of LLMs, the OP I've said this over and over again: there are no emergent abilities . Before you leap to link me this paper, I'll link it myself: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682 I read that paper. Did you? Did you understand it? Because if you had, you'd have seen that early on they define what they mean when they say "eme…

> the idea that larger models can do more than smaller models, which should be a surprise to no one.

Actually this was quite a surprise to a lot of people, since the whole race to scaling up began, with GPT2 or so. It was totally not obvious that you can scale up the model (and also training) and it would improve the performance. Many (most?) people thought there would be some limit, and we were close to that limit with 100M-500M params or so.

Then GPT2 came. And it was a surprise to a lot of people, that scaling up works so well. But then the question remained, is the limit reached now, or not, or is there any? The scaling laws appeared, and seemed to indicate that there really is no limit.

Still, GPT3 and then GPT4 were still surprising to people, that it really got better and better. But the question still remains, is there a limit? If there is no limit, it means we can easily surpass human intelligence by just scaling up further. Maybe the limit is just always current technical hardware limitations and cost.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#83

Post by byby »

kerkeslager wrote: post #60
cs702 wrote: post #18

Echoing many who now find themselves blindsided by the emergent abilities and rapid adoption of LLMs, the OP: * complains that we still lack a "comprehensive theory to explain what intelligence is or how it emerges from first principles," * argues that deep neural nets like LLMs may not be capable of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and * contends that achieving AGI will require "new algorithmic paradigms." Ric…

> Echoing many who now find themselves blindsided by the emergent abilities and rapid adoption of LLMs, the OP I've said this over and over again: there are no emergent abilities . Before you leap to link me this paper, I'll link it myself: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682 I read that paper. Did you? Did you understand it? Because if you had, you'd have seen that early on they define what they mean when they say "eme…

>"Emergent abilities" in that paper is an extraordinarily poor communication of the idea that larger models can do more than smaller models, which should be a surprise to no one.

Nothing on the face of the earth can be a sum of more than their parts. It's called conservation of mass and conservation of energy. So based off of your logic how can the term "emergent ability" even exist? Why do we even use the term?

You're getting hung up on a language quirk. Abilities aren't being built out of thin air, the term "emergent ability" is just an expression for "unexpected abilities". Even you as a human are a sum of it's parts.

There's no nonsense being spread here. Experts and eminent researchers including the father of modern AI (Hinton) ALL use the term "emergent abilities". Are you an expert? Why is your opinion on this "spreading of nonsense" and why is it directly contradictory to expert opinions?

Clearly you have logic that these experts and researchers haven't thought about. Can you spell it out step by step exactly what makes you more utterly clear about the "nonsense" then the experts who in actuality claim they don't fully understand what's going on?

I'm not being sarcastic here, there is a huge contingent of people on HN who are totally dismissing LLMs and it would be a disservice not for them and you to not allow them to spell out their logic clearly. But what I'm seeing in your paragraph is just an investigation on vocabulary on what is meant by "emergent abilities"

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#84

Post by photochemsyn »

danlugo92 wrote: post #80
photochemsyn wrote: post #75

The thing about LLMs that is revolutionary is just how fast you can find a solution to a problem or expand on answers to a problem even to the point of generating a realistic computational-mathematical model of the problem. For example, the author brings up Kepler, so let's ask: > "Please explain in concise terms how Kepler used Tycho Brahe's observational data to come up with Kepler's three laws, on ellipitical orbi…

It's all fun and games until the AI completely hallucinates the answer, while making it sound completely pausible and correct.

Well, sure, but in the context of the previous example I can now go look at poliastro (whatever that is, never heard of it before) documentation and do some more queries and so on.

Certainly anyone just running LLM code output without doing a bunch of tests and checks is a lunatic.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#85

Post by paulddraper »

danlugo92 wrote: post #80
photochemsyn wrote: post #75

The thing about LLMs that is revolutionary is just how fast you can find a solution to a problem or expand on answers to a problem even to the point of generating a realistic computational-mathematical model of the problem. For example, the author brings up Kepler, so let's ask: > "Please explain in concise terms how Kepler used Tycho Brahe's observational data to come up with Kepler's three laws, on ellipitical orbi…

It's all fun and games until the AI completely hallucinates the answer, while making it sound completely pausible and correct.

