3 ms·

The idea that LLMs "know much more than we do" is utterly ridiculous and entirely based on a techno-capitalist valuation of knowledge. - LLMs don't know person

The idea that LLMs "know much more than we do" is utterly ridiculous and entirely based on a techno-capitalist valuation of knowledge. - LLMs don't know personal details about your friends and family members - LLMs don't have your personal memories from age 2 to age 63 - LLMs don't know what things feel like - LLMs don't know what things smell like - LLMs don't know what it's like to experience sexuality The list goes on and on. It's particularly Hinton ignoring individual knowledge about individual social circumstances that drives me crazy. Human brains are not actually designed to store textual trivia! Why on earth would any rational AI researcher claim "knowledge about the war of 1812" means the LLM is very impressive compared to a human, but "knowledge about how my cat likes to be pet" is irrelevant? A ton of AI researchers do not seem to care about the problems human brains actually need to solve.

williamcotton 2y ago
And birds don’t have ailerons. Sure, a bird can soar and hover and doesn’t need jet fuel. But a plane isn’t trying to be a bird. It’s just trying to fly through the air, which it does, and at much faster speeds.
- nicklecompte 2y ago
  I am responding to Hinton's transparently false claim that LLMs know more than we do despite having less synapses. This is only true if you ignore non-textual information in the human brain. This is stupid and dishonest. Really not sure what your point is, it has nothing to do with Hinton's claim, and nothing to do with my comment.
  - williamcotton 2y ago
    An LLM like ChatGPT “knows” more than either than us on a very large amount of topics. Not human knowledge, but some kind of knowledge. And there’s no reason why the concept of intuition is limited to humans. Again, not human intuition. Our artificial constructs are not going to be completely like their biological analogs but they can indeed express certain qualities and have certain shared abilities. Did we watch the same clip of Hinton?
    - inference-lord 2y ago
      I recently saw Hinton give a talk where he very, very, very excitedly and confidently gave us an example to demonstrate how incredibly intelligent and creative LLMS are. He asked an LLM a question, but he didn't give us the answer. He let us have time to answer it ourselves. Personally I knew the answer instantly. He gave us the answer and sort of assumed no one would've known the answer and then used it as as justification for how smart these systems were. It honestly didn't feel very reassuring to me and honestly, I'd be surprised if it wasn't a topic covered somewhere on the internet before. With all due respect to Mr Hinton, I felt it showed his age a bit honestly. What is difficult about Hinton's statements is that he can't really give evidence to back up these sort of claims. How do you measure how much a person knows, and how do you objectively measure how much an LLM knows? How smart is an LLM? You can't really know. It seems almost rhetorical. How many notes in a saxophone ? We can make observations but that's not a great way to measure anything precisely. There is a limit to language and I think this is one of those topics where that limit is touched or even breached.I don't even know if "intelligence" is a sufficient enough word to describe what's going on with these systems. It's the best word we have but it doesn't seem to adequately describe what we're observing.
      - williamcotton 2y ago
        How do you measure how much a person knows, and how do you objectively measure how much an LLM knows? Here’s a very basic example of where an LLM is clearly more capable than a human: language translation. I would bet $10k at 10:1 that there are no humans who can reliably translate to and from as many languages as an LLM can. It is very easy to measure knowledge: test the subject. Personally, I can’t ever imagine scoring higher on a general knowledge test than a contemporary LLM. Also, I don’t know of any humans that can run as fast as a car so I don’t know why any of this is surprising or farfetched.
        inference-lord 2y ago
        I think you misinterpreted what I mean. I'm not saying that they can't be more capable, I'm saying the guy can get a little overly excited about things which are hard to measure or quantify. We're observing these systems and making up our own interpretations about how good they are at certain tasks, but it's not really easy to measure how much better or worse these things can be overall. Your example about language translation is a good example of where these things aren't really "better", just different. I speak multiple languages and while these systems are fantastic, they can fail in ways a professional translator wouldn't and it doesn't seem to automatically know it failed and should fix itself. The car example is also great because it again proves my point. We can easily measure a car and a person and workout a car is faster, but we can also see that a car can't walk. So it's faster but it;s also entirely different.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  Why do people post the same trite thing that's been said a thousand times before, over and over again? It makes for boring conversation. "Birds don't have ailerons"? Is that supposed to be a smart retort? To what? This site is supposed to be about curious conversation but sometimes it's like AI Tropes.
  - williamcotton 2y ago
    Because “artificial intelligence” doesn’t immediately mean “human intelligence” in the same manner that “artificial flight” doesn’t mean “bird flight”.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
      Yes, I understand, the meaning is blindingly obvious and everyone has heard the same thing a hundred times before, either with planes that don't fly, or submarines that don't swim, or cakes that don't cake, whatever. The point I'm making is that if you have something to say, don't resort to trite soundbites that only add noise and make the conversation more boring. You have an opinion, clearly, don't just repeat someone else's slogan. But note that's just, like, my opinion man. I'm not really trying to tell you what to do, just expressing frustration, to be clear.
      - williamcotton 2y ago
        I don’t see you responding to the trite anti-AI rhetoric that is also not novel. What else would you expect from me in response to some babble about techno-capitalism or hype machines or blah blah blah. Tired comments get tired responses.
        YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
        Think of the guidelines: they say that a discussion should get more substantial, not less, as time goes by. If we all do what you say exactly the opposite will happen. It'd be like a cold flamewar of platitudes and boredom.
inference-lord 2y ago
Sometimes I do get the feeling that he is just slowing down and innovation and change just keep going at the same rate. He seems to parrot the same sort of ideas over and over again. I find he can get really fixated on certain examples, things he has seen an LLM do and he can't seem to get beyond it, as if the singularity is at hand. Where as a 22 year old I work with just accepts the technology and tries to get work done with it.
- leereeves 2y ago
  Well, he knows how far neural networks have come and how hard it was to achieve. What they can do is truly amazing, even though it is also limited. It's like that old joke: X: OMG, that dog can speak English! Y: Yeah, but can he do my taxes?

