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They’re made out of weights

maxleiter.com

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#91

Post by ProllyInfamous »

MaxLeiter wrote: post #29
luca-ctx wrote: post #27

Truly fantastic bridge from the original, this deserves an award

All credit to the original author. I just had to think of analogues.

Your modern adaptation is perfect for now-common explainers [this time IS different; it's not programming, it's weights]; these "just analogues" will be the thing I show everybody first whenever discussions of consciousness/AI come up (then will play Jon Benjamin reading original).

Bravo. Really helps (even with my own) perceptions of newness. Similar to stsitned short-story (on dentists, backwards).

Re: They’re made out of weights

#92

Post by teiferer »

zkmon wrote: post #88

They are made out of data bits (memory) and switching bits (transistors/compute). Bits are made out of electric voltage and no voltage. Voltage is made out of flow of positive electric charges. Charges are made out of quarks ...

I have never thought of such a distinction between "bits" into "data bits" and "switching bits".

From a circuit perspective that makes kinda sense, but from the abstract "bit" perspective, the "switching bit" is a mechanism that operates on bits which in the end are also data. In other words there is only one type of bit: the data bit, and the switching comes on top of it.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#93

Post by slopinthebag »

wisty wrote: post #76
kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

AFAIK every argument against conciousness being emergent is just a weak "God of the gaps" argument (since we don't fully understand it all) or a nonsense analogy like the Chinsese room where if you seperate the hardware and software it's not concious anymore (like, duh, remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either). Yeah, the weights not updating online makes them less like a living organism that ca…

> remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either

What is no longer conscious, the brain? Or the body? Or some other entity?

If consciousness is weakly emergent, how do we know it emerges from the solely from the brain and not, say, brain + body? Or brain + body + or environment. Or from the universe itself?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#94

Post by teiferer »

noosphr wrote: post #4

It's not often I see something that's fractally wrong but here we are. There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer. There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 The point of the original sh…

> The point of the original short story is that the computational substrate doesn't matter when you have Turing completeness.

That is your takeaway from the 1991 story?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#96

Post by apsurd »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #22
kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

Time is entropy unfolding as things with nonzero temperature do what they do. Psychological time is your own weights being updated in response to stimuli and internal processing. When there isn't anything interesting happening, no updates are needed, and you don't perceive much time. That's why there's a logarithmic effect on the "density" of time as you age.

sibling discussions are taking this as human perception. But it’s easier to think of it literally. Time is change. Physical state change. By “nothing interesting” - interpret it literally . if “nothing happens” then there is no time because there is no change, there’s no reference to distinguish each frame of time.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#97

Post by jrahmy »

bfung wrote: post #82
noosphr wrote: post #4

It's not often I see something that's fractally wrong but here we are. There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer. There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 The point of the original sh…

And you know what the tokenizer is made of? Weights.

A tokenizer is a deterministic string-matching program, it's not made out of weights in the same sense as a neural network itself.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#99

Post by teiferer »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #80
noosphr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point that when the rules the model learns are simple enough they stop being spread out over all the layers and become as easily interpretable as any expert system. It's just that the rules we feed in the model are extremely poorly defined and we end up with the soup of disjoint rules smeared all across the weights. This isn't a feature of the models. It's a feature of the training set. Being shocked that you can…

So basically there are rules, we just can’t articulate them and so we can’t decode them from the weights. The Goedel Numbering metaphor is pretty appealing to me. You can represent any finite series of real numbers with a series of computations performed on some other finite series of real numbers. We just happen to be using matrices because the math is easy to parallelize. The trick is to realize that when you know…

> You can represent any finite series of real numbers with a series of computations performed on some other finite series of real numbers.

That statement caught my eye. It's either trivially true or quite clearly wrong, depending on how you mean it.

In the literal meaning it's true. Given any finite set of real numbers, I can easily produce a different set (like taking the original set and adding a number which wasn't in there like one plus the largest or so) from which you can trivially produce the original set computationally.

But if you mean you give me both sets then that can't be true. For example if you give me a single real number as set A and the empty set as set B then I can't create a program which generates set A from set B. Your real number in set A could encode anything.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#100

Post by mellosouls »

kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

This read like poetry to me

It's terrific, but the poetry is from the original it links to, in case you didn't realise.

It's a brilliant and timely update though.

Aside, there are various recorded versions including video on YouTube but this is my favourite, a radio play:

They're Made Out of Meat

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/studio/segments/168264-...

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