So....like a person?

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#86

Post by byby »

progrus wrote: post #33
cs702 wrote: post #18

Echoing many who now find themselves blindsided by the emergent abilities and rapid adoption of LLMs, the OP: * complains that we still lack a "comprehensive theory to explain what intelligence is or how it emerges from first principles," * argues that deep neural nets like LLMs may not be capable of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and * contends that achieving AGI will require "new algorithmic paradigms." Ric…

So there’s no speed of light limit, there’s no speed of clock limit, or else all useful algorithms are parallelizable? Sounds like bullshit.

We hit a clock limit ages ago and switched to parallelism.

I still remember the days there things were in mhz and we were going 90, 100, 200, 300, 500, 1ghz, 2, 3 ... and we'd be at hundreds of ghzs if we didn't hit a limit. Now we switched to cores.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#87

Post by hospitalhusband »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #71
hospitalhusband wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LMM = Large Markov Model. I use that term because models like GPT-4 and friends are for all intents and purposes Markov chains with more data, more compute, some lossy compression, and a bit of nearest neighbor search. Next-word-engines. > why can't I say that your brain is nothing but a bunch of biological neurons trained using its input and intialized based on your genetics? Because we don't think one word at a tim…

>Because we don't think one word at a time In what sense does an LLM think one word at a time that doesn't also apply to a person typing at a keyboard? I'm typing one word at a time right now, I assume you aren't about to declare me a markov chain. When I read my brain presumably ingests one word at a time (not sure if it's one exactly, but it can't be much more than one). It is of course true that I have some notion…

> In what sense does an LLM think one word at a time that doesn't also apply to a person typing at a keyboard?

Because you already have the thought formed before you started typing.

> When I read my brain presumably ingests one word at a time (not sure if it's one exactly, but it can't be much more than one)

And these models ingest many vectors at once, up to the context length. Your brain is also recursive, and regularly goes backwards to rescan earlier words as necessary.

Seems to me it's fundamentally inverted from how we operate, both input and output.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#88

Post by bmc7505 »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #67
bmc7505 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a LARP at best and a scam at worst. I shared some of my thoughts on the matter in a prior thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35145189#35147288

I don't understand the relevance of the prior thread, except that you made the same claim with similarly scant evidence. What exactly is it that makes you so confident?

The problems that AI will manifest are the result of human ambition and failings, no different as any other technology that empowers individuals. Yes, individuals and organizations will misuse AI for immoral purposes, but the popular belief that AI is inherently antihumanist launders accountability by pretending to remove human agency from the equation. How we use or misuse AI technology is entirely on us.

Furthermore, I would argue there are strong complexity-theoretic bottlenecks to computational processes which limit the expressive power of neural networks, even if they could harness galactic amounts of energy. Physical Turing machines have bottlenecks that upper-bound the power of oracles.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#89

Post by loandbehold »

danlugo92 wrote: post #80
photochemsyn wrote: post #75

The thing about LLMs that is revolutionary is just how fast you can find a solution to a problem or expand on answers to a problem even to the point of generating a realistic computational-mathematical model of the problem. For example, the author brings up Kepler, so let's ask: > "Please explain in concise terms how Kepler used Tycho Brahe's observational data to come up with Kepler's three laws, on ellipitical orbi…

It's all fun and games until the AI completely hallucinates the answer, while making it sound completely pausible and correct.

The issue of hallucinations is overblown. I use GPT4 all the time and don't see any hallucinations at all. It's a big problem with Google BARD and GPT3 and earlier models. But GPT4 fixed the issue of hallucinations completely.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#90

Post by dirkt »

paulddraper wrote: post #85
danlugo92 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all fun and games until the AI completely hallucinates the answer, while making it sound completely pausible and correct.

So....like a person?

The difference to a person is that most (though not all) people actually have an understanding if they know something, if they guess something, if they are making something up, or if they are outright lying. Which is about the first thing you train during a scientific education.

And in an honest interaction, they will tell you.

ChatGPT etc. does not. So basically it acts like a pathological liar (who happen to be right as long as it has been trained on something that comes close enough).

Post reply on HN