4 ms·

Who still thinks LLMs are stochastic parrots and an absolute dead end to AI?

baq 1y ago
A dead end is still useful. I shudder to think what comes next, though. These things are unreasonably effective for what they are.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  Nah no one can say this. Especially given the fact this very article has stated we don’t know or understand what’s going on but we see glimmers of introspection. Anyone who says or pretends to know it is or isn’t a dead end doesn’t know what they are talking about and are acting on a belief akin to religion. No rationality involved. It’s clearly not a stochastic parrot now that we know it introspects. That is now for sure. So the naysayers are wrong on that front. Utterly. Are they a dead end? That’s the last life line they’ll cling to for years as LLMs increase in capabilities everywhere. Whether it’s right or wrong they don’t actually know nor can they prove. I’m just curious why they even bother to state it or are so adamant about their beliefs.
  - NateEag 1y ago
    > Anyone who says or pretends to know it is or isn’t a dead end doesn’t know what they are talking about and are acting on a belief akin to religion. > It’s clearly not a stochastic parrot now that we know it introspects. That is now for sure. Your second claim here is kind of falling into that same religion-esque certitude. From what I gathered, it seems like "introspection" as described in the paper may not be the same thing most humans mean when they describe our ability to introspect. They might be the same, but they might not. I wouldn't even say the researchers have demonstrated that this "introspection" is definitely happening in the limited sense they've described. They've given decent evidence, and it's shifted upwards my estimate that LLMs may be capable of something more than comprehensionless token prediction. I don't think it's been shown "for sure."
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      > Your second claim here is kind of falling into that same religion-esque certitude. Nope it’s not. We have logical causal test of introspection. By definition introspection is not stochastic parroting. If you disagree then it is a linguistic terminology issue in which you disagree on what the general definition of what a stochastic parrot is. > From what I gathered, it seems like "introspection" as described in the paper may not be the same thing most humans mean when they describe our ability to introspect. They might be the same, but they might not. Doesn’t need to be the same as what humans do. What it did show is self awareness of its own internal thought process and that breaks it out of the definition stochastic parrot. The criteria is not human level intelligence but introspection which is a much lower bar. > They've given decent evidence, and it's shifted upwards my estimate that LLMs may be capable of something more than comprehensionless token prediction. This is causal evidence and already beyond all statistical thresholds as they can trigger this at will. The evidence is beyond double blind medical experiments used to verify our entire medical industry. By logic this result is more reliable than modern medicine. The result doesn’t say that LLMs can reliably introspect on demand but it does say with utmost reliability that LLMs can introspect and the evidence is extremely reproducible. By logic your stance is already defeated.
      - NateEag 1y ago
        > This is causal evidence and already beyond all statistical thresholds as they can trigger this at will. Their post says: > Even using our best injection protocol, Claude Opus 4.1 only demonstrated this kind of awareness about 20% of the time. That's not remotely close to "at will". As I already said, this does incline me towards believing LLMs can be in some sense aware of their own mental state. It's certainly evidence. Your certitude that it's what's happening, when the researchers' best efforts only yielded a twenty percent success rate, seems overconfident to me. If they could in fact produce this at will, then my confidence would be much higher that they've shown LLMs can be self-aware. ...though we still wouldn't have a way to tell when they actually are aware of their internal state, because certainly sometimes they appear not to be.
        1y ago
astrange 1y ago
That was disproven the same year (when transformers were shown to do in-context learning and that you can program algorithms into them) so hopefully noone ever believed it who was paying attention.

baq 1y ago

A dead end is still useful. I shudder to think what comes next, though. These things are unreasonably effective for what they are.

ninetyninenine 1y ago
Nah no one can say this. Especially given the fact this very article has stated we don’t know or understand what’s going on but we see glimmers of introspection. Anyone who says or pretends to know it is or isn’t a dead end doesn’t know what they are talking about and are acting on a belief akin to religion. No rationality involved. It’s clearly not a stochastic parrot now that we know it introspects. That is now for sure. So the naysayers are wrong on that front. Utterly. Are they a dead end? That’s the last life line they’ll cling to for years as LLMs increase in capabilities everywhere. Whether it’s right or wrong they don’t actually know nor can they prove. I’m just curious why they even bother to state it or are so adamant about their beliefs.
- NateEag 1y ago
  > Anyone who says or pretends to know it is or isn’t a dead end doesn’t know what they are talking about and are acting on a belief akin to religion. > It’s clearly not a stochastic parrot now that we know it introspects. That is now for sure. Your second claim here is kind of falling into that same religion-esque certitude. From what I gathered, it seems like "introspection" as described in the paper may not be the same thing most humans mean when they describe our ability to introspect. They might be the same, but they might not. I wouldn't even say the researchers have demonstrated that this "introspection" is definitely happening in the limited sense they've described. They've given decent evidence, and it's shifted upwards my estimate that LLMs may be capable of something more than comprehensionless token prediction. I don't think it's been shown "for sure."
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    > Your second claim here is kind of falling into that same religion-esque certitude. Nope it’s not. We have logical causal test of introspection. By definition introspection is not stochastic parroting. If you disagree then it is a linguistic terminology issue in which you disagree on what the general definition of what a stochastic parrot is. > From what I gathered, it seems like "introspection" as described in the paper may not be the same thing most humans mean when they describe our ability to introspect. They might be the same, but they might not. Doesn’t need to be the same as what humans do. What it did show is self awareness of its own internal thought process and that breaks it out of the definition stochastic parrot. The criteria is not human level intelligence but introspection which is a much lower bar. > They've given decent evidence, and it's shifted upwards my estimate that LLMs may be capable of something more than comprehensionless token prediction. This is causal evidence and already beyond all statistical thresholds as they can trigger this at will. The evidence is beyond double blind medical experiments used to verify our entire medical industry. By logic this result is more reliable than modern medicine. The result doesn’t say that LLMs can reliably introspect on demand but it does say with utmost reliability that LLMs can introspect and the evidence is extremely reproducible. By logic your stance is already defeated.
    - NateEag 1y ago
      > This is causal evidence and already beyond all statistical thresholds as they can trigger this at will. Their post says: > Even using our best injection protocol, Claude Opus 4.1 only demonstrated this kind of awareness about 20% of the time. That's not remotely close to "at will". As I already said, this does incline me towards believing LLMs can be in some sense aware of their own mental state. It's certainly evidence. Your certitude that it's what's happening, when the researchers' best efforts only yielded a twenty percent success rate, seems overconfident to me. If they could in fact produce this at will, then my confidence would be much higher that they've shown LLMs can be self-aware. ...though we still wouldn't have a way to tell when they actually are aware of their internal state, because certainly sometimes they appear not to be.
      - 1y ago

astrange 1y ago

That was disproven the same year (when transformers were shown to do in-context learning and that you can program algorithms into them) so hopefully noone ever believed it who was paying attention.