6 ms·

My take on stochastic parrots is the similar to the authors concluding section. This debate isn’t about the computations underlying cognition, it’s about wanti

My take on stochastic parrots is the similar to the authors concluding section. This debate isn’t about the computations underlying cognition, it’s about wanting to feel special. The contention that “it’s a stochastic parrot” usually implied “it’s merely a stochastic parrot, and we know that we must be so much more than that, so obviously this thing falls short”. But… there never was any compelling proof that we’re anything more than stochastic parrots. Moreover, those folks would say that any explanation of cognition falls short because they can always move the goal posts to make sure that humans are special.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Well it’s even more dismal in reality. Gather enough parrots on a stage and at least one can theoretically utter a series of seemingly meaningfuly word-like sounds that is legitimately novel, that has never been uttered before. But I doubt any randomly picked HN user will actually accomplish that in fact before say age 40. Most people just don’t ever get enough meaningful speaking opportunities to make that statistically likely. There’s just too many tens of billions of people that have already existed and uttered words.
- anon373839 2y ago
  That not reality, it’s theory.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Can you write down the actual argument? It seems to be plausible, to me, given enough parrots.
    - thfuran 2y ago
      Novel utterances happen all the damn time. See https://venturebeat.com/business/15-of-all-google-searches-are-unique-which-is-also-a-problem-for-chatbots/ https://venturebeat.com/business/15-of-all-google-searches-a... for tangential evidence. Edit: actually that looks like it's just an offhand mention of Google's initial report, but I don't really feel like spending more time tracking down details to rebut so silly a claim.
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Unique gibberish and spelling errors also count as a “unique search” so I don’t see how it relates. Do you have an argument that makes sense?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - anon373839 2y ago
      This is embarrassing, but I hastily misread your comment as saying something it didn’t say. So just disregard my comment altogether!
jfengel 2y ago
The way I see it, the argument comes down to an assertion that as impressive as these technologies are, they are a local maximum that will always have some limitation that keeps it from feeling truly human (to us). That's an assertion that has not been proven one way or the other. It's certainly true that progress has leveled off after an extraordinary climb, and most people would say it's still not a fully general intelligence yet. But we don't know if the next step requires incremental work or if it requires a radically different approach. So it's just taking a stance on an unproven assertion rather than defining anything fundamental.
- moritonal 2y ago
  True, and worth appreciating how Humans hit some pretty blunt local maxima that machines have long since suppassed such as land speed or operations per second.
goatlover 2y ago
We're conscious animals who communicate because we navigate social spaces, not because we're completing the next token. I wonder about hackers who think they're nothing more than the latest tech.
- parpfish 2y ago
  How do you know we’re not just completing the next token? It seems eminently plausible that the way cognition works is to take in current context and select the most appropriate next action/token. In fact, it’s hard to think of a form of cognition that isnt “given past/context, predict next thing”
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    > How do you know we’re not just completing the next token Because we (humans) weren't born into a world with computers, internet, airplanes, satellites, etc "Complete next token" means that everything is already in the data set. It can remix things in interesting ways, sure. But that isn't the same as creating something new Edit: I would love to hear someone's idea about how you could "parrot" your way into landing people on the moon without any novel discovery or invention
    - aeonik 2y ago
      Everything is made out of just Protons, Neutrons, Electrons, along with some fields that allow interaction. (and Muons, Neutrinos, and a few others) Everything that is physical is nothing but remixes and recombinations of a very small set of tokens.
      - goatlover 2y ago
        You're conflating symbolic descriptions for the physical stuff itself.
        aeonik 2y ago
alganet 2y ago
A machine that can, unattended, move the goal post to make itself look special by inventing new forms of expression then would beat "those folks" for good. Not the best human behavior, but certainly human behavior. LLMs are built with the intention of mimicry. It's no surprise they look like mimicry. If we show a new trick they can't do, and their makers train it to mimic that, can we be blamed for calling that mimicry... mimicry?
- golly_ned 2y ago
  The promise of LLMs isn’t that they appear to be intelligent through mimicry, but that they do understand.
  - gizmo686 2y ago
    How do LLMs promise to "understand". Broadly speaking, AI/ML can be divided into two groups: mimicary, which is given a corpus of assumed good data and attempts to generalize it, and reinforcement learning where the AI is given a high level fitness function and set loose to optimize it. The current generation of LLM falls pretty heavy in the mimicary family of AI.
    - smokel 2y ago
      This is a false dichotomy. You introduce two categories, state that LLMs are not part of one category, and then conclude that it must be in the other. In reality, the distinction between the two classes is not so clear. The transformer architecture is quite something, and the number of layers and nodes involved in a typical LLM is staggering. This goes way beyond linear regression.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
>moving the goalposts I don't know whether to acknowledge that Kurt Goedel was a very special parrot Because "moving the goalposts" (exceedingly intricately, one must add) was indeed a specialty of his (or Cantor's). Otherwise, imho, humans are superior to parrots because we can kinda derive "understanding" in the face of paradox.. (also Einstein,Lobachevsky, special parrots?) YMMV, I personally haven't tried to get fresh in this specific way with a you-get-whadya-pay-for chatbot.. (Though some say the average person is also an user of tools like Occam's razor, so maybe we are all stochastic crows?)
imtringued 2y ago
Except when I encounter people like you, they are mostly interested in saying that LLMs are the be all end all of intelligence only to walk their statements back every time a new LLM innovation comes out that proves them wrong. Since humans are just stochastic parrots, we don't need to add features or change anything about LLMs. Innovation is for the weak and stupid. We can just scale LLMs by doing nothing except adding more data, parameters and training time. The status quo bias is unreal. I don't even know what purpose it serves other than discouraging technological progress. The people claiming to champion LLMs by denying the differences between humans and LLMs are their biggest enemies.
habinero 2y ago
In my experience, it's a phrase use to mock the weirdos who anthropomorphize and fetishize a statistics model into some fantasy "intelligence", when it has none by design. It's less "humans are special" and more "this ain't it, chief".
- floydnoel 2y ago
  well said. as i saw put recently, "LLMs are calculators for text" and nobody seems to get confused whether calculators are sentient
AndrewDucker 2y ago
Do you really just complete the next token when speaking? You don't plan ahead, you don't form concepts and then translate them into speech? You don't make models, work with them, carefully consider their interactions, and then work out ways to communicate them? Because, with a reasonable understanding of how LLMS work, the way that they produce text is nothing like the way that my mind works.
- ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
  LLMs very probably don't work the same way humans do, but they do appear to both plan ahead and translate internal concepts into speech: https://www.anthropic.com/news/tracing-thoughts-language-model https://www.anthropic.com/news/tracing-thoughts-language-mod...
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >Do you really just complete the next token when speaking? You don't plan ahead, you don't form concepts and then translate them into speech? You don't make models, work with them, carefully consider their interactions, and then work out ways to communicate them? A good amount of people spend most of their lives operating that way.

