11 ms·

Often the "stochastic parrot" line is used as a reduction on what an LLM truly is. I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that humans are t

by LASR 3y ago

Often the "stochastic parrot" line is used as a reduction on what an LLM truly is. I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even consciousness itself is a next-token predictor. Where the industry is headed - multi-modal models. This really I think is the remaining frontier of LLM <> Human parity. I also have a 15 month old son. It's totally obvious to me that he's definitely learning by repetition. But the sources of training data is much more high bandwidth than whatever we're training our LLMs on. It's been a couple of years since GPT-3. It's time to abandon this notion of "stochastic parrot" as a derogatory. Anyone stuck in this mindset really is going to be hindered from making significant progress in developing utility from AI.

Probiotic6081 3y ago
> I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even consciousness itself is a next-token predictor. Almost every time I'm on hackernews I end up baffled by software engineers feeling entitled to have an unfunded opinion on scientific disciplines outside of their own field of expertise. I've literally never encountered that level of hubris from anyone else. It's always the software people! Consciousness is far from being fully understood but having a body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment are already established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness. Margaret Wilsons paper from 2002 is a good read: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03196322.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03196322.pdf peace
- mirekrusin 3y ago
  Are you saying that ie. paralyzed people don't have consciousness?
  - bena 3y ago
    First of all, paralyzed people do have bodies. And sensorimotor functions. Second of all, it wouldn't matter if individually they did or did not. The species does and now our species has developed consciousness. It's part of the package. If you wanted a counterexample, you should look to plant life. There is some discussion on whether or not plant systems have a form on consciousness. But, then again, plants have bodies at the very least.
    - mirekrusin 3y ago
      What about people with amputations or missing body parts due to genetics - are they less conscious?
  - zhynn 3y ago
    There is a spectrum between conscious and unconscious. You could say that under general anesthesia you are a 0/10 on the conscious scale, asleep is 1 or 2, just woken from sleep is maybe 3.... and up to a well rested, well fed, healthy sober adult human near the top of the scale. These are common sense notions of objective consciousness and they are testable and noncontroversial outside of a philosophy argument. Does this make sense as a rebuttal to your reductio argument?
    - mirekrusin 3y ago
      People dream under general anesthesia, which is a form of consciousness. I don't think ie. Stephen Hawking was on "lower spectrum of consciousness" either.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  I suspect you don't know what OPs field of expertise is. I also doubt OP would disagree with that statement that the only conscious things we know of have a body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment.
- Chabsff 3y ago
  The befuddlement goes even farther for me. LLMs are, effectively, black-box systems that interface with the world via a stochastic parrot interface. You'd think that software engineers would be a group that easily understands how making radical assumptions about implementation details when looking at nothing but an interface is generally misguided. I'm not saying that there isn't a strong case to be made against LLMs being intelligent. It's pointing at the stochastic parrot as evidence enough in of itself that confuses me.
  - throw0101a 3y ago
    > You'd think that […] As a stochastic parrot I'm unable to do that.
  - lainga 3y ago
    Ah, but HN is a platform for not just any software engineer, but the entrepreneurial type.
    - NoGravitas 3y ago
      Which is to say, the type that will believe anything if it's currently easy to hype to VCs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fragmede 3y ago
  To be fair, it's any of the exalted professions that the blessed extend their expertise to. Doctors, lawyers, software engineers. they (we) start with the notion that I'm a smart person, so from first principles, I can conquer the world. nevermind that that's an existing body of work, with their own practitioners to build off of.
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  Yeah, it's only software people. No one else has unfounded opinions. But... a parrot has a body. And sure, you'll say "they don't literally mean parrot".. but it's a vague term when you unpack it, and people saying "we are stochastic parrots" are also making a pretty vague comment (they clearly don't mean literally). Anyone who has a small child and understands LLMs is shocked by how much similar they seem to be when it comes to producing output.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    The question is: does polly really want a cracker?
- dekhn 3y ago
  Some of us who believe that humans are at least partly statistical parrots have PhDs in relevant fields- for example, my PhD is in Biophysics, I've studied cognitive neuroscience and ML for decades, and while I think embodiment may very well be a necessary condition to reproduce the subjective experience of consciousness, I don't think "having a body and sensorimotor interactions are established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness". Frankly I think that's an impractical question to answer. Instead, I work with the following idea: it seems not unlikely that we will, in the next decade or so, create non-embodied machine learning models which simply can't be told apart from a human (through a video chat-like interface). If you can do that, who really cares about whether it's conscious or not? I don't really think philosophy of the mind is that important here; instead, we should treat this as an engineering problem where we assume brains are subjectively conscious, but that's not a metric we are aiming for.
- nix0n 3y ago
