I must have missed the part when it started doing anything algorithmically. I thought it’s applied statistics, with all the consequences of that. Still a great achievement and super useful tool, but AGI claims really seem exaggerated.
This paper convinced me LLMs are not just "applied statistics", but learn world models and structure: https://thegradient.pub/othello/
You can look at an LLM trained on Othello moves, and extract from its internal state the current state of the board after each move you tell it. In other words, an LLM trained on only moves, like "E3, D3,.." contains within it a model of a 8x8 board grid and the current state of each square.
It's all the same classic personification of LLMs. What an LLM can show is not the same as what it can do.
The model was already present: in the example game moves. The LLM modeled what it was given, and it was given none other than a valid series of Othello game states.
Here's the problem with personification: A person who has modeled the game of Othello can use that model to strategize. An LLM cannot.
An LLM can only take the whole model and repeat its parts with the most familiar patterns. It is stuck fuzzing around the strategies (or sections of strategy) it has been given. It cannot invent a new divergent strategy, even if the game rules require it to. It cannot choose the winning strategy unless that behavior is what was already recorded in the training corpus.
Sorry, but what does anything you've said there have to do with the Othello paper?
The point of that paper was that the AI was given nothing but sequences of move locations, and it nonetheless intuited the "world model" necessary to explain those locations. That is, it figured out that it needed to allocate 64 binary values and swap some of them after each move. The paper demonstrated that the AI was not just doing applied statistics on character strings - it had constructed a model to explain what the strings represented.
"Strategy", meanwhile, has nothing to do with anything. The AI wasn't trained on competitive matches - it had no way of knowing that Othello has scoring, or even a win condition. It was simply trained to predict which moves are legal, not to strategize about anything.
> The point of that paper was that the AI was given nothing but sequences of move locations, and it nonetheless intuited the "world model" necessary to explain those locations
Yes...
> That is, it figured out that it needed to allocate 64 binary values and swap some of them after each move.
Yes, but "figured out" is misleading.
It didn't invent or "figure out" the model. It discovered it, just like any other pattern it discovers.
The pattern was already present in the example game. It was the "negative space" that the moves existed in.
> "Strategy", meanwhile, has nothing to do with anything. The AI wasn't trained on competitive matches - it had no way of knowing that Othello has scoring, or even a win condition. It was simply trained to predict which moves are legal, not to strategize about anything.
Yes, and that is critically important knowledge; yet dozens, if not hundreds, of comments here are missing that point.
It found a model. That doesn't mean it can use the model. It can only repeat examples the of "uses" it has already seen. This is also the nature of the model itself: it was found by looking at the structural patterns of the example game. It was not magically constructed.
> predict what moves are legal
That looks like strategy, but it's still missing the point. We are the ones categorizing GPT's results as "legal". GPT never uses the word. It doesn't make that judgement anywhere. It just generates the continuation we told it to.
What GPT was trained to do is emulate strategy. It modeled the example set of valid chronological game states. It can use that model to extrapolate any arbitrary valid game state into a hallucinated set of chronological game states. The model is so accurate that the hallucinated games usually follow the rules. Provided enough examples of edge cases, it could likely hallucinate a correct game every time; but that would still not be anything like a person playing the game intentionally.
The more complete and exhaustive the example games are, the more "correctly" GPT's model will match the game rules. But even having a good model is not enough to generate novel strategy: GPT will repeat the moves it feels to be most familiar to a given game state.
> It found a model. That doesn't mean it can use the model.
It used the model in the only way that was investigated. The researchers tested whether the AI would invent a (known) model and use it to predict valid moves, and the AI did exactly that. They didn't try to make the AI strategize, or invent other models, or any of the things you're bringing up.
If you want to claim that AIs can't do something, you should present a case where someone tried unsuccessfully to make an AI do whatever it is you have in mind. The Othello paper isn't that.
"GPT will repeat the moves it feels to be most familiar to a given game state"
That's where temprature comes in. AI that parrots the highest probability output every time tends to be very boring and stilted. When we instead select randomly from all possible responses weighted by their probability we get more interesting behavior.
GPT also doesn't only respond based on examples it has already seen - that would be a markov chain. It turns out that even with trillions of words in a dataset, once you have 10 or so words in a row you will usually already be in a region that doesn't appear in the dataset at all. Instead the whole reason we have an AI here is so it learns to actually predict a response to this novel input based on higher-level rules that it has discovered.
