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What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supr

What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems. The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life. In fact recently I was listening to a podcast with Donald Hoffman,. where he mentioned brain studies done on people with split brains etc and how these people did not even have a single consciousness. So even the assumption that we have like one "AGI" program running in our brain is not at all what goes on in our brain. Likewise Iain McGilchrist pointed out how the left and right brain hemispheres are two kind of attentions to the world, and almost two different type of consciousness in us. I quit listening to Rupert Spira many years ago but I found this interaction between him and Donald Hoffman really insightful. DOnald mentions the brain studies in this podcast: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality | Donald Hoffman & Rupert Spira https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rafVevceWgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rafVevceWgs

ChatGTP 3y ago
The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life. Many people in the developed world, especially tech people are now living online and spend the majority of their lives looking at a screen, chatting to each other on slack and via forums like this and now comparing their intellectual abilities to that of super computers running a language model of extreme complexity, which is basically the sum total of all human technical and intellectual output. All popular LLMs exist because of this online universe we’ve created. What the online life does is actually reduce one to an “autonomous agent”. You really become ChatGPT when you live this way. Go out for a night of dancing, practice martial arts, paint a real panting with oil on canvas, cook a nice meal, smell and taste it, or hike a mountain, then come back and try tell yourself you’re a LLM, it’s completely preposterous but it does make sense if you live an almost purely “intellectual and online existence”. Which is the world we’ve created in 2023. Science and religion are now merging and it is said science will bring us “immortality” soon through AI advancement and many would immediately upload their brain to a computer if given the chance. It completely makes sense to forget what you actually are and it makes sense to reduce yourself to “software running on hardware”, or a statistical model, a person who clicks like and dislike on social media most of the day, you become a model trainer etc. Even if there is some truth to the former statements, it’s stupid to discount the rest of existence because you can’t instantly translate text into many languages or whatever “emergent property” is displayed in some complex system. The intellect is something which should be consulted or used for survival or problem solving, to help one get back to enjoying life and that what’s most important. Intellect is not something one should strive to actually become.
naasking 3y ago
> What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems. That's irrelevant. Transformers are Turing complete. Whatever mathematical system underlies human cognition will thus have some expression as a transformer. These transformers are learning how to reproduce functions by inferring associations between inputs and outputs. The data whose function is being reproduced is the function in the human brain that produces human text. Therefore these transformers are literally learning how the human brain generates text, ie. this is what the brain does. Furthermore, there have been neuroscience papers correlating spiking behaviour in neural networks and human neurons when processing the same information, lending even more credence to this hypothesis. It's not as far-fetched as you think.
- quonn 3y ago
  > That's irrelevant. Transformers are Turing complete. Whatever mathematical system underlies human cognition will thus have some expression as a transformer. That‘s irrelevant, too, because nothing indicates that the actual transformer of, say, GPT or the training is in any way connected to such an expression of the human brain. Linux is written in C and that‘s Turing complete. And? Therefore Linux is like the brain?
  - naasking 3y ago
    > That‘s irrelevant, too, because nothing indicates that the actual transformer of, say, GPT or the training is in any way connected to such an expression of the human brain. It's not irrelevant, it was merely the premise for the following point, which was that transformers are trained to learn a function. Since they're Turing complete, they can thus hypothetically implement any function, including the function governing human speech, as I described. If transformers were not Turing complete, then they arguably would not be computationally powerful enough to model the brain which we know is Turing complete. What is irrelevant is trying to dismiss transformers as intelligent, or like the brain, simply because they're "merely matrix multiplications".
cush 3y ago
I love how the top three comments have nothing to do with the article. What about data dignity or provenance?
- Hugsun 3y ago
  It's a much less contentious part of the article. And I suppose many didn't read that far.

ChatGTP 3y ago

The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life. Many people in the developed world, especially tech people are now living online and spend the majority of their lives looking at a screen, chatting to each other on slack and via forums like this and now comparing their intellectual abilities to that of super computers running a language model of extreme complexity, which is basically the sum total of all human technical and intellectual output. All popular LLMs exist because of this online universe we’ve created. What the online life does is actually reduce one to an “autonomous agent”. You really become ChatGPT when you live this way. Go out for a night of dancing, practice martial arts, paint a real panting with oil on canvas, cook a nice meal, smell and taste it, or hike a mountain, then come back and try tell yourself you’re a LLM, it’s completely preposterous but it does make sense if you live an almost purely “intellectual and online existence”. Which is the world we’ve created in 2023. Science and religion are now merging and it is said science will bring us “immortality” soon through AI advancement and many would immediately upload their brain to a computer if given the chance. It completely makes sense to forget what you actually are and it makes sense to reduce yourself to “software running on hardware”, or a statistical model, a person who clicks like and dislike on social media most of the day, you become a model trainer etc. Even if there is some truth to the former statements, it’s stupid to discount the rest of existence because you can’t instantly translate text into many languages or whatever “emergent property” is displayed in some complex system. The intellect is something which should be consulted or used for survival or problem solving, to help one get back to enjoying life and that what’s most important. Intellect is not something one should strive to actually become.

naasking 3y ago

> What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems. That's irrelevant. Transformers are Turing complete. Whatever mathematical system underlies human cognition will thus have some expression as a transformer. These transformers are learning how to reproduce functions by inferring associations between inputs and outputs. The data whose function is being reproduced is the function in the human brain that produces human text. Therefore these transformers are literally learning how the human brain generates text, ie. this is what the brain does. Furthermore, there have been neuroscience papers correlating spiking behaviour in neural networks and human neurons when processing the same information, lending even more credence to this hypothesis. It's not as far-fetched as you think.

quonn 3y ago
> That's irrelevant. Transformers are Turing complete. Whatever mathematical system underlies human cognition will thus have some expression as a transformer. That‘s irrelevant, too, because nothing indicates that the actual transformer of, say, GPT or the training is in any way connected to such an expression of the human brain. Linux is written in C and that‘s Turing complete. And? Therefore Linux is like the brain?
- naasking 3y ago
  > That‘s irrelevant, too, because nothing indicates that the actual transformer of, say, GPT or the training is in any way connected to such an expression of the human brain. It's not irrelevant, it was merely the premise for the following point, which was that transformers are trained to learn a function. Since they're Turing complete, they can thus hypothetically implement any function, including the function governing human speech, as I described. If transformers were not Turing complete, then they arguably would not be computationally powerful enough to model the brain which we know is Turing complete. What is irrelevant is trying to dismiss transformers as intelligent, or like the brain, simply because they're "merely matrix multiplications".

cush 3y ago

I love how the top three comments have nothing to do with the article. What about data dignity or provenance?

Hugsun 3y ago
It's a much less contentious part of the article. And I suppose many didn't read that far.