cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2811405
"We view this moment of hype around generative AI as dangerous. There is a pack mentality in rushing to invest in these tools, while overlooking the fact that they threaten workers and impact consumers by creating lesser quality products and allowing more erroneous outputs. For example, earlier this year America’s National Eating Disorders Association fired helpline workers and attempted to replace them with a chatbot. The bot was then shut down after its responses actively encouraged disordered eating behaviors. "
No. Just… No. The LLM has not “figured out” what’s going on. It can’t. These things are just good at prediction. The main indicator is in your text: “mostly correct”. A computer that knows what to calculate will not be “mostly correct”. One false answer proves one hundred percent that it has no clue what it’s supposed to do.
What we are seeing with those “studies” is that social study people try to apply the same rules they apply to humans (where “mostly correct” is as good as “always correct”) which is bonkers, or behavioral researchers try to prove some behavior they attribute to the AI as if it was a living being, which is also bonkers because the AI will mimic the results in the training data which is human so the data will be biased as fuck and its impossible to determine if the AI did anything by itself at all (which it didn’t, because that’s not how the software works).
No, you’re wrong. All interesting behavior of ML models is emergent. It is learned, not programmed. The fact that it can perform what we consider an abstract task with success clearly distinguishable from random chance is irrefutable proof that some model of the task has been learned.
No one said anyhting about “learned” vs “programmed”. Literally no one.
OP is saying it’s impossible for a LLM to have “figured out” how something it works, and that if it understood anything it would be able to perform related tasks perfectly reliably. They didn’t use the words, but that’s what they meant. Sorry for your reading comprehension.
“op” you are referring to is… well… myself, Since you didn’t comprehend that from the posts above, my reading comprehension might not be the issue here. \
But in all seriousness: I think this is an issue with concepts. No one is saying that LLMs can’t “learn” that would be stupid. But the discussion is not “is everything programmed into the LLM or does it recombine stuff”. You seem to reason that when someone says the LLM can’t “understand”, that person means “the LLM can’t learn”, but “learning” and “understanding” are not the same at all. The question is not if LLMs can learn, It’s wether it can grasp concepts from the content of the words it absorbs as it it’s learning data. If it would grasp concepts (like rules in algebra), it could reproduce them everytime it gets confronted with a similar problem. The fact that it can’t do that shows that the only thing it does is chain words together by stochastic calculation. Really sophisticated stachastic calculation with lots of possible outcomes, but still.
I don’t care. It doesn’t matter, so I didn’t check. Your reading comprehension is still, in fact, the issue, since you didn’t understand that the “learned” vs “programmed” distinction I had referred to is completely relevant to your post.
That’s what learning is. The fact that it can construct syntactically and semantically correct, relevant responses in perfect English means that it has a highly developed inner model of many things we would consider to be abstract concepts (like the syntax of the English language).
This is wrong. It is obvious and irrefutable that it models sophisticated approximations of abstract concepts. Humans are literally no different. Humans who consider themselves to understand a concept can obviously misunderstand some aspect of the concept in some contexts. The fact that these models are not as robust as that of a human’s doesn’t mean what you’re saying it means.
This is a meaningless point, you’re thinking at the wrong level of abstraction. This argument is equivalent to “a computer cannot convey meaningful information to a human because it simply activates and deactivates bits according to simple rules.” Your statement about an implementation detail says literally nothing about the emergent behavior we’re talking about.
Indeed, and it turns out that in order to predict the next word these things may be thinking about stuff.
There’s a huge amount of complex work that can go into predicting stuff. If you were to try to predict the next word that a person you’re speaking with was going to say, how would you go about it? Developing a mental model of that person’s thought processes would be a really good approach. How would you predict what the next thing that comes after “126+118=” is? Would you always get it exactly correct, or might you occasionally predict the wrong number?
I think you’re starting from the premise that these things can’t possibly be “thinking”, on any level, and are trying to reinterpret everything to fit that premise. These things are largely opaque black boxes, just like human brains are. Is it really so impossible that thought-like processes are going on inside both of them?
Yes, it is impossible. There are no “thoughts”. The bloody thing doesn’t know what an Apple is if you ask it to write a 500 page book about them. It just guesses a word, then from there guesses the next one and so on. That’s why it will very often confidently tell you aggravating bullshit. It has no concept of the things it spits out. It’s a “word calculator” so to speak. The whole thing is not “revolutionary” or “new” by any stretch. What is new is the ability to use tons and tons and tons of reference data which makes the output halfway decent and the GPU power that will make it’s speed halfway decent. Other than that, LLMs are.not.“thinking”.
A rather categorical statement given that you didn’t say anything with regards to how you think.
Maybe wait until we actually know more what’s going on under the hood - both in LLMs and in the human brain - before stating with such confident finality that there’s absolutely no similarities.
If it turns out that LLMs aren’t thinking, but they’re still producing the same sort of interaction that humans are capable of, perhaps that says more about humans than it does about LLMs.
sees a plastic bag being blown by the wind
Holy shit that bag must be alive
I’ve been making the same or similar arguments you are here in a lot of places. I use LLMs every day for my job, and it’s quite clear that beyond a certain scale, there’s definitely more going on than “fancy autocomplete.”
I’m not sure what’s up with people hating on AI all of a sudden, but there seems quite a few who are confidently giving out incorrect information. I find it most amusing when they’re doing that at the same time as bashing LLMs for also confidently giving out wrong information.
I suspect it’s rooted in defensive reactions. People are worried about their jobs, and after being raised to believe that human thought is special and unique they’re worried that that “specialness” and “uniqueness” might be threatened. So they form very strong opinions that these things are nothing to worry about.
I’m not really sure what to do other than just keep pointing out what information we do have about this stuff. It works, so in the end it’ll be used regardless of hurt feelings. It would be better if we get ready for that sooner rather than later, though, and denial is going to delay that.
Can you give examples of that?
The one I like to give is tool use. I can present the LLM with a problem and give it a number of tools it can use to solve the problem and it is pretty good at that. Here’s an older writeup that mentions a lot of others: https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/emergence
They produce this kind of output because they break doen one mostly logical system (language) onto another (numbers). The irregularities language has get compensated by the vast number of sources.
We don’t need to know more about anything. If I tell you “hey, don’t think of an Apple”, your brain will conceptualize an Apple and then go from there. LLMs don’t know “concepts”. They spit out numbers just as mindlessly as your Casio calculator watch.
The engineers of ChatGPT-4 themselves have stated that it is beginning to show signs of general intelligence. I put a lot more value in their opinion on the subject than a person on the Internet who doesn’t work in the field of artificial intelligence.
It’s PR by Microsoft. I am beginning to doubt the intelligence of many humans rather than that of ChatGPT considering these kinds of comments.
That wasn’t the engineers of GPT-4, it was Microsoft who have been fanning the hype pretty heavily to recoup their investment and push their own Bing integration and then opened their “study” with:
An actual AI researcher (Maarten Sap) regarding this statement: