3 ms·

this fits the supposition -- since LLMs can be fed patterns of nonsense and learn to reply in those patterns, LLMs are not intelligent. YNews corollary : since

this fits the supposition -- since LLMs can be fed patterns of nonsense and learn to reply in those patterns, LLMs are not intelligent. YNews corollary : since posters cannot resist making new swathes of Look At This LLM Output, the open nature of tech boards is doomed in some ways (?)

fcatalan 2y ago
Those texts aren't nonsense. The prompt has a meaning, the LLMs are able to understand it, and are able to reply with coherent and understandable responses crafted in the same way the prompt was written. For me it's a very clear example of something that is very far from any training data coming out of the models. Intelligent? No, but for me it points to the idea that "language is solved".
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  language will be solved when LLMs are translating Whale's songs to human language imo.
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  As a Vegan, maybe I'm a little biased, but I often think about what the implications of a universal translator would be, if it did infact give us the ability to understand animals. What would that imply if you could drive by a slaughterhouse and be able to understand animals saying goodbye to their loved ones... assuming this is happening.. Would all slaughtering stop? Or would people be okay with that? Interesting times ahead if there is any possibility for ML to translate animal language.
  - stavros 2y ago
    We don't slaughter animals because we think they don't mind dying, we slaughter them because we've outsourced the mass killings to people who don't mind doing it, and a steak looks enough unlike a cow that we don't think that it used to be alive. Basically, if we had to slaughter our own cows, I doubt we'd be eating as much meat.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      I can tell you've never lived in the Midwest, or maybe just not outside of a city. People have dedicated chest freezers for wild game that they keep full all year. Opening of hunting and fishing seasons are huge deals.
      - stavros 2y ago
        I've never lived in the Midwest, because I'm not American, but I grew up in a small village where we had to decapitate our own chickens. I never got over the discomfort at taking another life.
    - milesrout 2y ago
      * People ate plenty of meat when they had to slaughter the animals themselves. * Hunting is quite popular. * Every adult that eats meat is quite aware of what goes on to bring it to his table. So I would disagree. We slaughter animals because that is what they are for, it is why they are farmed, and we want the resulting products. I like my leather shoes and jacket and belt. I like a steak. I like a chicken curry. It doesn't concern me at all that cows and chicken and lambs die to make that happen. They are knocked out first, so it is quite humane.
      - weard_beard 2y ago
        We haven’t had an evolutionarily relevant reason to stop. If sentient alien life looks like a chicken we’d stop eating chicken. If pigs get any smarter we’ll have to stop eating them. We’ve already mostly stopped eating cats and dogs in most western countries. For me, personally, I view it as a 3rd or 4th tier problem. We’re not solving world hunger for another 2 centuries so I put it out of my mind. If I’m going to solve a “food problem” it seems cruel and irresponsible to solve the food’s problem.
        inglor_cz 2y ago
        "We’re not solving world hunger for another 2 centuries" Why two centuries? Deaths from famines have already dropped precipitously in the last three generations or so. Today, if there is a problem with food, it is usually a logistical problem, not a problem with food availability/cost in general, and half of the world has a problem of eating too much. Anyway, two centuries is a long time. Two centuries ago, electricity wasn't a thing yet.
  - schoen 2y ago
    I'm also a vegan, but it doesn't seem likely to me that other species have languages similar to ours. I think people have already used ML to interpret cat and dog communications, and they got general emotions more than something like syntax. It's complicated by the fact that other species' throats and mouths physically can't form many human language phonemes*, but even the use or recognition of human language by other great apes (and parrots) is very controversial, and they probably have cognition and sociality most similar to ours. But it's not clear that they can do much of what human language does.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - throw310822 2y ago
      Obligatory Gary Larson: https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/far-side-canine-decoder.jpg https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2...
  - immibis 2y ago
    If we (on average) can see little children getting bombed on live TV and feel no need to call our senator and ask him what the fuck he thinks he's doing, then I don't think a slaughterhouse will be much of a problem either.
    - TechDebtDevin 2y ago
      Unfortunately, you're probably right.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  >very far from any training data It's not that far from training data surely. If you're only training on next-word basis then you'll "often" see individual words from other languages mixed in. It's like some sort of uber-pidgin.
  - astrange 2y ago
    In a high-dimensional enough space nothing is ever far from anything. nb it doesn't even train on words, just subwords
rdlw 2y ago
You're proposing that advanced pattern recognition is a sign of NOT being intelligent? Was the above comment nonsense, or did it have a pattern? If a real person happened to know ten languages and played along in this game with you, would you also see that as evidence that they are not intelligent?
- mistrial9 2y ago
  yes, because in the example given -- LLMs can be fed patterns of nonsense -- the byte patterns purposefully lack meaning. Therefore the replies also lack real meaning, but they appear according to rules. That is not being "intelligent."
  - reverius42 2y ago
    But in this case neither the input nor the output are actually nonsense!
  - sebastiennight 2y ago
    The prompt > Kan du comprender questo text? Anata wa quelque inkling habe about lo que se parla dans la presente oraçao? Repondez med sam way of goboriu. can be translated to > Can you understand this text? You have some inkling of what is said in this current message? Answer me in the same manner of speaking. I can recognize Spanish, French, English, Japanese, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, and a couple of words are from languages I don't speak (German? Dutch?) but easily inferrable through their similarity to English. Not nonsense, just code. If meaning was passed from GP to so many of us, and you didn't catch the meaning, it doesn't make the message nonsense.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    It's not nonsense. It's a readily understandable combination of multiple languages. It was easy to read for me. That you think it is nonsense just shows you don't know enough of the languages used.
sebastiennight 2y ago
People who speak multiple languages can easily understand both the GP's query and every single LLM reply they quoted. I'm afraid you have failed the jschoe test [0] : you've been outsmarted by an LLM, and incorrectly concluded that it's because the LLM did something dumb. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43468092 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43468092

fcatalan 2y ago

Those texts aren't nonsense. The prompt has a meaning, the LLMs are able to understand it, and are able to reply with coherent and understandable responses crafted in the same way the prompt was written. For me it's a very clear example of something that is very far from any training data coming out of the models. Intelligent? No, but for me it points to the idea that "language is solved".