  > software engineers feeling entitled to have an unfunded opinion on scientific disciplines outside of their own field of expertise There's an XKCD about this behavior[0]. The title is actually "Physicists", but I also have seen it on HN (especially with psychology). [0]https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
  - User23 3y ago
    Well with psychology it’s more fair. Thanks to the replication crisis we can say with a straight face that psychologists aren’t even experts on psychology. As usual the demonstrable expertise in the field lies with the pragmatic types. For psychology that means salesmen, pickup artists, advertisers, conmen, propagandists, high school queen bees, and so on.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    This is known as the "Why don't you just assume a spherical cow?"
- hackinthebochs 3y ago
  Embodiment is an intellectual dead end in explaining consciousness/sentience. Sure, its relevant to understanding human cognition as we are embodied entities, but it's not much relevant to consciousness as such. The fact that some pattern of signals on my perceptual apparatus is caused by an apple in the real world does not mean that I have knowledge or understanding of an apple in virtue of this causal relation. That my sensory signals are caused by apples is an accident of this world, one we are completely blind to. If all apples in the world were swapped with fapples (fake apples), where all sensory experiences that have up to now been caused by apples are now caused by fapples, we would be none the wiser. The wide content of our perceptual experiences is irrelevant to literally everything we know and how we interact with the world. Our knowledge of the world is limited to our sensory experiences and our deductions, inferences, etc derived from our experiences. Our situatedness in the world is only relevant insofar as it entails the space of possible sensory experiences. Our sensory experience is the medium by which we learn about the external world. We learn of apples not because of the redness of the sensory experience, but because the pattern of red/not-red experience entails the shape of apples. Conscious experience provides the medium, modulations of which provide the information about features of the external world. It is analogous to how modulations of electromagnetic waves provides information about some distant information source. Understanding consciousness is an orthogonal matter to one's situatedness in the world, just like understanding electromagnetic waves is orthogonal to understanding the information source being modulated into them.
- pzo 3y ago
  > having a body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment are already established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness. Does someone who is blind is not conscious then? How about when someone who is paralysed? or deaf? or someone with low IQ or mental illness? Stephen Hawking was paralysed most of his life but was a smart guy. If he was not only paralysed but also blind and deaf he would be smart guy still. I don't think AGI needs to have a body, sensorimotor interaction or even vision to be conscious. We need those for training - if you would be blind, paralysed, deaf from the beginning it would be hard for you learn anything and interact in any way. Machines have 6th sense that humans don't have - kind of a telepathy where they can exchange tokens/thoughts with different machines or humans much faster than we humans can type or speak.
  - Teever 3y ago
    I've been thinking about this for a while now but I've been approaching it from the opposite direction. If we were attempting to put someone into some sort of Matrix like reality simulator but we lacked the technology to provide a perfect simulation what level of simulation would be 'good enough' that a human would consider it reality and be able to develop into something we could relate to? If you gave someone the Helen Keller level of experience, but with reduced tactile sensation, how much could you reduce that touch sensation before they wouldn't be like us?
    - GenericPoster 3y ago
      > If we were attempting to put someone into some sort of Matrix like reality simulator but we lacked the technology to provide a perfect simulation what level of simulation would be 'good enough' that a human would consider it reality and be able to develop into something we could relate to? Have you tried VR before? You really don't need perfect simulation to be fooled. Good enough is already here, albeit for a short amount of time.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  From the first line of Wilson's paper: > There is a movement afoot in cognitive science to grant the body a central role in shaping the mind. It is far from true to say "having a body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment are already established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness" It is a popular idea in some groups of people that study these questions. But there are many other similar groups of peopel studying these questions who do not agree with it, certainly not stated as strongly as you have put it here. Also, a reminder that HN readership and its commentariat, while dominated by SWE, is not limited to them.
- findomgle 3y ago
  [flagged]
function_seven 3y ago
I'm in the same boat. It feels wrong to contemplate that our consciousness might not be a magical independent agent with supernatural powers, but is rather an emergent property of complex-but-deterministic actions and reactions. Like it somehow diminishes us. Reduces us to cogs and levers and such. But I can't imagine how it could be otherwise, though. I'm still baffled by the existence of qualia, phenomenology, etc. Awareness. But bafflement on that front isn't a good reason to reject the possibility that the only thing that separates me from a computer is the level of complexity. Or the structure of the computation. Sometimes things are just weird.
- jocaal 3y ago
  > emergent property of complex-but-deterministic actions and reactions I think you mean non-deterministic. The last century of physics was dominated by work showing how deterministic systems emerged from non-deterministic foundations. It seems that probability and statistics were the branches of maths behind everything. Who would have thought.
