10 ms·

LLMs are statistical models trained on human-generated text. They aren't the perfectly logical "machine brains" that Asimov and others imagined. The upshot of

by slibhb 2y ago

LLMs are statistical models trained on human-generated text. They aren't the perfectly logical "machine brains" that Asimov and others imagined. The upshot of this is that LLMs are quite good at the stuff that he thinks only humans will be able to do. What they aren't so good at (yet) is really rigorous reasoning, exactly the opposite of what 20th century people assumed.

Balgair 2y ago
[flagged]
- n4r9 2y ago
  I've only read the first Foundation novel by Asimov. But what you write applies equally well to many other Golden Age authors e.g. Heinlein and Bradbury, plus slightly later writers like Clarke. I doubt there was much in the way of autism awareness or diagnosis at the time, but it wouldn't be surprising if any of these landed somewhere on the spectrum. Alfred Bester's "The stars my destination" stands out as a shining counterpoint in this era. You don't get much character development like that in other works until the sixties imo.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    Heinlein doesn't develop his characters? Oh, come on. You can't have read him at all!
    - n4r9 2y ago
      [The italics and punctuation suggest your comment is sarcastic, but I'm going to treat it as serious just in case.] Yeah, I'd say characterisation is a weakness of his. I've read Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, and Double Star. Heinlein does explore characters more than, say, Clark, but he doesn't go much for internal change or emotional growth. His male characters typically fall into one of two cartoonish camps: either supremely confident, talented, intelligent and independent (e.g. Jubal, Bernardo, Mannie, Bonforte...) or vaguely pathetic and stupid (e.g. moon men). His female characters are submissive, clumsily sexualised objects who contribute very little to the plot. There are a few partial exceptions - e.g. Lorenzo in Double Star and female pilots in Starship Troopers - but the general atmosphere is one of teenage boy wish fulfilment.
      - throwanem 2y ago
        Thank you for confirming, especially at such effort, when a simple "No, I haven't; I just spend too much time uncritically reading feminism Twitter," would have amply sufficed. There's an honesty to this response in spite of itself, and in spite of itself I respect that.
        Balgair 2y ago
        I sincerely have no idea if any of your comments in this thread are sarcastic or not. (This comment is also not sarcastic FYI). Generally, I also agree that Heinlein's characters are one dimensional and could benefit from greater character growth, though that was a bit of a hallmark of Golden Age sci-fi.
        throwanem 2y ago
        "Teenage boy wish fulfillment" is well beneath any reasonable standard of criticism, and I've addressed that with about as much respect as it deserves. There is much worthy of critique in Heinlein, especially in his depiction of women. I've spent about a quarter century off and on both reading and formulating such critiques, much more recently than I've spent meaningful time with his fiction. I've also read what he had to say for himself before he died, and what Mrs. Heinlein - she kept the name - said about him after. If we want to talk about, for example, how the themes of maternal incest and specifically feminine embodiment of weakly superhuman AGI in his later work reflect a degree of senescence and the wish for a supercompetent maternal figure to whom to surrender the burden of responsibility, or if we want to talk about how Heinlein seems to spend an enormous amount of time just generally exploring stuff from female characters' perspectives that an honest modern inquiry would recognize as fumbling badly but earnestly in the direction of something like a contemporary understanding of gender, then we could talk about that. No one wants to, though. You can't use anything like that as a stick to beat people with, so it never gets a look in, and those as here who care nothing for anything of the subject save if it looks serviceable as a weapon claim to be the only ones in the talk who are honest. They don't know the man's work well enough to talk about the years he spent selling stories that absolutely revolve around character development, which exist solely to exemplify it! Of course these are universally dismissed as his 'juveniles' - a few letters shy of 'juvenilia' - because science fiction superfans are all children and so are science fiction superhaters, neither of whom knows how to respond in any way better than a tantrum on the rare occasion of being told bluntly it's well past time they grew up. But they're the honest ones. Why not? So it goes. It's a conversation I know better than to try to have, especially on Hacker News; if I don't care for how it's proceeding, I've no one but myself to blame.
beloch 2y ago
What we used to think of as "AI" at one point in time becomes a mere "algorithm" or "automation" by another point in time. A lot of what Asimov predicted has come to pass, very much in the way he saw it. We just no longer think of it as "AI". LLM's are just the latest form of "AI" that, for a change, doesn't quite fit Asimov's mold. Perhaps it's because they're being designed to replace humans in creative tasks rather than liberate humans to pursue them.
- israrkhan 2y ago
