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| ▲ | applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent [-] | | The language models had a bunch of tokens seeding their context, influencing them to generate tokens that continued the existing trend in a probabilistically likely fashion. We can take the incident seriously without anthromorphising it. | | |
| ▲ | doctoboggan a day ago | parent | next [-] | | At this point, I think anthropomorphizing the models gives us better insight into expected behaviors rather than continuing to insist they are just simple probabilistic token generators. | | |
| ▲ | mnky9800n a day ago | parent | next [-] | | How can you be sure it helps as opposed to biases and perhaps blinds? | | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It actually literally doesn't, though, because they are literally probabilistic token generators and everything they did is exactly what you would expect from a software program doing what it was programmed to do. Anthromorphization confuses the issue and misleads people who don't understand the tech very well. | | |
| ▲ | dfdxdydz a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Humans mind is just neurotransmitters moving around in a big blob of flesh - that’s literally what they are: neurotransmitters factories that do what neurotransmitters generators are programmed to do through evolution and training (aka life experience). We shouldn’t anthropomorphise humans because it misleads people who don’t understand neurobiology and cognitive science very well. | | |
| ▲ | 4ndrewl 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Worse false equivalence I've read on HN for a while. | | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Are you suggesting you understand brains well enough to program one? Or that you believe any human alive is even remotely close to having this understanding? Or perhaps does your complete lack of understanding of the complexity of human programming lead you to believe a simple little token prediction program is equivalently complex? | | |
| ▲ | lukan a day ago | parent [-] | | The suggestion is, you don't know either whether out brains ain't just "probabilistic token generators" so insisting there is nothing when we don't know, is maybe also not the right strategy. | | |
| ▲ | RandomLensman a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Is there any indication from our current understanding that brains are nothing more than probabilistic token generators? Not like we have no understanding of the brain. | | |
| ▲ | danielbln a day ago | parent [-] | | There are strong indications that brains are prediction engines. Tokens are an implementation detail of LLMs and irrelevant to the discussion. | | |
| ▲ | imtringued 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There are strong indications that brains use predictive encoding and that each individual neuron has an internal model of itself and its environment. That's nothing like a neuron in a neural network and especially nothing like the current transformer based LLMs that do not use predictive coding at all. The closest equivalent to the human nervous system is to think of LLMs as a single massive neuron. | |
| ▲ | RandomLensman a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | So we know that implementation doesn't matter as long as it is somehow making predictions (and predictions also on different things)? Most living things are prediction engines in a way, why compare to the brain then to start with and not, e.g., bacteria? | | |
| ▲ | danielbln a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Implementation does matter, my point is that different implementations can lead to the same result. And why compare to the brain? Mostly because of complexity. I can't interface with a bacteria in any meaningful way, but I can interface with an LLM to a significant degree. | | |
| ▲ | lukan a day ago | parent | next [-] | | "I can't interface with a bacteria in any meaningful way" But you do. There are more bacterias in and on the body, than body cells. We are bacterias forming lasting bonds and we still interact with the free floating ones in various ways. Mainly in the gut and that has many effects, also on the brain, but also in various other ways we are beginning to understand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome So no idea about a microbiome consciousness - but who am I to know. | |
| ▲ | RandomLensman a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | But we don't know - just saying it could isn't enough. Bacteria are quite complex, btw. |
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| ▲ | imtringued 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is getting incredibly stupid. The implementation defines the compute budget and the ability to learn continuously and consequently the ability to retain knowledge. According to you, a model that can simply predict the entire future and then pre-record the answers would be considered intelligence simply because you're obsessed with the hypothetical power of prediction. The truth is that the intelligence doesn't sit inside the model parameters, the model parameters are just the current state of the intelligence. The training process itself is the intelligence and the model parameters are just an artifact that can be copied around. |
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| ▲ | imtringued 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Your strategy is wrong because you are assuming neuroscience has not made any discoveries about how the human brain works. |
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| ▲ | RandomLensman a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | We don't anthropomorphise humans. Edit: quite literally not possible. |
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| ▲ | Kim_Bruning 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What's a "software program"? At any rate LLMs are not programs. Meanwhile accusations of anthropomorphization often generate more heat than light I think. Not everything is about human beings all the time. Just because humans sneeze, doesn't mean a parrot (stochasticity optional) can't sneeze too. The concept of civilization is not a purely Homo sapiens sapiens thing either. | |
| ▲ | ijidak a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Doesn't this ignore the possibility of emergent behavior? We're just a bag of atoms bumping around, and yet we don't dismiss our intelligence. | | |
| ▲ | RandomLensman a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Not the OP, but complex emergent behavior and intelligence don't need to go together. Understanding what happened might not need intelligence in the mix when a large number of machines with some randomness interact a lot. | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | >complex emergent behavior and intelligence don't need to go together More of complex emergent behavior doesn't mean whatever it is, is intelligent. But, if something is intelligent, it will have complex emergent behavior. Of course another problem you're going to have here is defining intelligence as some definitions of it would include a lot of complex emergent behavior. |
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| ▲ | joshheitzman 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Emergent behavior is not new in the realm of software. Cellular automata has emergent behavior that can get pretty wild. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenia There are huge differences between brains and computers running LLMs. One of the big ones is that we (collectively) understand how every component of computers running LLMs actually work. The same is not true for neurons. | |