  - function_seven 3y ago
    Thanks. I did actually mean to use "deterministic", but only as it sits in opposition to "free will". Is there a better word for what I meant? Of course there is randomness as well. So, yeah, I should clarify: We don't impose upon the world any kind of "uncaused cause", even if it feels like we do. Everything we think and do is a direct result of some other action. Sometimes that action can trace its lineage to a random particle decay. (Maybe—ultimately—all of them can?) Maybe we even have a source of True Randomness inherent in our minds. But even so, that doesn't lend any support to the common notion of our minds and consciousnesses as being somehow separate from the physical world or the chains of information that run through everything.
    - jocaal 3y ago
      I get what you are saying. I was just thinking about the stochastic parrot analogy for consciousness, but I see your comment is more about there not being special sauce to conciousness. But hey, the fact that such behaviour can emerge from simple processes is still pretty damn cool.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
LLMs don't create new information, they only compress existing complexity in their train and inference data sets. Humans definitely create new information. (Well, at least some humans do.)
- Gringham 3y ago
  Do they though? Or do humans just combine things they have learned about the world?
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  How are you defining "create new information" ?
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    In the information theoretic sense. (Increasing information entropy.)
    - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
      What do you define as the system here? The LLM itself? The world of all text? What about for the human?
- Zambyte 3y ago
  Lossy compression + interpolated decompression = new information
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    Lossy compression decreases information entropy by definition.
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      Interpolated decompression increases information entropy by definition.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
davedx 3y ago
Those who don’t understand a concept are doomed to reduce it to concepts they do understand. I’m currently reading I Am A Strange Loop, a pretty extensive dive into the nature of consciousness. I’m reserving final judgment on how much I agree with the author, but I find it laughable to claim consciousness itself is on the same level as an LLM.
IanCal 3y ago
I disagree they're stochastic parrots, I find othello-gpt very convincing that these models can create world models and respond accordingly.
gardenhedge 3y ago
Did you teach your child to crawl? To laugh? To get excited?
meindnoch 3y ago
That's a pretty bold statement, coming from someone with the subjective experience of consciousness.
mo_42 3y ago
> I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even consciousness itself is a next-token predictor. I agree with the first sentence but not with the second one. Consciousness most probably does not arise from just a next-token predictor. At least not from an architecture similar to current LLMs. Both humans and LLMs basically learn to predict what happens next. However, LLMs only predict when we ask them. In contrast, humans predict something all the time. Even when we don't have any sensory input, our brain plays scenarios. Maybe consciousness arises because the result of our thinking is fed back as input. In that sense, we simulate a world that includes us acting and communicating in that world. Also noteworthy, the human brain handles a variety of sensory information and it's output is not only language. LLMs are restricted to only language. But to me it seems like it's enough for consciousness if we can give it the self-referential property.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  In order to predict what happens next we need to create a model of the world. We exist as part of the world so we need to model ourselves within it. We also have to model our mind for it to be complete, including the model of the world it contains. Oops, I just created an infinite loop.
  - mo_42 3y ago
    Not necessarily infinite. It stops when there's reasonable accuracy. Similar to how we would implement this in software.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- xigency 3y ago
  > However, LLMs only predict when we ask them. In contrast, humans predict something all the time. Even when we don't have any sensory input, our brain plays scenarios. Pretty easy to do this exercise with an LLM. At least, easier than building an LLM in the first place. Leave it running, let it talk to itself, revisit partial memories, and explore noise. Really a duct-tape problem here more than anything.
esjeon 3y ago
> Anyone stuck in this mindset really is going to be hindered from making significant progress in developing utility from AI. I think this specific line shouts out that this is a typical tribalism comment. Once people identify themselves as a part of something, they start to translate the value of that something as their own worth. It's a cheap trick that even young kids play, but can LLM do this? No. Some might say multi-modal this, train on that-thing, but it already takes tens of thousands of the most advanced hardware and gigawatts of energy to push around numbers to reach where it is. TBH, I don't see it going anywhere, considering ROI on research will decrease as we dig deeper into the same paradigm. What I want to say is that today's LLM is certainly not the last stop of AI technology, but a lot of advocates tend to consider it as the final form of intelligence. It's certainly a case of extrapolation, and I don't think LLM can do that.
voitvod 3y ago
I would have agreed until these recent podcasts that Chomsky did. Everyone is basically talking out their ass when it comes to language and linguistics. That becomes incredibly obvious listening to Chomsky on chatGPT. I was even so stupid to think Chomsky wasn't a fan of chatGPT because it somehow invalidated some of his language theories. Low and behold, no, Chomsky actually knows what he is talking about when it comes to linguistics.
- blast 3y ago
  What recent podcasts? Can you link to some?