  Exactly... as someone said " I need AI to do my laundary and dishes, while I can focus on art and creative stuff" ... But AI is doing the exact opposite, i.e creative stuff (drawing, poetry, coding, documents creation etc), while we are left to do the dishes/laundary.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    As someone else said - maybe you haven't noticed but there's a machine washing your clothes, and there's a good chance it has at least some very basic AI in it. It's been quite a while since anyone in the developed world has had to wash clothes by slapping them against a rock while standing in a river. Obviously this is really wishing for domestic robots, not AI, and robots are at least a couple of levels of complexity beyond today's text/image/video GenAI. There were already huge issues with corporatisation of creativity as "content" long before AI arrived. In fact one of our biggest problems is the complete collapse of the public's ability to imagine anything at all outside of corporate content channels. AI can reinforce that. But - ironically - it can also be very good at subverting it.
    - Qworg 2y ago
      The wits in robotics would say we already have domestic robots - we just call them dishwashers and washing machines. Once something becomes good enough to take the job completely, it gets the name and drops "robotic" - that's why we still have robotic vacuums.
wubrr 2y ago
> LLMs are statistical models trained on human-generated text. I mean, not only human-generated text. Also, human brains are arguably statistical models trained on human-generated/collected data as well...
- slibhb 2y ago
  > Also, human brains are arguably statistical models trained on human-generated/collected data as well... I'd say no, human brains are "trained" on billions of years of sensory data. A very small amount of that is human-generated.
  - wubrr 2y ago
    Almost everything we learn in schools, universities, most jobs, history, news, hackernews, etc is literally human-generated text. Our brains have an efficient structure to learn language, which has evolved over time, but the processes of actually learning languages happens after you are born, based on human-generated text/voice. Things like balance/walking, motion control, speaking (physical voice control), other physical things are trained on sensory data, but there's no reason LLMs/AIs can't be trained on similar data (and in many cases they already are).
    - skydhash 2y ago
      What we generate is probably a function of our sensory data + what we call creativity. At least humans still have access to the sensory data, so we can separate the two (with various success). LLMs have access to what we generate, but not the source. So it embed how we may use words, but not why we use this word and not others.
      - wubrr 2y ago
        > At least humans still have access to the sensory data I don't understand this point - we can obviously collect sensory data and use that for training. Many AI/LLM/robotics projects do this today... > So it embed how we may use words, but not why we use this word and not others. Humans learn language by observing other humans use language, not by being taught explicit rules about when to use which word and why.
BeetleB 2y ago
Reminds me of an old math professor I had. Before word processors, he'd write up the exam on paper, and the department secretary would type it up. Then when word processors came around, it was expected that faculty members will type it up themselves. I don't know if there were fewer secretaries as a result, but professors' lives got much worse. He misses the old days.
- zusammen 2y ago
  To be truthful, though, that’s only like 0.01 percent of the “academia was stolen from us and being a professor (if you ever get there at all) is worse” problem.
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    This wasn't just a "academia" thing, though. All business executives (even low level ones) had secretaries in the 1980s and earlier too. Typing wasn't something most people could do and it was seen as a waste of time for them to learn. So people dictated letters to secretaries who typed them. After the popularity of personal computers, it just became part of everyone's job to type their correspondence themselves and secretaries (greatly reduced in number and rebranded as "assistants" who deal more with planning meetings and things) became limited only to upper management.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Lerc 2y ago
"LLMs are statistical models" I see this referenced over and over again to trivialise AI as if it is a fait acompli. I'm not entirely sure why invoking statistics feels like a rebuttal to me. Putting aside the fact that LLMs are not purely statistics, even if they were what proof is there that you cannot make a statistical intelligent machine. It would not at all surprise me to learn that someone has made a purely statistical Turing complete model. To then argue that it couldn't think you are saying computers can never think, and by that and the fact that we think you are invoking a soul, God, or Penrose.
- lelandbatey 2y ago
  In this one case it's not meant to trivialize, it's meant to point out that LLMs don't behave the way we thought that AI would behave. We thought we'd have 100% logically-sound thinking machines because we built them on top of digital logic. We thought they'd be obtuse, we thought they'd be "book smart but not wise". LLMs are just different from that; hallucinations, the whole "fancy words and great sentences but no substance to a paragraph", all that is different from the rigid but perfect brains we thought AI would bring. That's what "statistical machine" seems to be trying to point out. It was assumed that if you asked the same AI the same question, you'd get the same answer every time. But that's not how LLMs work (I know you can see them the same every time and get the same output but at we don't do that so how we experience them is different).
  - Lerc 2y ago
    That's a very archaic view of AI, like 70's era symbolic AI.
- vacuity 2y ago
  Personally, I have a negative opinion of LLMs, but I agree completely. Many people are motivated to reject LLMs solely because they see them as "soulless machines". Judge based on the facts of the matter, and make your values clear if you must bring them into it, but don't pretend you're not applying values when you are. You can do worse: kneejerk emotional reactions are just pointless.
- 2y ago

