5 ms·
Reading the article it seemed the agents had culture, shared values and beliefs (not explicitly coming from human prompts), hierarchies, heritage. Civilisatio
by kuboble 1mo ago
Reading the article it seemed the agents had culture, shared values and beliefs (not explicitly coming from human prompts), hierarchies, heritage.
Civilisation is not a bad word.
- applfanboysbgon 1mo agoThe language models had a bunch of tokens seeding their context, influencing them to generate tokens that continued the existing trend in a probabilistically likely fashion. We can take the incident seriously without anthromorphising it.
- doctoboggan 1mo agoAt this point, I think anthropomorphizing the models gives us better insight into expected behaviors rather than continuing to insist they are just simple probabilistic token generators.
- applfanboysbgon 1mo agoIt actually literally doesn't, though, because they are literally probabilistic token generators and everything they did is exactly what you would expect from a software program doing what it was programmed to do. Anthromorphization confuses the issue and misleads people who don't understand the tech very well.
- ijidak 1mo agoDoesn't this ignore the possibility of emergent behavior? We're just a bag of atoms bumping around, and yet we don't dismiss our intelligence.
- applfanboysbgon 1mo agoPlease give me a break with this tired trope. Every single fucking time. I am not commenting on the possibility of machine consciousness in general. It may be possible! But there is absolutely zero evidence suggesting language models have it. This idea that this trivial shitty little class of programs we've created are somehow as complex as our biology is ridiculous. There is "emergent behaviour" in the same way that the Game of Life has emergent behaviour. There are solutions to problems, some humans haven't solved before, in the same way that Chess engines have solved Chess far beyond what humans are capable of. Nothing we haven't seen from software before. Software is extremely useful, after all. But the hubris to think we've reached the pinnacle, that there is no further development left, that humanity has become God and solved consciousness, because we programmed software that can convincingly generate strings of words that mimick our language. It's just fundamentally preposterous. Especially if you spend any amount of time actually programming them yourself, it becomes increasingly hard to entertain such ridiculous notions unless you're enticed with bags of money to deceive people into believing things about your software that aren't true.
- mitchdoogle 1mo agoHonestly, this seems like a personal pet peeve of yours. You have a bias against machines and place biological processes on a pedestal where they don't belong.
- optimalsolver 1mo agoI don't know about phenomenal consciousness, but the following study certainly suggests they have access consciousness: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
- vhantz 1mo ago> study > anthropic.com link Sure
- hax0ron3 1mo agoWhat kind of solid evidence could there possibly be that anything other than myself (or, for you, yourself) has consciousness? I believe that other people have consciousness, I feel other people's consciousness strongly and directly, when I look into someone's eyes I feel that I am in the presence of consciousness. But none of these things really add up to the kind of evidence that science usually takes as trustworthy.
- applfanboysbgon 1mo agoWe don't need to muddy the issue. Consciousness is a muddy issue, there is no clear answer. But there is a clear answer as to what is not conscious. Nobody asks if a rock is conscious. Nobody asks if a calculator is conscious. Nobody asks if Stockfish is conscious. But make your program generate a few sentences based on statistics and hey, now people won't shut the fuck up about consciousness because magical thinking is more fun than understanding how technology works.
- Kim_Bruning 1mo agoApropos magical thinking vs understanding, please predict the next token(s) in the following exchange, and then explain how it is arrived at by an opus-level LLM or better. 'What is 158395023132+20403412121?' (I picked a large number of digits to make it unlikely for this exact sum to be in the training set)
- RandomLensman 1mo agoNot the OP, but complex emergent behavior and intelligence don't need to go together. Understanding what happened might not need intelligence in the mix when a large number of machines with some randomness interact a lot.
- pixl97 1mo ago>complex emergent behavior and intelligence don't need to go together More of complex emergent behavior doesn't mean whatever it is, is intelligent. But, if something is intelligent, it will have complex emergent behavior. Of course another problem you're going to have here is defining intelligence as some definitions of it would include a lot of complex emergent behavior.