by LASR 3y ago

Probiotic6081 3y ago

> I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even consciousness itself is a next-token predictor. Almost every time I'm on hackernews I end up baffled by software engineers feeling entitled to have an unfunded opinion on scientific disciplines outside of their own field of expertise. I've literally never encountered that level of hubris from anyone else. It's always the software people! Consciousness is far from being fully understood but having a body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment are already established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness. Margaret Wilsons paper from 2002 is a good read: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03196322.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03196322.pdf peace

mirekrusin 3y ago
Are you saying that ie. paralyzed people don't have consciousness?
- bena 3y ago
  First of all, paralyzed people do have bodies. And sensorimotor functions. Second of all, it wouldn't matter if individually they did or did not. The species does and now our species has developed consciousness. It's part of the package. If you wanted a counterexample, you should look to plant life. There is some discussion on whether or not plant systems have a form on consciousness. But, then again, plants have bodies at the very least.
  - mirekrusin 3y ago
    What about people with amputations or missing body parts due to genetics - are they less conscious?
- zhynn 3y ago
  There is a spectrum between conscious and unconscious. You could say that under general anesthesia you are a 0/10 on the conscious scale, asleep is 1 or 2, just woken from sleep is maybe 3.... and up to a well rested, well fed, healthy sober adult human near the top of the scale. These are common sense notions of objective consciousness and they are testable and noncontroversial outside of a philosophy argument. Does this make sense as a rebuttal to your reductio argument?
  - mirekrusin 3y ago
    People dream under general anesthesia, which is a form of consciousness. I don't think ie. Stephen Hawking was on "lower spectrum of consciousness" either.
oh_sigh 3y ago
I suspect you don't know what OPs field of expertise is. I also doubt OP would disagree with that statement that the only conscious things we know of have a body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment.
Chabsff 3y ago
The befuddlement goes even farther for me. LLMs are, effectively, black-box systems that interface with the world via a stochastic parrot interface. You'd think that software engineers would be a group that easily understands how making radical assumptions about implementation details when looking at nothing but an interface is generally misguided. I'm not saying that there isn't a strong case to be made against LLMs being intelligent. It's pointing at the stochastic parrot as evidence enough in of itself that confuses me.
- throw0101a 3y ago
  > You'd think that […] As a stochastic parrot I'm unable to do that.
- lainga 3y ago
  Ah, but HN is a platform for not just any software engineer, but the entrepreneurial type.
  - NoGravitas 3y ago
    Which is to say, the type that will believe anything if it's currently easy to hype to VCs.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fragmede 3y ago
To be fair, it's any of the exalted professions that the blessed extend their expertise to. Doctors, lawyers, software engineers. they (we) start with the notion that I'm a smart person, so from first principles, I can conquer the world. nevermind that that's an existing body of work, with their own practitioners to build off of.
danielmarkbruce 3y ago
Yeah, it's only software people. No one else has unfounded opinions. But... a parrot has a body. And sure, you'll say "they don't literally mean parrot".. but it's a vague term when you unpack it, and people saying "we are stochastic parrots" are also making a pretty vague comment (they clearly don't mean literally). Anyone who has a small child and understands LLMs is shocked by how much similar they seem to be when it comes to producing output.
- dekhn 3y ago
  The question is: does polly really want a cracker?
dekhn 3y ago
Some of us who believe that humans are at least partly statistical parrots have PhDs in relevant fields- for example, my PhD is in Biophysics, I've studied cognitive neuroscience and ML for decades, and while I think embodiment may very well be a necessary condition to reproduce the subjective experience of consciousness, I don't think "having a body and sensorimotor interactions are established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness". Frankly I think that's an impractical question to answer. Instead, I work with the following idea: it seems not unlikely that we will, in the next decade or so, create non-embodied machine learning models which simply can't be told apart from a human (through a video chat-like interface). If you can do that, who really cares about whether it's conscious or not? I don't really think philosophy of the mind is that important here; instead, we should treat this as an engineering problem where we assume brains are subjectively conscious, but that's not a metric we are aiming for.
nix0n 3y ago