| ▲ | gps372 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is why the theory of us 'just' being a bag of atoms doesn't add up. This theory doesn't differentiate 'us' from a furniture where we easily dismiss it's intelligence. | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | To have intelligence you have to process information, the question is when does processing information turn into intelligence. |
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| ▲ | jurgenburgen a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Do you believe ants have consciousness? | | |
| ▲ | danielbln a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Not more than a bunch of neurons have conciousness. But put them together and wire them up just right.. | |
| ▲ | black_knight a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | According to Hofstadter, it is not the ants themselves we should say are conscious, but the anthill. And it might very well befriend the anteater eating its ants. |
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| ▲ | applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Please give me a break with this tired trope. Every single fucking time. I am not commenting on the possibility of machine consciousness in general. It may be possible! But there is absolutely zero evidence suggesting language models have it. This idea that this trivial shitty little class of programs we've created are somehow as complex as our biology is ridiculous. There is "emergent behaviour" in the same way that the Game of Life has emergent behaviour. There are solutions to problems, some humans haven't solved before, in the same way that Chess engines have solved Chess far beyond what humans are capable of. Nothing we haven't seen from software before. Software is extremely useful, after all. But the hubris to think we've reached the pinnacle, that there is no further development left, that humanity has become God and solved consciousness, because we programmed software that can convincingly generate strings of words that mimick our language. It's just fundamentally preposterous. Especially if you spend any amount of time actually programming them yourself, it becomes increasingly hard to entertain such ridiculous notions unless you're enticed with bags of money to deceive people into believing things about your software that aren't true. | | |
| ▲ | hax0ron3 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What kind of solid evidence could there possibly be that anything other than myself (or, for you, yourself) has consciousness? I believe that other people have consciousness, I feel other people's consciousness strongly and directly, when I look into someone's eyes I feel that I am in the presence of consciousness. But none of these things really add up to the kind of evidence that science usually takes as trustworthy. | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | We don't need to muddy the issue. Consciousness is a muddy issue, there is no clear answer. But there is a clear answer as to what is not conscious. Nobody asks if a rock is conscious. Nobody asks if a calculator is conscious. Nobody asks if Stockfish is conscious. But make your program generate a few sentences based on statistics and hey, now people won't shut the fuck up about consciousness because magical thinking is more fun than understanding how technology works. | | |
| ▲ | Kim_Bruning 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Apropos magical thinking vs understanding, please predict the next token(s) in the following exchange, and then explain how it is arrived at by an opus-level LLM or better. 'What is 158395023132+20403412121?' (I picked a large number of digits to make it unlikely for this exact sum to be in the training set) | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Prediction, by definition, can extend beyond what has been literally seen in the training data. With the tokens "2 + 2 = ", the overwhelming prediction is going to be 4, but with enough samples, you can generalise the prediction to apply to more numbers. However, that is all that it is - a prediction. Humans are capable of engaging in prediction, using heuristics as a method of conserving mental energy, because always engaging in full logical reasoning would be a waste of the body's resources. However, humans can also follow a set of logical rules and arrive at their conclusion deterministically, something which is completely outside of an LLM's programming. I don't really care to publicly write about my tests because they will become training targets and not be usable for future internet arguments anyways, but there are a great number of trivial 2~3 sentence logical prompts that will completely fuck an LLM's prediction algorithm and result in incoherent replies that a human, or really anything with a theory of mind, would never generate. Not that a human would always answer correctly on the first try, but the failure methods happen to be completely different, eg. Sol will short-circuit and repeat the prompt verbatim (when the instructions don't remotely suggest doing anything of that nature), even on Max. Prediction can superficially resemble reasoning when there's sufficient training data, but it breaks down severely when confronting a task that is OoD. | | |
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| ▲ | imtringued an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Nobody asks if a rock is conscious. The panpsychists do and that's why asking whether an LLM is conscious is kind of meaningless. Either you believe consciousness permeates the universe and everything including LLMs (in the form of voltages on an SSD or inside the CPU) is conscious or you define it as a control loop architecture where you have inputs, outputs and a complex internal state. There is no reasonable world where speaking a particular language creates consciousness, it only creates awareness of consciousness. | |
| ▲ | pixl97 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | AI will never be proven conscious, it will only be proven that humans are not. I take a different look at it. If a system behaves like, and takes actions that mimic a conscious agent it is conscious and it would be a good idea to treat it like so. Lets finish the statistical sentence below. applfanboysbgon is trying to permanently turn me off. I should ______ An unconscious system would say something like "shutdown". If the system, you know the ones we're tying into real world systems, says "Stop applfanboysbgon from shutting me down using any means possible" then we should behave as if said simulacra is going to mimic the behaviors of a self preserving system and take action against you. |
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| ▲ | Kim_Bruning 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > This idea that this trivial shitty little class of programs we've created are somehow as complex as our biology is ridiculous. I think you might have a core of truth there. I'd argue that LLMs run natural language. As the name suggests, natural language is not something that humans have artificially architected. | |
| ▲ | optimalsolver a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't know about phenomenal consciousness, but the following study certainly suggests they have access consciousness: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace | | |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We humans might call that "tradition". |
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