williamcotton 2y ago

And birds don’t have ailerons. Sure, a bird can soar and hover and doesn’t need jet fuel. But a plane isn’t trying to be a bird. It’s just trying to fly through the air, which it does, and at much faster speeds.

nicklecompte 2y ago
I am responding to Hinton's transparently false claim that LLMs know more than we do despite having less synapses. This is only true if you ignore non-textual information in the human brain. This is stupid and dishonest. Really not sure what your point is, it has nothing to do with Hinton's claim, and nothing to do with my comment.
- williamcotton 2y ago
  An LLM like ChatGPT “knows” more than either than us on a very large amount of topics. Not human knowledge, but some kind of knowledge. And there’s no reason why the concept of intuition is limited to humans. Again, not human intuition. Our artificial constructs are not going to be completely like their biological analogs but they can indeed express certain qualities and have certain shared abilities. Did we watch the same clip of Hinton?
  - inference-lord 2y ago
    I recently saw Hinton give a talk where he very, very, very excitedly and confidently gave us an example to demonstrate how incredibly intelligent and creative LLMS are. He asked an LLM a question, but he didn't give us the answer. He let us have time to answer it ourselves. Personally I knew the answer instantly. He gave us the answer and sort of assumed no one would've known the answer and then used it as as justification for how smart these systems were. It honestly didn't feel very reassuring to me and honestly, I'd be surprised if it wasn't a topic covered somewhere on the internet before. With all due respect to Mr Hinton, I felt it showed his age a bit honestly. What is difficult about Hinton's statements is that he can't really give evidence to back up these sort of claims. How do you measure how much a person knows, and how do you objectively measure how much an LLM knows? How smart is an LLM? You can't really know. It seems almost rhetorical. How many notes in a saxophone ? We can make observations but that's not a great way to measure anything precisely. There is a limit to language and I think this is one of those topics where that limit is touched or even breached.I don't even know if "intelligence" is a sufficient enough word to describe what's going on with these systems. It's the best word we have but it doesn't seem to adequately describe what we're observing.
    - williamcotton 2y ago
      How do you measure how much a person knows, and how do you objectively measure how much an LLM knows? Here’s a very basic example of where an LLM is clearly more capable than a human: language translation. I would bet $10k at 10:1 that there are no humans who can reliably translate to and from as many languages as an LLM can. It is very easy to measure knowledge: test the subject. Personally, I can’t ever imagine scoring higher on a general knowledge test than a contemporary LLM. Also, I don’t know of any humans that can run as fast as a car so I don’t know why any of this is surprising or farfetched.
      - inference-lord 2y ago
        I think you misinterpreted what I mean. I'm not saying that they can't be more capable, I'm saying the guy can get a little overly excited about things which are hard to measure or quantify. We're observing these systems and making up our own interpretations about how good they are at certain tasks, but it's not really easy to measure how much better or worse these things can be overall. Your example about language translation is a good example of where these things aren't really "better", just different. I speak multiple languages and while these systems are fantastic, they can fail in ways a professional translator wouldn't and it doesn't seem to automatically know it failed and should fix itself. The car example is also great because it again proves my point. We can easily measure a car and a person and workout a car is faster, but we can also see that a car can't walk. So it's faster but it;s also entirely different.
YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
Why do people post the same trite thing that's been said a thousand times before, over and over again? It makes for boring conversation. "Birds don't have ailerons"? Is that supposed to be a smart retort? To what? This site is supposed to be about curious conversation but sometimes it's like AI Tropes.
- williamcotton 2y ago
  Because “artificial intelligence” doesn’t immediately mean “human intelligence” in the same manner that “artificial flight” doesn’t mean “bird flight”.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    Yes, I understand, the meaning is blindingly obvious and everyone has heard the same thing a hundred times before, either with planes that don't fly, or submarines that don't swim, or cakes that don't cake, whatever. The point I'm making is that if you have something to say, don't resort to trite soundbites that only add noise and make the conversation more boring. You have an opinion, clearly, don't just repeat someone else's slogan. But note that's just, like, my opinion man. I'm not really trying to tell you what to do, just expressing frustration, to be clear.
    - williamcotton 2y ago
      I don’t see you responding to the trite anti-AI rhetoric that is also not novel. What else would you expect from me in response to some babble about techno-capitalism or hype machines or blah blah blah. Tired comments get tired responses.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
        Think of the guidelines: they say that a discussion should get more substantial, not less, as time goes by. If we all do what you say exactly the opposite will happen. It'd be like a cold flamewar of platitudes and boredom.

inference-lord 2y ago

Sometimes I do get the feeling that he is just slowing down and innovation and change just keep going at the same rate. He seems to parrot the same sort of ideas over and over again. I find he can get really fixated on certain examples, things he has seen an LLM do and he can't seem to get beyond it, as if the singularity is at hand. Where as a 22 year old I work with just accepts the technology and tries to get work done with it.

leereeves 2y ago
Well, he knows how far neural networks have come and how hard it was to achieve. What they can do is truly amazing, even though it is also limited. It's like that old joke: X: OMG, that dog can speak English! Y: Yeah, but can he do my taxes?