by slibhb 2y ago

Balgair 2y ago

[flagged]

n4r9 2y ago
I've only read the first Foundation novel by Asimov. But what you write applies equally well to many other Golden Age authors e.g. Heinlein and Bradbury, plus slightly later writers like Clarke. I doubt there was much in the way of autism awareness or diagnosis at the time, but it wouldn't be surprising if any of these landed somewhere on the spectrum. Alfred Bester's "The stars my destination" stands out as a shining counterpoint in this era. You don't get much character development like that in other works until the sixties imo.
- throwanem 2y ago
  Heinlein doesn't develop his characters? Oh, come on. You can't have read him at all!
  - n4r9 2y ago
    [The italics and punctuation suggest your comment is sarcastic, but I'm going to treat it as serious just in case.] Yeah, I'd say characterisation is a weakness of his. I've read Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, and Double Star. Heinlein does explore characters more than, say, Clark, but he doesn't go much for internal change or emotional growth. His male characters typically fall into one of two cartoonish camps: either supremely confident, talented, intelligent and independent (e.g. Jubal, Bernardo, Mannie, Bonforte...) or vaguely pathetic and stupid (e.g. moon men). His female characters are submissive, clumsily sexualised objects who contribute very little to the plot. There are a few partial exceptions - e.g. Lorenzo in Double Star and female pilots in Starship Troopers - but the general atmosphere is one of teenage boy wish fulfilment.
    - throwanem 2y ago
      Thank you for confirming, especially at such effort, when a simple "No, I haven't; I just spend too much time uncritically reading feminism Twitter," would have amply sufficed. There's an honesty to this response in spite of itself, and in spite of itself I respect that.
      - Balgair 2y ago
        I sincerely have no idea if any of your comments in this thread are sarcastic or not. (This comment is also not sarcastic FYI). Generally, I also agree that Heinlein's characters are one dimensional and could benefit from greater character growth, though that was a bit of a hallmark of Golden Age sci-fi.
        throwanem 2y ago
        "Teenage boy wish fulfillment" is well beneath any reasonable standard of criticism, and I've addressed that with about as much respect as it deserves. There is much worthy of critique in Heinlein, especially in his depiction of women. I've spent about a quarter century off and on both reading and formulating such critiques, much more recently than I've spent meaningful time with his fiction. I've also read what he had to say for himself before he died, and what Mrs. Heinlein - she kept the name - said about him after. If we want to talk about, for example, how the themes of maternal incest and specifically feminine embodiment of weakly superhuman AGI in his later work reflect a degree of senescence and the wish for a supercompetent maternal figure to whom to surrender the burden of responsibility, or if we want to talk about how Heinlein seems to spend an enormous amount of time just generally exploring stuff from female characters' perspectives that an honest modern inquiry would recognize as fumbling badly but earnestly in the direction of something like a contemporary understanding of gender, then we could talk about that. No one wants to, though. You can't use anything like that as a stick to beat people with, so it never gets a look in, and those as here who care nothing for anything of the subject save if it looks serviceable as a weapon claim to be the only ones in the talk who are honest. They don't know the man's work well enough to talk about the years he spent selling stories that absolutely revolve around character development, which exist solely to exemplify it! Of course these are universally dismissed as his 'juveniles' - a few letters shy of 'juvenilia' - because science fiction superfans are all children and so are science fiction superhaters, neither of whom knows how to respond in any way better than a tantrum on the rare occasion of being told bluntly it's well past time they grew up. But they're the honest ones. Why not? So it goes. It's a conversation I know better than to try to have, especially on Hacker News; if I don't care for how it's proceeding, I've no one but myself to blame.

beloch 2y ago

What we used to think of as "AI" at one point in time becomes a mere "algorithm" or "automation" by another point in time. A lot of what Asimov predicted has come to pass, very much in the way he saw it. We just no longer think of it as "AI". LLM's are just the latest form of "AI" that, for a change, doesn't quite fit Asimov's mold. Perhaps it's because they're being designed to replace humans in creative tasks rather than liberate humans to pursue them.