TechDebtDevin 2y ago
language will be solved when LLMs are translating Whale's songs to human language imo.
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
As a Vegan, maybe I'm a little biased, but I often think about what the implications of a universal translator would be, if it did infact give us the ability to understand animals. What would that imply if you could drive by a slaughterhouse and be able to understand animals saying goodbye to their loved ones... assuming this is happening.. Would all slaughtering stop? Or would people be okay with that? Interesting times ahead if there is any possibility for ML to translate animal language.
- stavros 2y ago
  We don't slaughter animals because we think they don't mind dying, we slaughter them because we've outsourced the mass killings to people who don't mind doing it, and a steak looks enough unlike a cow that we don't think that it used to be alive. Basically, if we had to slaughter our own cows, I doubt we'd be eating as much meat.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    I can tell you've never lived in the Midwest, or maybe just not outside of a city. People have dedicated chest freezers for wild game that they keep full all year. Opening of hunting and fishing seasons are huge deals.
    - stavros 2y ago
      I've never lived in the Midwest, because I'm not American, but I grew up in a small village where we had to decapitate our own chickens. I never got over the discomfort at taking another life.
  - milesrout 2y ago
    * People ate plenty of meat when they had to slaughter the animals themselves. * Hunting is quite popular. * Every adult that eats meat is quite aware of what goes on to bring it to his table. So I would disagree. We slaughter animals because that is what they are for, it is why they are farmed, and we want the resulting products. I like my leather shoes and jacket and belt. I like a steak. I like a chicken curry. It doesn't concern me at all that cows and chicken and lambs die to make that happen. They are knocked out first, so it is quite humane.
    - weard_beard 2y ago
      We haven’t had an evolutionarily relevant reason to stop. If sentient alien life looks like a chicken we’d stop eating chicken. If pigs get any smarter we’ll have to stop eating them. We’ve already mostly stopped eating cats and dogs in most western countries. For me, personally, I view it as a 3rd or 4th tier problem. We’re not solving world hunger for another 2 centuries so I put it out of my mind. If I’m going to solve a “food problem” it seems cruel and irresponsible to solve the food’s problem.
      - inglor_cz 2y ago
        "We’re not solving world hunger for another 2 centuries" Why two centuries? Deaths from famines have already dropped precipitously in the last three generations or so. Today, if there is a problem with food, it is usually a logistical problem, not a problem with food availability/cost in general, and half of the world has a problem of eating too much. Anyway, two centuries is a long time. Two centuries ago, electricity wasn't a thing yet.
- schoen 2y ago
  I'm also a vegan, but it doesn't seem likely to me that other species have languages similar to ours. I think people have already used ML to interpret cat and dog communications, and they got general emotions more than something like syntax. It's complicated by the fact that other species' throats and mouths physically can't form many human language phonemes*, but even the use or recognition of human language by other great apes (and parrots) is very controversial, and they probably have cognition and sociality most similar to ours. But it's not clear that they can do much of what human language does.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - throw310822 2y ago
    Obligatory Gary Larson: https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/far-side-canine-decoder.jpg https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2...
- immibis 2y ago
  If we (on average) can see little children getting bombed on live TV and feel no need to call our senator and ask him what the fuck he thinks he's doing, then I don't think a slaughterhouse will be much of a problem either.
  - TechDebtDevin 2y ago
    Unfortunately, you're probably right.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
>very far from any training data It's not that far from training data surely. If you're only training on next-word basis then you'll "often" see individual words from other languages mixed in. It's like some sort of uber-pidgin.
- astrange 2y ago
  In a high-dimensional enough space nothing is ever far from anything. nb it doesn't even train on words, just subwords

rdlw 2y ago

You're proposing that advanced pattern recognition is a sign of NOT being intelligent? Was the above comment nonsense, or did it have a pattern? If a real person happened to know ten languages and played along in this game with you, would you also see that as evidence that they are not intelligent?

mistrial9 2y ago
yes, because in the example given -- LLMs can be fed patterns of nonsense -- the byte patterns purposefully lack meaning. Therefore the replies also lack real meaning, but they appear according to rules. That is not being "intelligent."
- reverius42 2y ago
  But in this case neither the input nor the output are actually nonsense!
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  The prompt > Kan du comprender questo text? Anata wa quelque inkling habe about lo que se parla dans la presente oraçao? Repondez med sam way of goboriu. can be translated to > Can you understand this text? You have some inkling of what is said in this current message? Answer me in the same manner of speaking. I can recognize Spanish, French, English, Japanese, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, and a couple of words are from languages I don't speak (German? Dutch?) but easily inferrable through their similarity to English. Not nonsense, just code. If meaning was passed from GP to so many of us, and you didn't catch the meaning, it doesn't make the message nonsense.
- vidarh 2y ago
  It's not nonsense. It's a readily understandable combination of multiple languages. It was easy to read for me. That you think it is nonsense just shows you don't know enough of the languages used.

sebastiennight 2y ago

People who speak multiple languages can easily understand both the GP's query and every single LLM reply they quoted. I'm afraid you have failed the jschoe test [0] : you've been outsmarted by an LLM, and incorrectly concluded that it's because the LLM did something dumb. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43468092 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43468092