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I think "scale-dependent capability" is a much more precise term for what they're describing, but I'm not sure that that term doesn't fall under the general umb

I think "scale-dependent capability" is a much more precise term for what they're describing, but I'm not sure that that term doesn't fall under the general umbrella of emergent properties. The opening paragraphs of emergent properties in philosophy [1] cites a number of examples that I would argue are comparable to LLM suddenly becoming able to do arithmetic past a certain scale. > In philosophy and esp. the philosophy of science, emergence is a relation between a whole and its parts such that a property of the whole does not obtain just in virtue of properties of its parts taken in isolation. This is not a settled definition. I think everyone can agree that this applies epistemologically, where studying the parts in isolation cannot always yield sufficient information to predict macroscopic properties, but to claim that all properties of the whole do not reduce to the properties of its parts is controversial. For instance, it seems unlikely that we would have predicted H2O's dipole moment and the phenomenon of surface tension just from studying hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms in isolation, but it would be incorrect to say that surface tension is not the result of the properties of hydrogen and oxygen in isolation. We simply cannot discover all the relevant properties without studying them together. Edit: to clarify, H2O's dipole moment seems obvious in hindsight when we have a good model for what's going on, and analogously, LLM's ability to do arithmetic seems obvious as a scale-dependent property in hindsight, but that doesn't mean it was obvious that this would happen before it was created. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/

mjburgess 4y ago
Well it's scale dependence is an illusion. It's uniformly able to model Q->SingleAnswer problems, and uniformly able to model Q-> ManyAnswer problems. Basic arithmetic is the former kind, and it becomes useful to people at large scales, ie., accurate on basic arithmetic. This dual condition of "useful-to-people" is the thing introducing the illusion, since it changes depending on what we're modelling. The system isnt acquring any new property. Consider a researcher putting a book on a thin ice-sheet, and then putting a car on it. Here, they're concluding the ice has different properties in each case -- but it doesnt.
- naasking 4y ago
  > This dual condition of "useful-to-people" is the thing introducing the illusion, since it changes depending on what we're modelling. The system isnt acquring any new property. I have a couple of possible responses to this, but maybe the most obvious is that I'm not sure why "useful to people" can't qualify as a new property. For instance, a system that suddenly becomes useful to people can be transformative to society, which can lead to new emergent social or economic properties at the societal scale. To conclude that "useful to people" is not a meaningful property, aren't you basically implying that something that suddenly becomes useful cannot even in principle lead to new societal scale emergent properties? That seems dubious. Edit: or you're implying that emergent properties are not reducible to interactions between constituent properties, which also seems dubious. For a concrete example, the internet probably falls into this category. It has transformed society and led to new emergent properties at societal scales, but computers didn't suddenly acquire any new computational properties, or new properties to manipulate bits. Only the scale of their deployment changed, and that scaling was itself useful to people, and this led to new societal properties. That arguably can't happen unless "useful to people" is itself a meaningful property, no?
- darawk 4y ago
  > Consider a researcher putting a book on a thin ice-sheet, and then putting a car on it. Here, they're concluding the ice has different properties in each case -- but it doesnt. This is just a linguistic shell game with the meaning of the word "property". You could just as easily say the difference between the mind of a human and a monkey is a matter of degree, and therefore going from one to the other does not gain any novel "property". It should be obvious that the degree of a property can fundamentally change its nature, and that there is no hard distinction between "properties" and degrees of things. The difference between a tickle and a gunshot are matters of "degree", but that fact is of near zero semantic utility.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Emergence is about intrinsic properties, observer-independent properties. If emergence were about observer-relative properties it would be a meaningless term. My shoe gets an "emergent property" to hold my door open when I put it in a door way. This is mumbojumbo. Systems acquiring observer-relative "properties" are all well and good, but the claim here is a much stronger one. This gross misuse of language amounts to saying that "models with enough parameters to accurately approximate a function" have "emergent properties" that "models without enough parameters" do not have. This is a deeply silly way to describe the conditions under which one function can approximate another, and the rate at which that aproximation converges to something useful.

mjburgess 4y ago

Well it's scale dependence is an illusion. It's uniformly able to model Q->SingleAnswer problems, and uniformly able to model Q-> ManyAnswer problems. Basic arithmetic is the former kind, and it becomes useful to people at large scales, ie., accurate on basic arithmetic. This dual condition of "useful-to-people" is the thing introducing the illusion, since it changes depending on what we're modelling. The system isnt acquring any new property. Consider a researcher putting a book on a thin ice-sheet, and then putting a car on it. Here, they're concluding the ice has different properties in each case -- but it doesnt.

naasking 4y ago
> This dual condition of "useful-to-people" is the thing introducing the illusion, since it changes depending on what we're modelling. The system isnt acquring any new property. I have a couple of possible responses to this, but maybe the most obvious is that I'm not sure why "useful to people" can't qualify as a new property. For instance, a system that suddenly becomes useful to people can be transformative to society, which can lead to new emergent social or economic properties at the societal scale. To conclude that "useful to people" is not a meaningful property, aren't you basically implying that something that suddenly becomes useful cannot even in principle lead to new societal scale emergent properties? That seems dubious. Edit: or you're implying that emergent properties are not reducible to interactions between constituent properties, which also seems dubious. For a concrete example, the internet probably falls into this category. It has transformed society and led to new emergent properties at societal scales, but computers didn't suddenly acquire any new computational properties, or new properties to manipulate bits. Only the scale of their deployment changed, and that scaling was itself useful to people, and this led to new societal properties. That arguably can't happen unless "useful to people" is itself a meaningful property, no?
darawk 4y ago
> Consider a researcher putting a book on a thin ice-sheet, and then putting a car on it. Here, they're concluding the ice has different properties in each case -- but it doesnt. This is just a linguistic shell game with the meaning of the word "property". You could just as easily say the difference between the mind of a human and a monkey is a matter of degree, and therefore going from one to the other does not gain any novel "property". It should be obvious that the degree of a property can fundamentally change its nature, and that there is no hard distinction between "properties" and degrees of things. The difference between a tickle and a gunshot are matters of "degree", but that fact is of near zero semantic utility.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Emergence is about intrinsic properties, observer-independent properties. If emergence were about observer-relative properties it would be a meaningless term. My shoe gets an "emergent property" to hold my door open when I put it in a door way. This is mumbojumbo. Systems acquiring observer-relative "properties" are all well and good, but the claim here is a much stronger one. This gross misuse of language amounts to saying that "models with enough parameters to accurately approximate a function" have "emergent properties" that "models without enough parameters" do not have. This is a deeply silly way to describe the conditions under which one function can approximate another, and the rate at which that aproximation converges to something useful.