They’re made out of weights
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They’re made out of weights
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Re: They’re made out of weights
#2Numbers that dream.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#3It works until they get to the sentience part. Neat idea!
Re: They’re made out of weights
#4It'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 short story is that the computational substrate doesn't matter when you have Turing completeness. This one seems to think that you don't need structure and interpretability just because you change substrates.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#5It works until they get to the sentience part. Neat idea!
Even there it works a bit.
> These models are the only other things we've ever met that can hold a conversation, and they're made out of weights
Is a fair point.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#6It'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…
I don't think the grokking paper is a great argument for the difference between weights and meat. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_Labs learning to play Pong.
The tokenizer is, at best, a sensory mechanism as evidenced by 1) the random generation of the tokenization scheme, and 2) vastly different tokenization schemes produce virtually identical behavior. It'd be like if Noah Webster threw a bunch of movable type into a bucket (breaking some words in half) and then drew randomly to make the first English dictionary.
EDIT; I was too cavalier with the comparison of tokenizer to sensory modality; my ultimate point is that direct byte-to-token transformers can achieve similar overall performance which to me makes a weights to meat comparison pretty straightforward, but the particular tokenizer in use certainly has a large impact on both efficiency and accuracy on specific problems (e.g. digit representation)
Re: They’re made out of weights
#7It'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…
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Re: They’re made out of weights
#8It works until they get to the sentience part. Neat idea!
Even there it works a bit. > These models are the only other things we've ever met that can hold a conversation, and they're made out of weights Is a fair point.
Not especially. Depending on where you set your standards for "holding a conversation" you can satisfy the requirement with a classical markov chatterbot, a well-trained parrot, a copy of Eliza, or a telemarketer flowchart drawn on a sheet of paper. Only the markov bot is made out of "weights" in the sense of a statistical model.
Parrots are intelligent animals, albeit with a limited capacity for vocabulary and syntax compared to a human, and Eliza and the flowchart are made out of explicitly encoded rules and conversational tactics.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#9It'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…
> There are grammar rules
And they're made out of weights.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#10It'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…
I don't think the grokking paper is a great argument for the difference between weights and meat. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_Labs learning to play Pong. The tokenizer is, at best, a sensory mechanism as evidenced by 1) the random generation of the tokenization scheme, and 2) vastly different tokenization schemes produce virtually identical behavior. It'd be like if Noah Webster threw a bunch of movab…
I'm kind of stunned that someone is using my work to tell me I'm wrong. I wrote the code for the dish brain pong and encoding information was a huge part of what that experiment was about.
So when I way that the grok paper and the pong paper fundamentally agree I have some idea of what I'm talking about.