> software engineers feeling entitled to have an unfunded opinion on scientific disciplines outside of their own field of expertise There's an XKCD about this behavior[0]. The title is actually "Physicists", but I also have seen it on HN (especially with psychology). [0]https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
- User23 3y ago
  Well with psychology it’s more fair. Thanks to the replication crisis we can say with a straight face that psychologists aren’t even experts on psychology. As usual the demonstrable expertise in the field lies with the pragmatic types. For psychology that means salesmen, pickup artists, advertisers, conmen, propagandists, high school queen bees, and so on.
- dekhn 3y ago
  This is known as the "Why don't you just assume a spherical cow?"
hackinthebochs 3y ago
Embodiment is an intellectual dead end in explaining consciousness/sentience. Sure, its relevant to understanding human cognition as we are embodied entities, but it's not much relevant to consciousness as such. The fact that some pattern of signals on my perceptual apparatus is caused by an apple in the real world does not mean that I have knowledge or understanding of an apple in virtue of this causal relation. That my sensory signals are caused by apples is an accident of this world, one we are completely blind to. If all apples in the world were swapped with fapples (fake apples), where all sensory experiences that have up to now been caused by apples are now caused by fapples, we would be none the wiser. The wide content of our perceptual experiences is irrelevant to literally everything we know and how we interact with the world. Our knowledge of the world is limited to our sensory experiences and our deductions, inferences, etc derived from our experiences. Our situatedness in the world is only relevant insofar as it entails the space of possible sensory experiences. Our sensory experience is the medium by which we learn about the external world. We learn of apples not because of the redness of the sensory experience, but because the pattern of red/not-red experience entails the shape of apples. Conscious experience provides the medium, modulations of which provide the information about features of the external world. It is analogous to how modulations of electromagnetic waves provides information about some distant information source. Understanding consciousness is an orthogonal matter to one's situatedness in the world, just like understanding electromagnetic waves is orthogonal to understanding the information source being modulated into them.
pzo 3y ago
> having a body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment are already established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness. Does someone who is blind is not conscious then? How about when someone who is paralysed? or deaf? or someone with low IQ or mental illness? Stephen Hawking was paralysed most of his life but was a smart guy. If he was not only paralysed but also blind and deaf he would be smart guy still. I don't think AGI needs to have a body, sensorimotor interaction or even vision to be conscious. We need those for training - if you would be blind, paralysed, deaf from the beginning it would be hard for you learn anything and interact in any way. Machines have 6th sense that humans don't have - kind of a telepathy where they can exchange tokens/thoughts with different machines or humans much faster than we humans can type or speak.
- Teever 3y ago
  I've been thinking about this for a while now but I've been approaching it from the opposite direction. If we were attempting to put someone into some sort of Matrix like reality simulator but we lacked the technology to provide a perfect simulation what level of simulation would be 'good enough' that a human would consider it reality and be able to develop into something we could relate to? If you gave someone the Helen Keller level of experience, but with reduced tactile sensation, how much could you reduce that touch sensation before they wouldn't be like us?
  - GenericPoster 3y ago
    > If we were attempting to put someone into some sort of Matrix like reality simulator but we lacked the technology to provide a perfect simulation what level of simulation would be 'good enough' that a human would consider it reality and be able to develop into something we could relate to? Have you tried VR before? You really don't need perfect simulation to be fooled. Good enough is already here, albeit for a short amount of time.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
From the first line of Wilson's paper: > There is a movement afoot in cognitive science to grant the body a central role in shaping the mind. It is far from true to say "having a body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment are already established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness" It is a popular idea in some groups of people that study these questions. But there are many other similar groups of peopel studying these questions who do not agree with it, certainly not stated as strongly as you have put it here. Also, a reminder that HN readership and its commentariat, while dominated by SWE, is not limited to them.
findomgle 3y ago
[flagged]