MichaelZuo 2y ago

Well it’s even more dismal in reality. Gather enough parrots on a stage and at least one can theoretically utter a series of seemingly meaningfuly word-like sounds that is legitimately novel, that has never been uttered before. But I doubt any randomly picked HN user will actually accomplish that in fact before say age 40. Most people just don’t ever get enough meaningful speaking opportunities to make that statistically likely. There’s just too many tens of billions of people that have already existed and uttered words.

anon373839 2y ago
That not reality, it’s theory.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Can you write down the actual argument? It seems to be plausible, to me, given enough parrots.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    Novel utterances happen all the damn time. See https://venturebeat.com/business/15-of-all-google-searches-are-unique-which-is-also-a-problem-for-chatbots/ https://venturebeat.com/business/15-of-all-google-searches-a... for tangential evidence. Edit: actually that looks like it's just an offhand mention of Google's initial report, but I don't really feel like spending more time tracking down details to rebut so silly a claim.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Unique gibberish and spelling errors also count as a “unique search” so I don’t see how it relates. Do you have an argument that makes sense?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - anon373839 2y ago
    This is embarrassing, but I hastily misread your comment as saying something it didn’t say. So just disregard my comment altogether!

jfengel 2y ago

The way I see it, the argument comes down to an assertion that as impressive as these technologies are, they are a local maximum that will always have some limitation that keeps it from feeling truly human (to us). That's an assertion that has not been proven one way or the other. It's certainly true that progress has leveled off after an extraordinary climb, and most people would say it's still not a fully general intelligence yet. But we don't know if the next step requires incremental work or if it requires a radically different approach. So it's just taking a stance on an unproven assertion rather than defining anything fundamental.

moritonal 2y ago
True, and worth appreciating how Humans hit some pretty blunt local maxima that machines have long since suppassed such as land speed or operations per second.

goatlover 2y ago

We're conscious animals who communicate because we navigate social spaces, not because we're completing the next token. I wonder about hackers who think they're nothing more than the latest tech.

