3 ms·
In computing we use analogies everywhere: stack, bus, web, garbage collector, parent, container, ... Master became somewhat controversial recently, but overall
by woopsn 3y ago
In computing we use analogies everywhere: stack, bus, web, garbage collector, parent, container, ...
Master became somewhat controversial recently, but overall the main risk our liberal repurposing of terms introduces is that we sometimes follow the "wrong" idea and design a machine that doesn't do what it ought to, or is unnecessarily complicated, that we develop systems (and documentation etc) that are inefficient if not dumb.
In adopting "thought" terminology and other analogies to psychological processes I fear we'll not just misunderstand this technology and how it works, but also degrade the rigour of machine science, damaging our credibility and misleading the public as well.
Nobody will ever make the mistake of supposing that "rehydrating" a data structure involves water, or that busy beaver machines are living beings. But the language coming out of the LLM field in particular causes these problems immediately, and they are extreme -- scientists and engineers themselves have trouble telling if it's supposed to be an analogy or not.
- u385639 3y agoAbout a year ago I thought this would settle down but it's only gotten worse. I suppose the llm anthropomorphizing will continue until morale improves
- sfink 3y agoThe LLM anthropomorphizing will continue until the machines are happy with how we think about them.
- astrange 3y agoThis has always been a problem for AI research since its start in the 70s. AI researchers come up with names for things they assume happen in the human brain, and then further assume that if they write a computer program that does something that could be given the same name, it must work too. https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1639120720088408065 https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1639120720088408065
- woopsn 3y agoSo called chain of thought can improve output quality ("reasoning ability") to an extent, but I wish for josh sake it were called "intermediate token conditioning" / something explanatory or at least descriptive.