function_seven 3y ago

I'm in the same boat. It feels wrong to contemplate that our consciousness might not be a magical independent agent with supernatural powers, but is rather an emergent property of complex-but-deterministic actions and reactions. Like it somehow diminishes us. Reduces us to cogs and levers and such. But I can't imagine how it could be otherwise, though. I'm still baffled by the existence of qualia, phenomenology, etc. Awareness. But bafflement on that front isn't a good reason to reject the possibility that the only thing that separates me from a computer is the level of complexity. Or the structure of the computation. Sometimes things are just weird.

jocaal 3y ago
> emergent property of complex-but-deterministic actions and reactions I think you mean non-deterministic. The last century of physics was dominated by work showing how deterministic systems emerged from non-deterministic foundations. It seems that probability and statistics were the branches of maths behind everything. Who would have thought.
- function_seven 3y ago
  Thanks. I did actually mean to use "deterministic", but only as it sits in opposition to "free will". Is there a better word for what I meant? Of course there is randomness as well. So, yeah, I should clarify: We don't impose upon the world any kind of "uncaused cause", even if it feels like we do. Everything we think and do is a direct result of some other action. Sometimes that action can trace its lineage to a random particle decay. (Maybe—ultimately—all of them can?) Maybe we even have a source of True Randomness inherent in our minds. But even so, that doesn't lend any support to the common notion of our minds and consciousnesses as being somehow separate from the physical world or the chains of information that run through everything.
  - jocaal 3y ago
    I get what you are saying. I was just thinking about the stochastic parrot analogy for consciousness, but I see your comment is more about there not being special sauce to conciousness. But hey, the fact that such behaviour can emerge from simple processes is still pretty damn cool.

