5 ms·

It's increasingly looking naive to assume scaling LLMs is all you need to get to full white-collar worker replacement. The attention mechanism / hopfield networ

It's increasingly looking naive to assume scaling LLMs is all you need to get to full white-collar worker replacement. The attention mechanism / hopfield network is fundamentally modeling only a small subset of the full human brain, and all the increasing sustained hype around bolted-on solutions for "agentic memory" is, in my opinion, glaring evidence that these SOTA transformers alone aren't sufficient even when you just limit the space to text. Maybe I'm just parroting Yann LeCun.

aerhardt 6mo ago
> you just limit the space to text And even then... why can't they write a novel? Or lowering the bar, let's say a novella like Death in Venice, Candide, The Metamorphosis, Breakfast at Tiffany's...? Every book's in the training corpus... Is it just a matter of someone not having spent a hundred grand in tokens to do it?
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  Who says they can't? What's your bar that needs to be passed in order for "written a novella" to be achieved? There's a lot of bad writing out there, I can't imagine nobody has used an LLM to write a bad novella.
  - aerhardt 6mo ago
    > What's your bar that needs to be passed I provide four examples in my comment...
    - colechristensen 6mo ago
      Your qualification for if an LLM can write a novella is it has to be as good as The Metamorphosis? Yes, those are examples of novellas, surely you believe an LLM could write a bad novella? I'm not sure what your point is. Either you think it can't string the words together in that length or your standard is it can't write a foundational piece of literature that stays relevant for generations... I'm not sure which.
      - aerhardt 6mo ago
        I don't think it can write something that's of a fraction of the quality of Kafka. But GP's argument ("limit the space to text") could be taken to imply - and it seems to be a common implication these days - that LLMs have mastered the text medium, or that they will very soon. > it can't write a foundational piece of literature Why not, if this a pure textual medium, the corpus includes all the great stories ever written, and possibly many writing workshops and great literature courses?
        colechristensen 6mo ago
        I don't know what to tell you. It's more than a little absurd to make the qualification of being able to do something to be that the output has to be considered a great work of art for generations.
        aerhardt 6mo ago
        I agree that the argument starts from a reduction to the absurd. So at least we can agree that AI hasn't mastered the text medium, without further qualification? And what about my argument, further qualified, which is that I don't think it could even write as well as a good professional writer - not necessarily a generational one?
        colechristensen 6mo ago
        >AI hasn't mastered the text medium I don't know what this means and I don't know what would qualify it as having "mastered" at all. Seems like a no-true-Scotsman thing where regardless there would always be someone that it couldn't actually do a thing because this and that. >why can't they write a novel? This is what I'm disagreeing with. I think an LLM can write a novel well enough that it's recognizably a pretty mediocre novel, no worse than the median written human novel which to be fair is pretty bad. You seem to have an unqualified bar something needs to pass before "writing a novel" is accomplished but it's not clear what that is. At the same time you're switching between the ability to do a thing and the ability to do a thing in a way that's honored as the best of the best for a century. So I don't know it kind of seems like you just don't like AI and have a different standard for it that adjusts so that it fails. This doesn't match what you'd consider some random Bob's ability to do a thing.
- conception 6mo ago
  I don’t understand - there are hundreds/thousands of AI written books available now.
  - aerhardt 6mo ago
    I've glossed over a few and one can immediately tell they don't meet the average writing level you'd see in a local workshop for writers, and much less that of Mann or Capote.
- voxl 6mo ago
  I know someone spending basically every day writing personal fan fiction stories using every model you can find. She doesn't want to share it, and does complain about it a lot, seems like maintaining consistency for something say 100 pages long is difficult
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  Never mind novels, it can't even write a good Reddit-style or HN-style comment. agentalcove.ai has an archive of AI models chatting to one another in "forum" style and even though it's a good show of the models' overall knowledge the AIisms are quite glaring.
  - mh- 6mo ago
    They definitely can, and do. It's just that the ones that manage to suppress all the AI writing "tells" go unnoticed as AI. This is a type of survivorship bias, though I feel there must be a better term for it that eludes me.
ACCount37 6mo ago
You probably are. The "small subset" argument is profoundly unconvincing, and inconsistent with both neurobiology of the human brain and the actual performance of LLMs. The transformer architecture is incredibly universal and highly expressive. Transformers power LLMs, video generator models, audio generator models, SLAM models, entire VLAs and more. It not a 1:1 copy of human brain, but that doesn't mean that it's incapable of reaching functional equivalence. Human brain isn't the only way to implement general intelligence - just the one that was the easiest for evolution to put together out of what it had. LeCun's arguments about "LLMs can't do X" keep being proven wrong empirically. Even on ARC-AGI-3, which is a benchmark specifically designed to be adversarial to LLMs and target the weakest capabilities of off the shelf LLMs, there is no AI class that beats LLMs.
- bigyabai 6mo ago
  > Human brain isn't the only way to implement general intelligence - just the one that was the easiest for evolution to put together out of what it had. The human brain is not a pretrained system. It's objectively more flexible than than transformers and capable of self-modulation in ways that no ML architecture can replicate (that I'm aware of).
  - ACCount37 6mo ago
    Human brain's "pre-training" is evolution cramming way too much structure into it. It "learns from scratch" the way it does because it doesn't actually learn from scratch. I've seen plenty of wacky test-time training things used in ML nowadays, which is probably the closest to how the human brain learns. None are stable enough to go into the frontier LLMs, where in-context learning still reigns supreme. In-context learning is a "good enough" continuous learning approximatation, it seems.
    - bigyabai 6mo ago
      > In-context learning is a "good enough" continuous learning approximatation, it seems. "it seems" is doing a herculean effort holding your argument up, in this statement. Say, how many "R"s are in Strawberry?
mohamedkoubaa 6mo ago
I think they're as good as they're going to get from scaling. They can still get more efficient, and tooling/harnesses around them will improve.
- 3dfd 6mo ago
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aerhardt 6mo ago

