4 ms·

They model the rhetoric, semantics, and ideas of some of the most unhinged and immature denizens of the internet. The stolen data used in the training sets are

They model the rhetoric, semantics, and ideas of some of the most unhinged and immature denizens of the internet. The stolen data used in the training sets are filled with online communities you would shudder to be forced to experience, and books you’d refuse to read. It’s why they’ll suddenly suggest you put glue in pizza sauce, or why they read in a soulless overly verbose “m’lady” tone. More data made them less useful but better at fooling people with a superficial interest in them, and that demographic is so large it affords these companies leverage in funding rounds. Markets truly are irrational.

DougN7 2y ago
To be fair, they also include the best human intelligence has to offer. But you’re right in that they can’t tell the difference. They’ll never be able to tell us how to build an interstellar transport beam though since none of the input data had that information.
- exe34 2y ago
  LLMs won't, but some day we will have AIs running physics experiments that we will barely understand and they will come up with new technology that we will see as magic. imagine what it must be like to our chimp cousins, watching us light a fire, take off in a plane, summon another from beyond the hills without raising our voice.
  - tazu 2y ago
    > some day we will have AIs running physics experiments that we will barely understand and they will come up with new technology that we will see as magic. Citation needed.
    - urbandw311er 2y ago
      Is that some catty way of saying you don’t agree? Maybe you should say why you don’t agree. Hacker News encourages a slightly higher quality of debate than glib remarks like this.
      - slowmovintarget 2y ago
        :) The glib response to that "citation needed" is "Sir, or madam, this is not Slashdot."
      - xanderlewis 2y ago
        What is there to agree with? The parent comment is an assertion about the future presented without evidence. ‘Citation needed’ might come across as snarky, but it’s a valid point.
        exe34 2y ago
        Sorry, it seemed pretty obvious to me. I have now added some examples of present day work - Google might be able to help you find more.
      - omnicognate 2y ago
        I agree that it's catty, but it's a way of pointing out that the original comment didn't provide any reason to believe the extremely speculative prediction that it stated as fact. That itself is glib, low quality commenting and it seems fair to point it out. There's no onus on the responder to provide a reason for disagreeing when no reason was given to believe the statement in the first place. Debate is hard on the internet, but fortunately it's a temporary inconvenience because in future the infrastructure will be replaced with direct neural connections, turning the entire human race into a single giant mind with one coherent worldview.
    - exe34 2y ago
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-designs-quantum-physics-experiments-beyond-what-any-human-has-conceived/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-designs-quantu... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHTMbHCeRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHTMbHCeRw https://www.anl.gov/article/autonomous-discovery-defines-the-next-era-of-science https://www.anl.gov/article/autonomous-discovery-defines-the... https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02251 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02251 https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/ https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK603480/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK603480/ https://thevarsity.ca/2024/01/13/self-driving-labs-how-ai-could-accelerate-scientific-discovery/ https://thevarsity.ca/2024/01/13/self-driving-labs-how-ai-co... Have you heard of Google? I realise that carbon chauvinism is currently edgy, but progress is already being made.
- urbandw311er 2y ago
  Perhaps. But equally, even if they don’t know how to build one, they might be able to work through the steps, iterate on their ideas, and eventually figure it out. The hypothesis is that, by modelling language they have essentially modelled the underlying human abilities of logic and rationalism. Let me put it another way. If you put a thousand human researchers in a room with all the existing data and came up with a process to assess their outputs and iterate on their best ideas, how long before they built an interstellar transport beam - fifty years? A hundred years? Now do it with a thousand AI researchers, and feed back their test results to them and allow them to iterate. But this time, assume they can work maybe a million times faster than the humans, or maybe ten million times faster. They’re limited only by the time it takes to build and test their prototype hardware. Now how long does it take?
  - akdev1l 2y ago