israrkhan 2y ago
Exactly... as someone said " I need AI to do my laundary and dishes, while I can focus on art and creative stuff" ... But AI is doing the exact opposite, i.e creative stuff (drawing, poetry, coding, documents creation etc), while we are left to do the dishes/laundary.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  As someone else said - maybe you haven't noticed but there's a machine washing your clothes, and there's a good chance it has at least some very basic AI in it. It's been quite a while since anyone in the developed world has had to wash clothes by slapping them against a rock while standing in a river. Obviously this is really wishing for domestic robots, not AI, and robots are at least a couple of levels of complexity beyond today's text/image/video GenAI. There were already huge issues with corporatisation of creativity as "content" long before AI arrived. In fact one of our biggest problems is the complete collapse of the public's ability to imagine anything at all outside of corporate content channels. AI can reinforce that. But - ironically - it can also be very good at subverting it.
  - Qworg 2y ago
    The wits in robotics would say we already have domestic robots - we just call them dishwashers and washing machines. Once something becomes good enough to take the job completely, it gets the name and drops "robotic" - that's why we still have robotic vacuums.

wubrr 2y ago

> LLMs are statistical models trained on human-generated text. I mean, not only human-generated text. Also, human brains are arguably statistical models trained on human-generated/collected data as well...

slibhb 2y ago
> Also, human brains are arguably statistical models trained on human-generated/collected data as well... I'd say no, human brains are "trained" on billions of years of sensory data. A very small amount of that is human-generated.
- wubrr 2y ago
  Almost everything we learn in schools, universities, most jobs, history, news, hackernews, etc is literally human-generated text. Our brains have an efficient structure to learn language, which has evolved over time, but the processes of actually learning languages happens after you are born, based on human-generated text/voice. Things like balance/walking, motion control, speaking (physical voice control), other physical things are trained on sensory data, but there's no reason LLMs/AIs can't be trained on similar data (and in many cases they already are).
  - skydhash 2y ago
    What we generate is probably a function of our sensory data + what we call creativity. At least humans still have access to the sensory data, so we can separate the two (with various success). LLMs have access to what we generate, but not the source. So it embed how we may use words, but not why we use this word and not others.
    - wubrr 2y ago
      > At least humans still have access to the sensory data I don't understand this point - we can obviously collect sensory data and use that for training. Many AI/LLM/robotics projects do this today... > So it embed how we may use words, but not why we use this word and not others. Humans learn language by observing other humans use language, not by being taught explicit rules about when to use which word and why.

BeetleB 2y ago

Reminds me of an old math professor I had. Before word processors, he'd write up the exam on paper, and the department secretary would type it up. Then when word processors came around, it was expected that faculty members will type it up themselves. I don't know if there were fewer secretaries as a result, but professors' lives got much worse. He misses the old days.

zusammen 2y ago
To be truthful, though, that’s only like 0.01 percent of the “academia was stolen from us and being a professor (if you ever get there at all) is worse” problem.
- jhbadger 2y ago
  This wasn't just a "academia" thing, though. All business executives (even low level ones) had secretaries in the 1980s and earlier too. Typing wasn't something most people could do and it was seen as a waste of time for them to learn. So people dictated letters to secretaries who typed them. After the popularity of personal computers, it just became part of everyone's job to type their correspondence themselves and secretaries (greatly reduced in number and rebranded as "assistants" who deal more with planning meetings and things) became limited only to upper management.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Lerc 2y ago

"LLMs are statistical models" I see this referenced over and over again to trivialise AI as if it is a fait acompli. I'm not entirely sure why invoking statistics feels like a rebuttal to me. Putting aside the fact that LLMs are not purely statistics, even if they were what proof is there that you cannot make a statistical intelligent machine. It would not at all surprise me to learn that someone has made a purely statistical Turing complete model. To then argue that it couldn't think you are saying computers can never think, and by that and the fact that we think you are invoking a soul, God, or Penrose.

lelandbatey 2y ago
In this one case it's not meant to trivialize, it's meant to point out that LLMs don't behave the way we thought that AI would behave. We thought we'd have 100% logically-sound thinking machines because we built them on top of digital logic. We thought they'd be obtuse, we thought they'd be "book smart but not wise". LLMs are just different from that; hallucinations, the whole "fancy words and great sentences but no substance to a paragraph", all that is different from the rigid but perfect brains we thought AI would bring. That's what "statistical machine" seems to be trying to point out. It was assumed that if you asked the same AI the same question, you'd get the same answer every time. But that's not how LLMs work (I know you can see them the same every time and get the same output but at we don't do that so how we experience them is different).
- Lerc 2y ago
  That's a very archaic view of AI, like 70's era symbolic AI.
vacuity 2y ago
Personally, I have a negative opinion of LLMs, but I agree completely. Many people are motivated to reject LLMs solely because they see them as "soulless machines". Judge based on the facts of the matter, and make your values clear if you must bring them into it, but don't pretend you're not applying values when you are. You can do worse: kneejerk emotional reactions are just pointless.
2y ago