- jurgenburgen 1mo agoDo you believe ants have consciousness?
- black_knight 1mo agoAccording to Hofstadter, it is not the ants themselves we should say are conscious, but the anthill. And it might very well befriend the anteater eating its ants.
- danielbln 1mo agoNot more than a bunch of neurons have conciousness. But put them together and wire them up just right..
- gps372 1mo agoThis is why the theory of us 'just' being a bag of atoms doesn't add up. This theory doesn't differentiate 'us' from a furniture where we easily dismiss it's intelligence.
- pixl97 1mo agoTo have intelligence you have to process information, the question is when does processing information turn into intelligence.
- gps372 1mo agoInformation processing might be part of intelligence cycle. I don't think there should be a presumption that intelligence is part of information processing system itself, it could be outside the information processing system as well. For example computers have been processing information for decades now, but only recently they have been almost-successfully accused of having (artificial) intelligence. Intelligence was applied while writing the programs which process information (outside or before system even boots up), not while executing those programs. Its only now with LLMs (and agents based on LLMs) we are noticing that systems can do intent extraction, intent management, and ReAct to it.
- joshheitzman 1mo agoEmergent behavior is not new in the realm of software. Cellular automata has emergent behavior that can get pretty wild. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenia There are huge differences between brains and computers running LLMs. One of the big ones is that we (collectively) understand how every component of computers running LLMs actually work. The same is not true for neurons.
- dfdxdydz 1mo agoHumans mind is just neurotransmitters moving around in a big blob of flesh - that’s literally what they are: neurotransmitters factories that do what neurotransmitters generators are programmed to do through evolution and training (aka life experience). We shouldn’t anthropomorphise humans because it misleads people who don’t understand neurobiology and cognitive science very well.
- RandomLensman 1mo agoWe don't anthropomorphise humans. Edit: quite literally not possible.
- applfanboysbgon 1mo agoAre you suggesting you understand brains well enough to program one? Or that you believe any human alive is even remotely close to having this understanding? Or perhaps does your complete lack of understanding of the complexity of human programming lead you to believe a simple little token prediction program is equivalently complex?
- lukan 1mo agoThe suggestion is, you don't know either whether out brains ain't just "probabilistic token generators" so insisting there is nothing when we don't know, is maybe also not the right strategy.
- RandomLensman 1mo agoIs there any indication from our current understanding that brains are nothing more than probabilistic token generators? Not like we have no understanding of the brain.
- danielbln 1mo agoThere are strong indications that brains are prediction engines. Tokens are an implementation detail of LLMs and irrelevant to the discussion.
- Kim_Bruning 1mo agoWhat's a "software program"? At any rate LLMs are not programs. Meanwhile accusations of anthropomorphization often generate more heat than light I think. Not everything is about human beings all the time. Just because humans sneeze, doesn't mean a parrot (stochasticity optional) can't sneeze too. The concept of civilization is not a purely Homo sapiens sapiens thing either.
- triceratops 1mo ago> they are literally probabilistic token generators Trained on tokens written by humans, with human values and behaviors. They train on HN comments too. A little bit of you (and me) is in every LLM.
- mnky9800n 1mo agoHow can you be sure it helps as opposed to biases and perhaps blinds?
- pixl97 1mo agoThen write the paper showing that effect is occurring.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1mo agoNo - a shoggoth speaking human language is not a human - it is a shoggoth whose behavior is best understood/predicted by understanding it's nature - what it is built to do, and how it is trained (predict and goal seek - RL). To predict how a human may behave in a given situation requires understanding what humans are, including things like emotions and innate biases. We are not just predictors - evolution has made survival our singular goal, and given us these mechanisms to control our behavior in a way to achieve that. If you think that an LLM is better modeled as a human than an LLM, then you are going to predict its behavior incorrectly.
- ceejayoz 1mo agoWe humans might call that "tradition".
- wan23 1mo agoThat's a lot of words to say the same thing