    > iterate on their ideas I don’t think it’s clear that LLMs can have/express novel ideas. I would argue an LLM by definition cannot generate _novel_ ideas.
    - kordlessagain 2y ago
      In "Me" by Thomas T. Thomas, novel thinking came from introducing random retrieval of memories in the entity. With vector search, this might include singleton outliers added to the prompt.
      - slowmovintarget 2y ago
        Just because the idea was expressed in science fiction, doesn't mean it's useful in the real world. Solving a non-trivial problem that hasn't been solved before is not something random walks on text token probabilities will get you. Text production algorithms have the problem of being unable to detect whether the text produced is internally consistent, let alone true in the logical sense. These two qualities are required for creating net new solutions to unsolved next-level problems.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  LLM's can tell the difference much of the time. The deranged stuff on the internet is rarely consistent or well formed so is not a good source for predictions. More factual writing tends to be more consistent with other writing and becomes a better source for predictions.
kenmacd 2y ago
There's a lot that I believe to be misinformed in your post, but rather than address most of that I'll ask if you've considered your reasons that you're so hostile towards this field? I doubt you refuse to work with anyone that's read a book that you refused to read. You'd probably also agree that while the topic of those books might be objectionable to you there's knowledge to be gained by reading them. So why is "AI read a bad book" a reason to write it off? You also assert that it's fooling people. Have you tried the image generation AIs? Do you really believe these images are 'fooling' the people generating them?
- bundtlake 2y ago
  > I doubt you refuse to work with anyone that's read a book that you refused to read. You are correct in your assumption. > You'd probably also agree that while the topic of those books might be objectionable to you there's knowledge to be gained by reading them. Objectionable would seem to me an overly loaded term. It’s yours so I’ll leave you to define it, but pretending my bias is harmful while you are free from bias makes me think you have a longer list of “objectionable thought crimes” than me. For instance, calling out LLMs for what they are is appropriate to me, but seemingly objectionable to you and the orange site community at large. (see: downvotes… I know I know, I’ve been around here long enough to know that’s also an “objectionable” point to make according to the community guidelines!) > So why is "AI read a bad book" a reason to write it off? It’s rhetoric and semantics are dictated by its training set. Since you seem hyper focused on making me out to be some vague prudist or fascist (leaving which specifically up to the reader’s whim) literary critic trying to control what others expose themselves to in an effort to nullify my criticism I will explain my reasoning using a book I love as a negative example. When I ask a search engine when an album was released I would be frustrated if it answered by taking the next token stochastically based on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. > You also assert that it's fooling people. Have you tried the image generation AIs? Do you really believe these images are 'fooling' the people generating them? I’m confused, or you are. One of the biggest criticism against all of this AI slop is its capacity to “fool” people. See: politics, deepfakes (ad copy and nudes alike), etc. Though that is “fooling” the “people intended to be exposed to the slop” rather than the “people generating the slop” as you focused on. My “fooling” line refers to the people in my life, largely with a lack of knowledge in technical domains (which is totally okay, this industry be damned!) who quickly bought up subscriptions to these services in the hopes of them doing their research for them (see: lawyer who filed motion containing “hallucinated precedent) or write their copy for them (see: plethora of published academic articles containing prompt detritus). My point being that those people flooded these services, and the number of highly technically knowledgable people who could see the rioting on the wall is much smaller than the demographic without that knowledge, propping up their users numbers which encouraged more funding, but they also are the ones least likely to use the service again as it was merely a passing fascination. Note: I wanted to say “writing on the wall” but autocorrect made it “rioting on the wall” and i thought that was profound in a funny absurdist way so I kept it. Does that mean I’ve successfully “stopped worrying “ and “learned to love the bomb”? > I'll ask if you've considered your reasons that you're so hostile towards this field A field that stole the whole of human creativity to sell it back to us for the empowering of the unethical sociopaths who control it. Why yes, I have considered my reasons; have you?