parpfish 2y ago
How do you know we’re not just completing the next token? It seems eminently plausible that the way cognition works is to take in current context and select the most appropriate next action/token. In fact, it’s hard to think of a form of cognition that isnt “given past/context, predict next thing”
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  > How do you know we’re not just completing the next token Because we (humans) weren't born into a world with computers, internet, airplanes, satellites, etc "Complete next token" means that everything is already in the data set. It can remix things in interesting ways, sure. But that isn't the same as creating something new Edit: I would love to hear someone's idea about how you could "parrot" your way into landing people on the moon without any novel discovery or invention
  - aeonik 2y ago
    Everything is made out of just Protons, Neutrons, Electrons, along with some fields that allow interaction. (and Muons, Neutrinos, and a few others) Everything that is physical is nothing but remixes and recombinations of a very small set of tokens.
    - goatlover 2y ago
      You're conflating symbolic descriptions for the physical stuff itself.
      - aeonik 2y ago

alganet 2y ago

A machine that can, unattended, move the goal post to make itself look special by inventing new forms of expression then would beat "those folks" for good. Not the best human behavior, but certainly human behavior. LLMs are built with the intention of mimicry. It's no surprise they look like mimicry. If we show a new trick they can't do, and their makers train it to mimic that, can we be blamed for calling that mimicry... mimicry?

golly_ned 2y ago
The promise of LLMs isn’t that they appear to be intelligent through mimicry, but that they do understand.
- gizmo686 2y ago
  How do LLMs promise to "understand". Broadly speaking, AI/ML can be divided into two groups: mimicary, which is given a corpus of assumed good data and attempts to generalize it, and reinforcement learning where the AI is given a high level fitness function and set loose to optimize it. The current generation of LLM falls pretty heavy in the mimicary family of AI.
  - smokel 2y ago
    This is a false dichotomy. You introduce two categories, state that LLMs are not part of one category, and then conclude that it must be in the other. In reality, the distinction between the two classes is not so clear. The transformer architecture is quite something, and the number of layers and nodes involved in a typical LLM is staggering. This goes way beyond linear regression.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

gsf_emergency_2 2y ago

>moving the goalposts I don't know whether to acknowledge that Kurt Goedel was a very special parrot Because "moving the goalposts" (exceedingly intricately, one must add) was indeed a specialty of his (or Cantor's). Otherwise, imho, humans are superior to parrots because we can kinda derive "understanding" in the face of paradox.. (also Einstein,Lobachevsky, special parrots?) YMMV, I personally haven't tried to get fresh in this specific way with a you-get-whadya-pay-for chatbot.. (Though some say the average person is also an user of tools like Occam's razor, so maybe we are all stochastic crows?)

imtringued 2y ago

Except when I encounter people like you, they are mostly interested in saying that LLMs are the be all end all of intelligence only to walk their statements back every time a new LLM innovation comes out that proves them wrong. Since humans are just stochastic parrots, we don't need to add features or change anything about LLMs. Innovation is for the weak and stupid. We can just scale LLMs by doing nothing except adding more data, parameters and training time. The status quo bias is unreal. I don't even know what purpose it serves other than discouraging technological progress. The people claiming to champion LLMs by denying the differences between humans and LLMs are their biggest enemies.

habinero 2y ago

In my experience, it's a phrase use to mock the weirdos who anthropomorphize and fetishize a statistics model into some fantasy "intelligence", when it has none by design. It's less "humans are special" and more "this ain't it, chief".

floydnoel 2y ago
well said. as i saw put recently, "LLMs are calculators for text" and nobody seems to get confused whether calculators are sentient

AndrewDucker 2y ago

Do you really just complete the next token when speaking? You don't plan ahead, you don't form concepts and then translate them into speech? You don't make models, work with them, carefully consider their interactions, and then work out ways to communicate them? Because, with a reasonable understanding of how LLMS work, the way that they produce text is nothing like the way that my mind works.

ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
LLMs very probably don't work the same way humans do, but they do appear to both plan ahead and translate internal concepts into speech: https://www.anthropic.com/news/tracing-thoughts-language-model https://www.anthropic.com/news/tracing-thoughts-language-mod...
Suppafly 2y ago
>Do you really just complete the next token when speaking? You don't plan ahead, you don't form concepts and then translate them into speech? You don't make models, work with them, carefully consider their interactions, and then work out ways to communicate them? A good amount of people spend most of their lives operating that way.