4 ms·

Why think only about "incremental" improvement? People aren't just making slight tweaks, new papers are published at a remarkable rate where people try signific

Why think only about "incremental" improvement? People aren't just making slight tweaks, new papers are published at a remarkable rate where people try significantly different architectures, training methods, etc, and that steady progress leads to ever more impressive results. How can you assume this direction of research will lead nowhere? OK, ignore everyone who doesn't understand the technology. Of those of who do, I'm utterly amazed how pessimistic many are that this "isn't capable" of leading to AGI. Probably not Transformers specially, but LLMs show that intelligence is remarkably easy. You don't even need to put anything in the neural architecture designed to perform reasoning tasks, but they can be learnt regardless, because Transformers are flexible enough to learn to emulate computation (Turing machines) with bounded space and time, going beyond the famous result that 2-layer MLPs are universal function approximators.

greenyoda 4y ago
> You don't even need to put anything in the neural architecture designed to perform reasoning tasks, but they can be learnt... That sounds interesting. Can you provide a reference to this research?
- versteegen 4y ago
  See my reply to sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672865 A more interesting example of transformers learning a process may be [1]. There's a large literature on applying language models to reasoning tasks, but not many on what's actually going on inside them. But see for example [2]. Also https://transformer-circuits.pub/ https://transformer-circuits.pub/ has a body of work on it, but still at a very early stage (see in particular "In-context Learning and Induction Heads"). [1] Extraction of organic chemistry grammar from unsupervised learning of chemical reactions https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe4166 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe4166 [2] Analyzing the Structure of Attention in a Transformer Language Model https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04284 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04284
LegionMammal978 4y ago
> Probably not Transformers specially, but LLMs show that intelligence is remarkably easy. LLMs show that language is remarkably easy. Ever since GPT-3 was released, I've been convinced that language comprehension isn't nearly as big a component of general intelligence as people are making it out to be. This makes some intuitive sense: I recall a writer for a tabloid expressing that they simply turn off their brain and start spinning up paragraphs. But so far, I haven't seen any of these models perform logical reasoning, beyond basic memorization and reasoning by analogy. They can tell you all day what their "reasoning process" is, but the actual content of any step is simply something that looks like it would fit in that step. Where do you derive this confidence that advanced logical reasoning is a natural capability of transformer models? (Being capable of emulating finite Turing machines is hardly impressive: any sufficiently large finite circuit can do that.)
- hackinthebochs 4y ago
  >Ever since GPT-3 was released, I've been convinced that language comprehension isn't nearly as big a component of general intelligence as people are making it out to be "X is the key to intelligence" computers do X "Well actually, X isn't that hard..." rinse and repeat 100x At some point you have to stop and reflect on whether your concept of intelligence is faulty. All the milestones that came and went (arithmetic, simulations, chess, image recognition, language, etc) are all facets of intelligence. It's not that we're discovering intelligence isn't this or that computational feat, but that intelligence is just made up of many computational feats. Eventually we will have them all covered, much sooner than the naysayers think.
  - LegionMammal978 4y ago
    > All the milestones that came and went (arithmetic, simulations, chess, image recognition, language, etc) are all facets of intelligence. Why should I have to care about those weird milestones that some other randos came up with once upon a time? I've never espoused any of those myself, so how is this supposed to prove anything about my thought process? > It's not that we're discovering intelligence isn't this or that computational feat, but that intelligence is just made up of many computational feats. Eventually we will have them all covered, much sooner than the naysayers think. Well, it certainly appears to me like there's a big qualitative difference between the capabilities you mentioned (arithmetic and simulations are just applications of predefined algorithms; chess, image recognition, and language are memorization, association, and analogy on a massive scale) and the kind of ad-hoc multi-step logical reasoning that I'd expect from any AGI. You can argue that the difference is purely illusory, but I'll have a very hard time believing that until I see it with my own eyes.
lolinder 4y ago
I never said incremental improvements to LLMs won't lead anywhere, I said they won't replace me. A sibling has already commented on why that would be, and I agree with them. I just wanted to chime in and remind about the other part of my argument: my job is not threatened until we have AGI, and AGI would be so earth-shattering to the entire premise of our economy that there's literally no point in worrying about it as an individual. We can and should talk about society-level changes like UBI, but having individual anxiety about your own personal job is a strange response to the end of the entire global economic system.