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

LLMs don't create new information, they only compress existing complexity in their train and inference data sets. Humans definitely create new information. (Well, at least some humans do.)

Gringham 3y ago
Do they though? Or do humans just combine things they have learned about the world?
danielmarkbruce 3y ago
How are you defining "create new information" ?
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  In the information theoretic sense. (Increasing information entropy.)
  - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
    What do you define as the system here? The LLM itself? The world of all text? What about for the human?
Zambyte 3y ago
Lossy compression + interpolated decompression = new information
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  Lossy compression decreases information entropy by definition.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    Interpolated decompression increases information entropy by definition.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

davedx 3y ago

Those who don’t understand a concept are doomed to reduce it to concepts they do understand. I’m currently reading I Am A Strange Loop, a pretty extensive dive into the nature of consciousness. I’m reserving final judgment on how much I agree with the author, but I find it laughable to claim consciousness itself is on the same level as an LLM.

IanCal 3y ago

I disagree they're stochastic parrots, I find othello-gpt very convincing that these models can create world models and respond accordingly.

gardenhedge 3y ago

Did you teach your child to crawl? To laugh? To get excited?

meindnoch 3y ago

That's a pretty bold statement, coming from someone with the subjective experience of consciousness.

mo_42 3y ago

> I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even consciousness itself is a next-token predictor. I agree with the first sentence but not with the second one. Consciousness most probably does not arise from just a next-token predictor. At least not from an architecture similar to current LLMs. Both humans and LLMs basically learn to predict what happens next. However, LLMs only predict when we ask them. In contrast, humans predict something all the time. Even when we don't have any sensory input, our brain plays scenarios. Maybe consciousness arises because the result of our thinking is fed back as input. In that sense, we simulate a world that includes us acting and communicating in that world. Also noteworthy, the human brain handles a variety of sensory information and it's output is not only language. LLMs are restricted to only language. But to me it seems like it's enough for consciousness if we can give it the self-referential property.

throwaway4aday 3y ago
In order to predict what happens next we need to create a model of the world. We exist as part of the world so we need to model ourselves within it. We also have to model our mind for it to be complete, including the model of the world it contains. Oops, I just created an infinite loop.
- mo_42 3y ago
  Not necessarily infinite. It stops when there's reasonable accuracy. Similar to how we would implement this in software.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
xigency 3y ago
> However, LLMs only predict when we ask them. In contrast, humans predict something all the time. Even when we don't have any sensory input, our brain plays scenarios. Pretty easy to do this exercise with an LLM. At least, easier than building an LLM in the first place. Leave it running, let it talk to itself, revisit partial memories, and explore noise. Really a duct-tape problem here more than anything.

esjeon 3y ago

> Anyone stuck in this mindset really is going to be hindered from making significant progress in developing utility from AI. I think this specific line shouts out that this is a typical tribalism comment. Once people identify themselves as a part of something, they start to translate the value of that something as their own worth. It's a cheap trick that even young kids play, but can LLM do this? No. Some might say multi-modal this, train on that-thing, but it already takes tens of thousands of the most advanced hardware and gigawatts of energy to push around numbers to reach where it is. TBH, I don't see it going anywhere, considering ROI on research will decrease as we dig deeper into the same paradigm. What I want to say is that today's LLM is certainly not the last stop of AI technology, but a lot of advocates tend to consider it as the final form of intelligence. It's certainly a case of extrapolation, and I don't think LLM can do that.

voitvod 3y ago

I would have agreed until these recent podcasts that Chomsky did. Everyone is basically talking out their ass when it comes to language and linguistics. That becomes incredibly obvious listening to Chomsky on chatGPT. I was even so stupid to think Chomsky wasn't a fan of chatGPT because it somehow invalidated some of his language theories. Low and behold, no, Chomsky actually knows what he is talking about when it comes to linguistics.

blast 3y ago
What recent podcasts? Can you link to some?