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ML promises to be profoundly weird
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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some people point at LLMs confabulating No. LLMs do not confabulate they bullshit. There is a big difference. AIs do not care, cannot care, have not capacity to care about the output. String tokens in, string tokes out. Even if they have all the data perfectly recorded they will still fail to use it for a coherent output. > Collapsing the dimensionality is going to be lossy, which means it will have gaps between wh…
I don't even think they bullshit, since that requires conscious effort that they do not an cannot possess. They just simply interpret things incorrectly sometimes, like any of us meatbags.
They make incorrect predictions of text to respond to prompts.
The neat thing about LLMs is they are very general models that can be used for lots of different things. The downside is they often make incorrect predictions, and what's worse, it isn't even very predictable to know when they make incorrect predictions.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because who cares if the world dies as long as you made lots of money on the way. Guiding principle of the AI industry
It's really the whole tech industry as it exists right now and AI is a victim of bad timing. If this AI had been invented 40 years ago there'd have been a lower ceiling on the damage it could do. Another way of saying that is that capitalism is the real problem, but I was never anti-capitalist in principle, it's just gotten out of hand in the last 5-10 years. (Not that it hadn't been building to that.)
> Another way of saying that is that capitalism is the real problem, but I was never anti-capitalist in principle, it's just gotten out of hand in the last 5-10 years. (Not that it hadn't been building to that.)
Capitalism is a tool and it's fine as a tool, to accomplish certain goals while subordinated to other things. Unfortunately it's turned into an ideology (to the point it's worshiped idolatrously by some), and that's where things went off the rails.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#94> It remains unclear whether continuing to throw vast quantities of silicon and ever-bigger corpuses at the current generation of models will lead to human-equivalent capabilities. Massive increases in training costs and parameter count seem to be yielding diminishing returns. Or maybe this effect is illusory. Mysteries!
I’m not even sure whether this is possible. The current corpus used for training includes virtually all known material. If we make it illegal for these companies to use copyrighted content without remuneration, either the task gets very expensive, indeed, or the corpus shrinks. We can certainly make the models larger, with more and more parameters, subject only to silicon’s ability to give us more transistors for RAM density and GPU parallelism. But it honestly feels like, without another “Attention is All You Need” level breakthrough, we’re starting to see the end of the runway.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things can be true at the same time: The technology has improved, and the technology in its current state still isn't fit for purpose. I stress test commercially deployed LLMs like Gemini and Claude with trivial tasks: sports trivia, fixing recipes, explaining board game rules, etc. It works well like 95% of the time. That's fine for inconsequential things. But you'd have to be deeply irresponsible to accept that…
> I stress test commercially deployed LLMs like Gemini and Claude with trivial tasks: sports trivia, fixing recipes, explaining board game rules, etc. It works well like 95% of the time. That's fine for inconsequential things. But you'd have to be deeply irresponsible to accept that kind of error rate on things that actually matter. 95% is not my experience and frankly dishonest. I have ChatGPT open right now, can yo…
>95% is not my experience and frankly dishonest.
Quite frankly, this is exactly like how two people can use the same compression program on two different files and get vastly different compression ratios (because one has a lot of redundancy and the other one has not).
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#96"As LLMs etc. are deployed in new situations, and at new scale, there will be all kinds of changes in work, politics, art, sex, communication, and economics." For an article five years in the making, this is what I expected it to be about. Instead, we got a ramble about how imperfect LLMs are right now.
> Instead, we got a ramble about how imperfect LLMs are right now.
I wager this is a point that needs beaten into the common psyche. After all, it's been sold that it is not an imperfect tool, but the solution to all of our problems in every field forever. That's why these companies need billions upon billions of dollars of public subsidies and investments that would otherwise find their way to more pragmatic ends.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I stress test commercially deployed LLMs like Gemini and Claude with trivial tasks: sports trivia, fixing recipes, explaining board game rules, etc. It works well like 95% of the time. That's fine for inconsequential things. But you'd have to be deeply irresponsible to accept that kind of error rate on things that actually matter. 95% is not my experience and frankly dishonest. I have ChatGPT open right now, can yo…
>95% is not my experience and frankly dishonest. Quite frankly, this is exactly like how two people can use the same compression program on two different files and get vastly different compression ratios (because one has a lot of redundancy and the other one has not).
I'm asking for a single example.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really the whole tech industry as it exists right now and AI is a victim of bad timing. If this AI had been invented 40 years ago there'd have been a lower ceiling on the damage it could do. Another way of saying that is that capitalism is the real problem, but I was never anti-capitalist in principle, it's just gotten out of hand in the last 5-10 years. (Not that it hadn't been building to that.)
> Another way of saying that is that capitalism is the real problem, but I was never anti-capitalist in principle, it's just gotten out of hand in the last 5-10 years. (Not that it hadn't been building to that.) Capitalism is a tool and it's fine as a tool, to accomplish certain goals while subordinated to other things. Unfortunately it's turned into an ideology (to the point it's worshiped idolatrously by some), and…
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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#99Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing. I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimension…
We shouldn’t try to build a worse version of a human. We should try to build a better compiler and encyclopedia.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
So your logic is humans and LLMs are the same because humans are wrong sometimes?
Pretty much, yeah. Or rather, the fact that we're both reliably wrong in identifiably similar ways makes "we're more alike than different" an attractive prior to me.
“More alike than different” is reasonable I think, as long as we’re talking about how we have some of the same failure modes. Although the way we get there is quite different.
I’m still not a big fan of comparing humans and LLMs because LLMs lack so much of what actually makes us human. We might bullshit or be wrong because of many reasons that just don’t apply to LLMs.