6 ms·

It's interesting to watch a new religion spinning up in real time. People know how it works, but somehow also ignore that and go crazy believing it must be con

It's interesting to watch a new religion spinning up in real time. People know how it works, but somehow also ignore that and go crazy believing it must be conscious or intelligent or whatever they want to ascribe. We collectively made fun of that guy at google, i thought, but now somehow the collective has moved on to believing that matrix multiplication is sentient

MauroIksem 4y ago
Maybe that's all sentience is.
- version_five 4y ago
  As depressing as it would be, I could accept that sentience is just some manifestation of our atomic desire to increase the entropy of the universe. Based on what we know, that's plausible, if kind of disappointing. But it's very different from linear algebra.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  It does‘t answer who the matrix multiplication is for. No reason to make an illusion.
circuit10 4y ago
Not conscious but it is intelligent, it has knowledge and can do reasoning with that knowledge I guess it depends on how you define intelligence but I don’t see why you’d link it in with consciousness, especially considering that simple algorithms are often described as “intelligent”
mckirk 4y ago
Where's your proof that your own brain is doing anything that couldn't be represented with a 'matrix multiplication'?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- version_five 4y ago
  I'll respond only to draw the parallel between the kind of comment above and the typical religious "how do you know my untestable idea isn't true" type argument. Faith is fine, but it's not part of rational debate.
  - tidenly 4y ago
    Honestly though, with no theory of mind or consciousness you have no way to assert in either direction. To borrow the religion analogy, there's the opposite fallacy of claiming the negative case "I know for a fact God isn't real", by stating you know what these kinds of information processing systems are doing fundamentally cannot yield intelligence or some kind of consciousness.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
      Maybe we don't know it in the limit, but we've had langauge models for a very long time and nobody ever said anything about, say, n-gram models, or Hidden Markov Models, being "intelligent" or "conscious". Even the people who first proposed the idea of language modelling (precisely as an alternative to trying to model meaning, which we have no idea how to do) didn't propose them as models of intelligence, or sentience, or anything like that; just models of "language", which really means text, and even more precisely "text corpora". Sorry that I don't have a reference for that, other than my private conversations with my tutors when I was studying for my Master's (data science with a heavy dose of neural nets and NLP). In any case, at some point one has to observe that the people who are leaning most heavily on agnosticism (the fact that we don't know what intelligence is) are the ones who say that we can't say whether those LLMs are intelligent or not because we don't know what intelligence is. In other words, agnostitism itself is used as evidence: we can't define intelligence, the thinking goes, therefore LLMs may be intelligent. There is no other evidence of any sort that LLMs may be intelligent (or any number of synonyms). Note that this is exactly Russel's Teapot: Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
matthewdgreen 4y ago
I don’t have any idea “how to works” outside of the most general description of how the model is mechanically trained and evaluated.
ilaksh 4y ago
Kind of a good point but also you are mixing some things up. Conscious, intelligent, sentient all have different meanings. Conscious and sentient are very vague but I don't see any reason to believe LLMs have such a thing, or certainly not similar to our own. But I think you are quite wrong to suggest that this technology does not exhibit some type of intelligence.
tuxracer 4y ago
"People know how it works, but somehow also ignore that..." It's annoyingly arrogant to assume people could only be impressed having ignored that. It's impressive to me not by ignoring that at all. Matrix multiplication is apparently capable of producing poetry, jokes, insults, abstract ideas, etc (to some level at least) - but in your mind it's a pixar movie? Words arise from a team of angels pulling levers? Fascination is not from thinking LLM are advanced as us - fascination is from wondering how much more complicated are we than that?

MauroIksem 4y ago

Maybe that's all sentience is.

version_five 4y ago
As depressing as it would be, I could accept that sentience is just some manifestation of our atomic desire to increase the entropy of the universe. Based on what we know, that's plausible, if kind of disappointing. But it's very different from linear algebra.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
It does‘t answer who the matrix multiplication is for. No reason to make an illusion.

circuit10 4y ago

Not conscious but it is intelligent, it has knowledge and can do reasoning with that knowledge I guess it depends on how you define intelligence but I don’t see why you’d link it in with consciousness, especially considering that simple algorithms are often described as “intelligent”

mckirk 4y ago

Where's your proof that your own brain is doing anything that couldn't be represented with a 'matrix multiplication'?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
version_five 4y ago
I'll respond only to draw the parallel between the kind of comment above and the typical religious "how do you know my untestable idea isn't true" type argument. Faith is fine, but it's not part of rational debate.
- tidenly 4y ago
  Honestly though, with no theory of mind or consciousness you have no way to assert in either direction. To borrow the religion analogy, there's the opposite fallacy of claiming the negative case "I know for a fact God isn't real", by stating you know what these kinds of information processing systems are doing fundamentally cannot yield intelligence or some kind of consciousness.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    Maybe we don't know it in the limit, but we've had langauge models for a very long time and nobody ever said anything about, say, n-gram models, or Hidden Markov Models, being "intelligent" or "conscious". Even the people who first proposed the idea of language modelling (precisely as an alternative to trying to model meaning, which we have no idea how to do) didn't propose them as models of intelligence, or sentience, or anything like that; just models of "language", which really means text, and even more precisely "text corpora". Sorry that I don't have a reference for that, other than my private conversations with my tutors when I was studying for my Master's (data science with a heavy dose of neural nets and NLP). In any case, at some point one has to observe that the people who are leaning most heavily on agnosticism (the fact that we don't know what intelligence is) are the ones who say that we can't say whether those LLMs are intelligent or not because we don't know what intelligence is. In other words, agnostitism itself is used as evidence: we can't define intelligence, the thinking goes, therefore LLMs may be intelligent. There is no other evidence of any sort that LLMs may be intelligent (or any number of synonyms). Note that this is exactly Russel's Teapot: Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

matthewdgreen 4y ago

I don’t have any idea “how to works” outside of the most general description of how the model is mechanically trained and evaluated.

ilaksh 4y ago

Kind of a good point but also you are mixing some things up. Conscious, intelligent, sentient all have different meanings. Conscious and sentient are very vague but I don't see any reason to believe LLMs have such a thing, or certainly not similar to our own. But I think you are quite wrong to suggest that this technology does not exhibit some type of intelligence.

tuxracer 4y ago

"People know how it works, but somehow also ignore that..." It's annoyingly arrogant to assume people could only be impressed having ignored that. It's impressive to me not by ignoring that at all. Matrix multiplication is apparently capable of producing poetry, jokes, insults, abstract ideas, etc (to some level at least) - but in your mind it's a pixar movie? Words arise from a team of angels pulling levers? Fascination is not from thinking LLM are advanced as us - fascination is from wondering how much more complicated are we than that?