> you just limit the space to text And even then... why can't they write a novel? Or lowering the bar, let's say a novella like Death in Venice, Candide, The Metamorphosis, Breakfast at Tiffany's...? Every book's in the training corpus... Is it just a matter of someone not having spent a hundred grand in tokens to do it?

colechristensen 6mo ago
Who says they can't? What's your bar that needs to be passed in order for "written a novella" to be achieved? There's a lot of bad writing out there, I can't imagine nobody has used an LLM to write a bad novella.
- aerhardt 6mo ago
  > What's your bar that needs to be passed I provide four examples in my comment...
  - colechristensen 6mo ago
    Your qualification for if an LLM can write a novella is it has to be as good as The Metamorphosis? Yes, those are examples of novellas, surely you believe an LLM could write a bad novella? I'm not sure what your point is. Either you think it can't string the words together in that length or your standard is it can't write a foundational piece of literature that stays relevant for generations... I'm not sure which.
    - aerhardt 6mo ago
      I don't think it can write something that's of a fraction of the quality of Kafka. But GP's argument ("limit the space to text") could be taken to imply - and it seems to be a common implication these days - that LLMs have mastered the text medium, or that they will very soon. > it can't write a foundational piece of literature Why not, if this a pure textual medium, the corpus includes all the great stories ever written, and possibly many writing workshops and great literature courses?
      - colechristensen 6mo ago
        I don't know what to tell you. It's more than a little absurd to make the qualification of being able to do something to be that the output has to be considered a great work of art for generations.
        aerhardt 6mo ago
        I agree that the argument starts from a reduction to the absurd. So at least we can agree that AI hasn't mastered the text medium, without further qualification? And what about my argument, further qualified, which is that I don't think it could even write as well as a good professional writer - not necessarily a generational one?
        colechristensen 6mo ago
        >AI hasn't mastered the text medium I don't know what this means and I don't know what would qualify it as having "mastered" at all. Seems like a no-true-Scotsman thing where regardless there would always be someone that it couldn't actually do a thing because this and that. >why can't they write a novel? This is what I'm disagreeing with. I think an LLM can write a novel well enough that it's recognizably a pretty mediocre novel, no worse than the median written human novel which to be fair is pretty bad. You seem to have an unqualified bar something needs to pass before "writing a novel" is accomplished but it's not clear what that is. At the same time you're switching between the ability to do a thing and the ability to do a thing in a way that's honored as the best of the best for a century. So I don't know it kind of seems like you just don't like AI and have a different standard for it that adjusts so that it fails. This doesn't match what you'd consider some random Bob's ability to do a thing.
conception 6mo ago
I don’t understand - there are hundreds/thousands of AI written books available now.
- aerhardt 6mo ago
  I've glossed over a few and one can immediately tell they don't meet the average writing level you'd see in a local workshop for writers, and much less that of Mann or Capote.
voxl 6mo ago
I know someone spending basically every day writing personal fan fiction stories using every model you can find. She doesn't want to share it, and does complain about it a lot, seems like maintaining consistency for something say 100 pages long is difficult
zozbot234 6mo ago
Never mind novels, it can't even write a good Reddit-style or HN-style comment. agentalcove.ai has an archive of AI models chatting to one another in "forum" style and even though it's a good show of the models' overall knowledge the AIisms are quite glaring.
- mh- 6mo ago
  They definitely can, and do. It's just that the ones that manage to suppress all the AI writing "tells" go unnoticed as AI. This is a type of survivorship bias, though I feel there must be a better term for it that eludes me.

ACCount37 6mo ago

You probably are. The "small subset" argument is profoundly unconvincing, and inconsistent with both neurobiology of the human brain and the actual performance of LLMs. The transformer architecture is incredibly universal and highly expressive. Transformers power LLMs, video generator models, audio generator models, SLAM models, entire VLAs and more. It not a 1:1 copy of human brain, but that doesn't mean that it's incapable of reaching functional equivalence. Human brain isn't the only way to implement general intelligence - just the one that was the easiest for evolution to put together out of what it had. LeCun's arguments about "LLMs can't do X" keep being proven wrong empirically. Even on ARC-AGI-3, which is a benchmark specifically designed to be adversarial to LLMs and target the weakest capabilities of off the shelf LLMs, there is no AI class that beats LLMs.

bigyabai 6mo ago
> Human brain isn't the only way to implement general intelligence - just the one that was the easiest for evolution to put together out of what it had. The human brain is not a pretrained system. It's objectively more flexible than than transformers and capable of self-modulation in ways that no ML architecture can replicate (that I'm aware of).
- ACCount37 6mo ago
  Human brain's "pre-training" is evolution cramming way too much structure into it. It "learns from scratch" the way it does because it doesn't actually learn from scratch. I've seen plenty of wacky test-time training things used in ML nowadays, which is probably the closest to how the human brain learns. None are stable enough to go into the frontier LLMs, where in-context learning still reigns supreme. In-context learning is a "good enough" continuous learning approximatation, it seems.
  - bigyabai 6mo ago
    > In-context learning is a "good enough" continuous learning approximatation, it seems. "it seems" is doing a herculean effort holding your argument up, in this statement. Say, how many "R"s are in Strawberry?

mohamedkoubaa 6mo ago

I think they're as good as they're going to get from scaling. They can still get more efficient, and tooling/harnesses around them will improve.

3dfd 6mo ago
[dead]