4 ms·

I don't know if anyone notices that, but LLMs are very much like what you see in dreams when you reflect on them when awake. When you asleep a dream feels very

I don't know if anyone notices that, but LLMs are very much like what you see in dreams when you reflect on them when awake. When you asleep a dream feels very coherent; but when you're awake, you see wild gaps and jumps and the overall impression of many dreams' plot is that it is pure nonsense. I once heard advice on trying to re-read the text you see in dreams. And I did that once. It was a phrase where one of words referred to a city. The first time I read that city was "London". I remembered the advice and re-read the phrase and the word changed to the name of an old Russian city "Rostov". Yet the phrase was "same", that is it felt same in the dream, even though the city was different. LLMs are like that dream mechanics. It is how something else is reflected in what we know (e.g. an image of a city is rendered as a name of a city, just any city). So, on one hand, we do have a similar mechanism in our minds. But on another hand our normal reasoning is very much unlike that. It would be a very wild stretch to believe that reasoning somehow stems from dreaming. I'd say reasoning is opposite to dreaming. If we amplify our dreaming mechanics we won't get a genius; more likely we'll get a schizophrenic.

neom 1y ago
I think that is a cool way of looking at it - build on what you said, to me it might be a bit like in both instances (dreaming and llms) - it's maybe a bit related to what they are trying to do (presuming dreams have a purpose) + the resource they have to do it in + the context they have to couple in to get the point across + something related to the abilities of the user? Lets for fun say there is a subsystem that understands and runs dreaming, you only have so much time, plus it's a weird modality, and you're trying to do something... maybe it's fine enough to just serve up the story no matter how muddled it is, what you might be talking about in LLMs is a similar thing? Dreams have a ticking clock where the brain chemistry is literally changing and the opportunity for that type of processing is about to disappear, and eventually the human will awaken, LLMs have a context window size. Fun thinking, anyway.
Fade_Dance 1y ago
Well it's neither schizophrenic nor using human reasoning. It's a machine using transformers no reason to overly anthropomorphize it, but sure the parallels do exist to some degree. These tools are obviously not reasoning tools in the classic sense, as they're not building off of core axiomic truths like classic logic. These truths may be largely embedded in the probabilistic output, due to the input universe that we feed it being based on human reason, but it's certainly not in a power of these tools. That said, of course we are attacking on more and more of this ability (ability to check databases of facts, iterative "reasoning" models, etc) so they are becoming "adequate" in these respects. The dreaming comparison seems quite apt though. I entirely get what you mean by rereading the dream word and seeing it suddenly transformed to another city name, yet somehow also "fitting". For some reason I'm keenly aware of these sorts of relationships when I think about my dreams. I will think of a situation and immediately be able to identify the input memories that "built" the dream scenario. Usually they involve overlapping themes and concepts, as well as some human specific common targets like "unresolved, emotionally charged, danger, etc" (presumably running through these types of brain neurons provides some sort of advantage for mammals, which makes sense to me). What an LLM does is essentially create a huge interconnected conceptual web of the universe which is fed, and then uses probably ballistic models to travel through these chains, much like how dreaming does a trance like dance through these conceptual connections. In the former example though, we have optimized the traversal to be as close to a "mock awake human" as possible. If the dream poem is dreary in nature, and Rostov sounds dreary, and you were hearing about the dreary London rain earlier in the day, and you have a childhood memory of reading through a dreary poem that made you very sad, that's the perfect sort of overlapping set of memory synapses for a dream to light up. And when looking back, all you'll see is a strange fantasmic and (usually, not always) frustratingly inaccessible conglomeration of these inputs. This sort of traversal isn't just used in dreaming though. To some degree we're doing similar things when we do things like creative thinking. The difference is, and this is especially so in "modern" life, we're strongly filtering our thoughts through language first and foremost (and indeed there's a lot of philosophical and scientific work done about how extremely important language is to humanness), but also through basic logic. LLM's inherent some of the power/magic of language, in that it is deconstructing the relationships between the concepts behind language that contains so much embedded meaning. But they aren't filtering through logic like we do. Well, reasoning models do to some degree, but it is obviously quite rudimentary. I think it's a good analogy.

neom 1y ago

I think that is a cool way of looking at it - build on what you said, to me it might be a bit like in both instances (dreaming and llms) - it's maybe a bit related to what they are trying to do (presuming dreams have a purpose) + the resource they have to do it in + the context they have to couple in to get the point across + something related to the abilities of the user? Lets for fun say there is a subsystem that understands and runs dreaming, you only have so much time, plus it's a weird modality, and you're trying to do something... maybe it's fine enough to just serve up the story no matter how muddled it is, what you might be talking about in LLMs is a similar thing? Dreams have a ticking clock where the brain chemistry is literally changing and the opportunity for that type of processing is about to disappear, and eventually the human will awaken, LLMs have a context window size. Fun thinking, anyway.

Fade_Dance 1y ago

Well it's neither schizophrenic nor using human reasoning. It's a machine using transformers no reason to overly anthropomorphize it, but sure the parallels do exist to some degree. These tools are obviously not reasoning tools in the classic sense, as they're not building off of core axiomic truths like classic logic. These truths may be largely embedded in the probabilistic output, due to the input universe that we feed it being based on human reason, but it's certainly not in a power of these tools. That said, of course we are attacking on more and more of this ability (ability to check databases of facts, iterative "reasoning" models, etc) so they are becoming "adequate" in these respects. The dreaming comparison seems quite apt though. I entirely get what you mean by rereading the dream word and seeing it suddenly transformed to another city name, yet somehow also "fitting". For some reason I'm keenly aware of these sorts of relationships when I think about my dreams. I will think of a situation and immediately be able to identify the input memories that "built" the dream scenario. Usually they involve overlapping themes and concepts, as well as some human specific common targets like "unresolved, emotionally charged, danger, etc" (presumably running through these types of brain neurons provides some sort of advantage for mammals, which makes sense to me). What an LLM does is essentially create a huge interconnected conceptual web of the universe which is fed, and then uses probably ballistic models to travel through these chains, much like how dreaming does a trance like dance through these conceptual connections. In the former example though, we have optimized the traversal to be as close to a "mock awake human" as possible. If the dream poem is dreary in nature, and Rostov sounds dreary, and you were hearing about the dreary London rain earlier in the day, and you have a childhood memory of reading through a dreary poem that made you very sad, that's the perfect sort of overlapping set of memory synapses for a dream to light up. And when looking back, all you'll see is a strange fantasmic and (usually, not always) frustratingly inaccessible conglomeration of these inputs. This sort of traversal isn't just used in dreaming though. To some degree we're doing similar things when we do things like creative thinking. The difference is, and this is especially so in "modern" life, we're strongly filtering our thoughts through language first and foremost (and indeed there's a lot of philosophical and scientific work done about how extremely important language is to humanness), but also through basic logic. LLM's inherent some of the power/magic of language, in that it is deconstructing the relationships between the concepts behind language that contains so much embedded meaning. But they aren't filtering through logic like we do. Well, reasoning models do to some degree, but it is obviously quite rudimentary. I think it's a good analogy.