greenyoda 4y ago

> You don't even need to put anything in the neural architecture designed to perform reasoning tasks, but they can be learnt... That sounds interesting. Can you provide a reference to this research?

versteegen 4y ago
See my reply to sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672865 A more interesting example of transformers learning a process may be [1]. There's a large literature on applying language models to reasoning tasks, but not many on what's actually going on inside them. But see for example [2]. Also https://transformer-circuits.pub/ https://transformer-circuits.pub/ has a body of work on it, but still at a very early stage (see in particular "In-context Learning and Induction Heads"). [1] Extraction of organic chemistry grammar from unsupervised learning of chemical reactions https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe4166 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe4166 [2] Analyzing the Structure of Attention in a Transformer Language Model https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04284 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04284

LegionMammal978 4y ago

> Probably not Transformers specially, but LLMs show that intelligence is remarkably easy. LLMs show that language is remarkably easy. Ever since GPT-3 was released, I've been convinced that language comprehension isn't nearly as big a component of general intelligence as people are making it out to be. This makes some intuitive sense: I recall a writer for a tabloid expressing that they simply turn off their brain and start spinning up paragraphs. But so far, I haven't seen any of these models perform logical reasoning, beyond basic memorization and reasoning by analogy. They can tell you all day what their "reasoning process" is, but the actual content of any step is simply something that looks like it would fit in that step. Where do you derive this confidence that advanced logical reasoning is a natural capability of transformer models? (Being capable of emulating finite Turing machines is hardly impressive: any sufficiently large finite circuit can do that.)

hackinthebochs 4y ago
>Ever since GPT-3 was released, I've been convinced that language comprehension isn't nearly as big a component of general intelligence as people are making it out to be "X is the key to intelligence" computers do X "Well actually, X isn't that hard..." rinse and repeat 100x At some point you have to stop and reflect on whether your concept of intelligence is faulty. All the milestones that came and went (arithmetic, simulations, chess, image recognition, language, etc) are all facets of intelligence. It's not that we're discovering intelligence isn't this or that computational feat, but that intelligence is just made up of many computational feats. Eventually we will have them all covered, much sooner than the naysayers think.
- LegionMammal978 4y ago
  > All the milestones that came and went (arithmetic, simulations, chess, image recognition, language, etc) are all facets of intelligence. Why should I have to care about those weird milestones that some other randos came up with once upon a time? I've never espoused any of those myself, so how is this supposed to prove anything about my thought process? > It's not that we're discovering intelligence isn't this or that computational feat, but that intelligence is just made up of many computational feats. Eventually we will have them all covered, much sooner than the naysayers think. Well, it certainly appears to me like there's a big qualitative difference between the capabilities you mentioned (arithmetic and simulations are just applications of predefined algorithms; chess, image recognition, and language are memorization, association, and analogy on a massive scale) and the kind of ad-hoc multi-step logical reasoning that I'd expect from any AGI. You can argue that the difference is purely illusory, but I'll have a very hard time believing that until I see it with my own eyes.

lolinder 4y ago

I never said incremental improvements to LLMs won't lead anywhere, I said they won't replace me. A sibling has already commented on why that would be, and I agree with them. I just wanted to chime in and remind about the other part of my argument: my job is not threatened until we have AGI, and AGI would be so earth-shattering to the entire premise of our economy that there's literally no point in worrying about it as an individual. We can and should talk about society-level changes like UBI, but having individual anxiety about your own personal job is a strange response to the end of the entire global economic system.