4 ms·

> What is in the nature of bike-riding that cannot be reduced to text? You're asking someone to answer this question in a text forum. This is not quite the got

> What is in the nature of bike-riding that cannot be reduced to text? You're asking someone to answer this question in a text forum. This is not quite the gotcha you think it is. The distinction between "knowing" and "putting into language" is a rich source of epistemological debate going back to Plato and is still widely regarded to represent a particularly difficult philosophical conundrum. I don't see how you can make this claim with so much certainty.

CamperBob2 8mo ago
Every time someone has said, "Yeah, but they can't do X," they've ended up with egg on their face. Have you seen the price of eggs lately?
- throw4847285 8mo ago
  You have resorted to, "You don't want to end up being wrong, do you?" To paraphrase Asimov, this kind of fallacious appeal is the last resort of the in-over-the-heads
  - D-Machine 8mo ago
    Lot of people in this thread being caught with their pants down. Dunno what it is about LLM and AI discourse that causes people to lie or so freely offer opinions on things they clearly have no understanding about whatsoever. AI discourse truly is a great Dunning-Kruger filter.
D-Machine 8mo ago
"A human can't learn to ride a bike from a book, but an LLM could" is a take so unhinged you could only find it on HN. Riding a bike is, broadly, learning to co-ordinate your muscles in response to visual data from your surroundings and signals from your vestibular and tactile systems that give you data about your movement, orientation, speed, and control. As LLMs only output tokens that represent text, by definition they can NEVER learn to ride a bike. Even ignoring that glaring definitional issue, an LLM also can't learn to ride a bike from books written by humans to humans, because an LLM could only operate through a machine using e.g. pistons and gears to manipulate the pedals. That system would be controlled by physics and mechanisms different from humans, and not have the same sensory information, so almost no human-written information about (human) bike-riding would be useful or relevant for this machine to learn how to bike. It'd just have to do reinforcement learning with some appropriate rewards and punishments for balance, speed, and falling. And if we could embody AI in a sensory system so similar to the human sensory system that it becomes plausible text on bike-riding might actually be useful to the AI, it might also be that, for exactly the same reasons, the AI learns just as well to ride just by hopping on the thing, and that the textual content is as useless to it as it is for us. Thinking this is an obvious gotcha (or the later comment that anyone thinking otherwise is going to have egg on their face) is just embarrassing. Much more of a wordcel problem than I would have expected on HN.
- cindyllm 8mo ago
  [dead]
- skeptic_ai 8mo ago
  The llm can output to a tool calling which moves the bike. Can claim the same as your brain alone can’t control the bike because can’t access muscle tool. You need to compare similar stuff
  - D-Machine 8mo ago
    > The LLM can output to a tool calling which moves the bike. No, it literally cannot. See the reasons I give elsewhere here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46948266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46948266. A more general AI trained with reinforcement learning and a novel architecture could surely learn to ride a bike, but an LLM simply cannot.
    - skeptic_ai 8mo ago
      I don’t get it from your message why am llm can’t do it Related: Have you seen nvidea with their simulated 3d env. That might not be called llm but it’s not very far away from what our llm actually do right now. It’s just a naming difference
      - anthuswilliams 8mo ago
        This argument was specifically about LLMs, not about other techniques (RL, multi-armed bandit, etc) that might be better leveraged to accomplish this type of goal. An LLM which makes a tool call to a function called `ride_bike`, where that function is a different sort of model with a different set of feedback mechanisms than those available to the LLM, is NOT the same thing at all. The LLM hasn't "learned" to ride the bike. The best you can say is that the LLM has learned that the bike can be ridden, and that it has a way of asking some other entity to ride on its behalf. Now, could you develop such a model and make it available to an LLM? Sure, probably. But that's not an LLM. Moreover, it involves you, a human, making novel inroads on a different sort of AI/robotics problem. It simply is not possible to accomplish with an LLM.

CamperBob2 8mo ago

Every time someone has said, "Yeah, but they can't do X," they've ended up with egg on their face. Have you seen the price of eggs lately?

throw4847285 8mo ago
You have resorted to, "You don't want to end up being wrong, do you?" To paraphrase Asimov, this kind of fallacious appeal is the last resort of the in-over-the-heads
- D-Machine 8mo ago
  Lot of people in this thread being caught with their pants down. Dunno what it is about LLM and AI discourse that causes people to lie or so freely offer opinions on things they clearly have no understanding about whatsoever. AI discourse truly is a great Dunning-Kruger filter.

D-Machine 8mo ago

"A human can't learn to ride a bike from a book, but an LLM could" is a take so unhinged you could only find it on HN. Riding a bike is, broadly, learning to co-ordinate your muscles in response to visual data from your surroundings and signals from your vestibular and tactile systems that give you data about your movement, orientation, speed, and control. As LLMs only output tokens that represent text, by definition they can NEVER learn to ride a bike. Even ignoring that glaring definitional issue, an LLM also can't learn to ride a bike from books written by humans to humans, because an LLM could only operate through a machine using e.g. pistons and gears to manipulate the pedals. That system would be controlled by physics and mechanisms different from humans, and not have the same sensory information, so almost no human-written information about (human) bike-riding would be useful or relevant for this machine to learn how to bike. It'd just have to do reinforcement learning with some appropriate rewards and punishments for balance, speed, and falling. And if we could embody AI in a sensory system so similar to the human sensory system that it becomes plausible text on bike-riding might actually be useful to the AI, it might also be that, for exactly the same reasons, the AI learns just as well to ride just by hopping on the thing, and that the textual content is as useless to it as it is for us. Thinking this is an obvious gotcha (or the later comment that anyone thinking otherwise is going to have egg on their face) is just embarrassing. Much more of a wordcel problem than I would have expected on HN.

cindyllm 8mo ago
[dead]
skeptic_ai 8mo ago
The llm can output to a tool calling which moves the bike. Can claim the same as your brain alone can’t control the bike because can’t access muscle tool. You need to compare similar stuff
- D-Machine 8mo ago
  > The LLM can output to a tool calling which moves the bike. No, it literally cannot. See the reasons I give elsewhere here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46948266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46948266. A more general AI trained with reinforcement learning and a novel architecture could surely learn to ride a bike, but an LLM simply cannot.
  - skeptic_ai 8mo ago
    I don’t get it from your message why am llm can’t do it Related: Have you seen nvidea with their simulated 3d env. That might not be called llm but it’s not very far away from what our llm actually do right now. It’s just a naming difference
    - anthuswilliams 8mo ago
      This argument was specifically about LLMs, not about other techniques (RL, multi-armed bandit, etc) that might be better leveraged to accomplish this type of goal. An LLM which makes a tool call to a function called `ride_bike`, where that function is a different sort of model with a different set of feedback mechanisms than those available to the LLM, is NOT the same thing at all. The LLM hasn't "learned" to ride the bike. The best you can say is that the LLM has learned that the bike can be ridden, and that it has a way of asking some other entity to ride on its behalf. Now, could you develop such a model and make it available to an LLM? Sure, probably. But that's not an LLM. Moreover, it involves you, a human, making novel inroads on a different sort of AI/robotics problem. It simply is not possible to accomplish with an LLM.