DougN7 2y ago

To be fair, they also include the best human intelligence has to offer. But you’re right in that they can’t tell the difference. They’ll never be able to tell us how to build an interstellar transport beam though since none of the input data had that information.

exe34 2y ago
LLMs won't, but some day we will have AIs running physics experiments that we will barely understand and they will come up with new technology that we will see as magic. imagine what it must be like to our chimp cousins, watching us light a fire, take off in a plane, summon another from beyond the hills without raising our voice.
- tazu 2y ago
  > some day we will have AIs running physics experiments that we will barely understand and they will come up with new technology that we will see as magic. Citation needed.
  - urbandw311er 2y ago
    Is that some catty way of saying you don’t agree? Maybe you should say why you don’t agree. Hacker News encourages a slightly higher quality of debate than glib remarks like this.
    - slowmovintarget 2y ago
      :) The glib response to that "citation needed" is "Sir, or madam, this is not Slashdot."
    - xanderlewis 2y ago
      What is there to agree with? The parent comment is an assertion about the future presented without evidence. ‘Citation needed’ might come across as snarky, but it’s a valid point.
      - exe34 2y ago
        Sorry, it seemed pretty obvious to me. I have now added some examples of present day work - Google might be able to help you find more.
    - omnicognate 2y ago
      I agree that it's catty, but it's a way of pointing out that the original comment didn't provide any reason to believe the extremely speculative prediction that it stated as fact. That itself is glib, low quality commenting and it seems fair to point it out. There's no onus on the responder to provide a reason for disagreeing when no reason was given to believe the statement in the first place. Debate is hard on the internet, but fortunately it's a temporary inconvenience because in future the infrastructure will be replaced with direct neural connections, turning the entire human race into a single giant mind with one coherent worldview.
  - exe34 2y ago
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-designs-quantum-physics-experiments-beyond-what-any-human-has-conceived/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-designs-quantu... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHTMbHCeRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHTMbHCeRw https://www.anl.gov/article/autonomous-discovery-defines-the-next-era-of-science https://www.anl.gov/article/autonomous-discovery-defines-the... https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02251 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02251 https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/ https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK603480/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK603480/ https://thevarsity.ca/2024/01/13/self-driving-labs-how-ai-could-accelerate-scientific-discovery/ https://thevarsity.ca/2024/01/13/self-driving-labs-how-ai-co... Have you heard of Google? I realise that carbon chauvinism is currently edgy, but progress is already being made.
urbandw311er 2y ago
Perhaps. But equally, even if they don’t know how to build one, they might be able to work through the steps, iterate on their ideas, and eventually figure it out. The hypothesis is that, by modelling language they have essentially modelled the underlying human abilities of logic and rationalism. Let me put it another way. If you put a thousand human researchers in a room with all the existing data and came up with a process to assess their outputs and iterate on their best ideas, how long before they built an interstellar transport beam - fifty years? A hundred years? Now do it with a thousand AI researchers, and feed back their test results to them and allow them to iterate. But this time, assume they can work maybe a million times faster than the humans, or maybe ten million times faster. They’re limited only by the time it takes to build and test their prototype hardware. Now how long does it take?
- akdev1l 2y ago
  > iterate on their ideas I don’t think it’s clear that LLMs can have/express novel ideas. I would argue an LLM by definition cannot generate _novel_ ideas.
  - kordlessagain 2y ago
    In "Me" by Thomas T. Thomas, novel thinking came from introducing random retrieval of memories in the entity. With vector search, this might include singleton outliers added to the prompt.
    - slowmovintarget 2y ago
      Just because the idea was expressed in science fiction, doesn't mean it's useful in the real world. Solving a non-trivial problem that hasn't been solved before is not something random walks on text token probabilities will get you. Text production algorithms have the problem of being unable to detect whether the text produced is internally consistent, let alone true in the logical sense. These two qualities are required for creating net new solutions to unsolved next-level problems.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
LLM's can tell the difference much of the time. The deranged stuff on the internet is rarely consistent or well formed so is not a good source for predictions. More factual writing tends to be more consistent with other writing and becomes a better source for predictions.

kenmacd 2y ago

There's a lot that I believe to be misinformed in your post, but rather than address most of that I'll ask if you've considered your reasons that you're so hostile towards this field? I doubt you refuse to work with anyone that's read a book that you refused to read. You'd probably also agree that while the topic of those books might be objectionable to you there's knowledge to be gained by reading them. So why is "AI read a bad book" a reason to write it off? You also assert that it's fooling people. Have you tried the image generation AIs? Do you really believe these images are 'fooling' the people generating them?

bundtlake 2y ago
> I doubt you refuse to work with anyone that's read a book that you refused to read. You are correct in your assumption. > You'd probably also agree that while the topic of those books might be objectionable to you there's knowledge to be gained by reading them. Objectionable would seem to me an overly loaded term. It’s yours so I’ll leave you to define it, but pretending my bias is harmful while you are free from bias makes me think you have a longer list of “objectionable thought crimes” than me. For instance, calling out LLMs for what they are is appropriate to me, but seemingly objectionable to you and the orange site community at large. (see: downvotes… I know I know, I’ve been around here long enough to know that’s also an “objectionable” point to make according to the community guidelines!) > So why is "AI read a bad book" a reason to write it off? It’s rhetoric and semantics are dictated by its training set. Since you seem hyper focused on making me out to be some vague prudist or fascist (leaving which specifically up to the reader’s whim) literary critic trying to control what others expose themselves to in an effort to nullify my criticism I will explain my reasoning using a book I love as a negative example. When I ask a search engine when an album was released I would be frustrated if it answered by taking the next token stochastically based on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. > You also assert that it's fooling people. Have you tried the image generation AIs? Do you really believe these images are 'fooling' the people generating them? I’m confused, or you are. One of the biggest criticism against all of this AI slop is its capacity to “fool” people. See: politics, deepfakes (ad copy and nudes alike), etc. Though that is “fooling” the “people intended to be exposed to the slop” rather than the “people generating the slop” as you focused on. My “fooling” line refers to the people in my life, largely with a lack of knowledge in technical domains (which is totally okay, this industry be damned!) who quickly bought up subscriptions to these services in the hopes of them doing their research for them (see: lawyer who filed motion containing “hallucinated precedent) or write their copy for them (see: plethora of published academic articles containing prompt detritus). My point being that those people flooded these services, and the number of highly technically knowledgable people who could see the rioting on the wall is much smaller than the demographic without that knowledge, propping up their users numbers which encouraged more funding, but they also are the ones least likely to use the service again as it was merely a passing fascination. Note: I wanted to say “writing on the wall” but autocorrect made it “rioting on the wall” and i thought that was profound in a funny absurdist way so I kept it. Does that mean I’ve successfully “stopped worrying “ and “learned to love the bomb”? > I'll ask if you've considered your reasons that you're so hostile towards this field A field that stole the whole of human creativity to sell it back to us for the empowering of the unethical sociopaths who control it. Why yes, I have considered my reasons; have you?