| ▲ | nwhnwh 4 hours ago |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | dang 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html |
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| ▲ | D-Machine 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not sure about that, I'd more say the Western reductionism here is the assumption that all thinking / modeling is primarily linguistic and conscious. This article is NOT clearly falling into this trap. A more "Eastern" perspective might recognize that much deep knowledge cannot be encoded linguistically ("The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao", etc.), and there is more broad recognition of the importance of unconscious processes and change (or at least more skepticism of the conscious mind). Freud was the first real major challenge to some of this stuff in the West, but nowadays it is more common than not for people to dismiss the idea that unconscious stuff might be far more important than the small amount of things we happen to notice in the conscious mind. The (obviously false) assumptions about the importance of conscious linguistic modeling are what lead to people say (obviously false) things like "How do you know your thinking isn't actually just like LLM reasoning?". |
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| ▲ | mirekrusin 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | All models have multimodality now, it's not just text, in that sense they are not "just linguistic". Regarding conscious vs non-conscious processes: Inference is actually non-conscious process because nothing is observed by the model. Auto regression is conscious process because model observes its own output, ie it has self-referential access. Ie models use both and early/mid layers perform highly abstracted non-conscious processes. | | |
| ▲ | D-Machine 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The multimodality of most current popular models is quite limited (mostly text is used to improve capacity in vision tasks, but the reverse is not true, except in some special cases). I made this point below at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939091 Otherwise, I don't understand the way you are using "conscious" and "unconscious" here. My main point about conscious reasoning is that when we introspect to try to understand our thinking, we tend to see e.g. linguistic, imagistic, tactile, and various sensory processes / representations. Some people focus only on the linguistic parts and downplay e.g. imagery ("wordcels vs. shape rotators meme"), but in either case, it is a common mistake to think the most important parts of thinking must always necessarily be (1) linguistic, (2) are clearly related to what appears during introspection. | | |
| ▲ | mirekrusin an hour ago | parent [-] | | All modern models are processing images internally within its own neural network, they don't delegate it to some other/ocr model. Image data flows through the same paths as text, what do you mean by "quite limited" here? Your first comment was refering to unconscious, now you don't mention it. Regarding "conscious and linguistic" which you seem to be touching on now, taking aside multimodality - text itself is way richer for llms than for humans. Trivial example may be ie. mermaid diagram which describes some complex topology, svg which describes some complex vector graphic or complex program or web application - all are textual but to understand and create them model must operate in non linguistic domains. Even pure text-to-text models have ability to operate in other than linguistic domains, but they are not text-to-text only, they can ingest images directly as well. |
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| ▲ | bfung 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Or the opposite, that humans are somehow super special and not as simple as a prediction feedback loop with randomizations. |
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| ▲ | tbrownaw 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How do you manage to get that from the article? |
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| ▲ | nwhnwh 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not from the article. Comments don't have to work this way. |
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| ▲ | FpUser 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >"Westerners are trying so hard to prove that there is nothing special about humans." I am not really fond of us "westerners", but judjing how many "easterners" treat their populace they seem to confirm the point |
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| ▲ | swyx 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| you realize ankit is from india and i'm from singapore right lol |
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| ▲ | Xmd5a 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| another "noahpinion" |