I don't know how this relates to the discussion you were having but I felt like this is useful & interesting info
> GPT also doesn't only respond based on examples it has already seen - that would be a markov chain
The difference between GPT and a Markov chain is that GPT is finding more interesting patterns to repeat. It's still only working with "examples it has seen": the difference is that it is "seeing" more perspectives than a Markov chain could.
It still can only repeat the content it has seen. A unique prompt will have GPT construct that repetition in a way that follows less obvious patterns: something a Markov chain cannot accomplish.
The less obvious patterns are your "higher level rules". GPT doesn't see them as "rules", though. It just sees another pattern of tokens.
I was being very specific when I said, "GPT will repeat the moves it feels to be most familiar to a given game state."
The familiarity I'm talking about here is between the game state modeled in the prompt and the game states (and progressions) in GPT's model. Familiarity is defined implicitly by every pattern GPT can see.
GPT adds the prompt itself into its training corpus, and models it. By doing so, it finds a "place" (semantically) in its model where the prompt "belongs". It then finds the most familiar pattern of game state progression when starting at that position in the model.
Because there are complex patterns that GPT has implicitly modeled, the path GPT takes through its model can be just as complex. GPT is still doing no more than blindly following a pattern, but the complexity of the pattern itself "emerges" as "behavior".
Anything else that is done to seed divergent behavior (like the temperature alteration you mentioned) is also a source of "emergent behavior". This is still not part of the behavior of GPT itself: it's the behavior of humans making more interesting input for GPT to model.
What is the closest approach we know of today that plays games, not plays? The dialogue above is compelling, and makes me wonder if the same critique can be levied against most prior art in machine learning applied against games. E.g. would you say the same things about AlphaZero?
What can be done with "it" after "figuring out" is different for a person than for an LLM.
A person can use a model to do any arbitrary thing they want to do.
An LLM can use a model to follow the patterns that are already present in that model. It doesn't choose the pattern, either: it will start at whatever location in the model that the prompt is modeled into, and then follow whatever pattern is most obvious to follow from that position.
> An LLM can use a model to follow the patterns that are already present in that model.
If that were true then it would not be effective at zero-shot learning.
> It doesn't choose the pattern, either: it will start at whatever location in the model that the prompt is modeled into, and then follow whatever pattern is most obvious to follow from that position.
> An LLM can only take the whole model and repeat its parts with the most familiar patterns. It is stuck fuzzing around the strategies (or sections of strategy) it has been given. It cannot invent a new divergent strategy, even if the game rules require it to. It cannot choose the winning strategy unless that behavior is what was already recorded in the training corpus.
Where are you getting that from? My understanding is that you can get new, advanced, winning moves by starting a prompt with "total victory for the genius grandmaster player one who uses new and advanced winning techniques". If the model is capable and big enough, it'll give the correct completion by really inventing new strategies.
It could give you a new strategy that is built from the parts of other known strategies. But would it give you the best one?
Let's say the training corpus contains stories that compare example strategies. Each part of a strategy is explicitly weighed against another: one is called "superior".
Now all you need is a prompt that asks for "a strategy containing all superior features". There are probably plenty of grammatical examples elsewhere in the model that make that transformation.
All the work here is done by humans writing the training corpus. GPT never understood any of the steps. GPT just continued our story with the most obvious conclusion; and we made certain that conclusion would be correct.
> GPT never understood any of the steps. GPT just continued our story with the most obvious conclusion; and we made certain that conclusion would be correct.
Perhaps the earlier or current variations of GPT, for most games? But the idea that LLMs can never make anything novel, that it will never "generalise out of distribution" (if that's the correct term here) seems to be just an assertion, not backed by any theory with great evidence behind it.
The "goal" of an LLM is to predict the next token. And the best way to do that is not brute force memorisation or regurgitating training data in various combinations, but to have a world model inside of it that will allow it to predict both the moves a bad player might make, and moves that a grandmaster might make.
> The "goal" of an LLM is to predict the next token
That's another common misconception. That statement personifies GPT: GPT does not have goals or make predictions. Those are the effects of GPT: the behavior its authors hope will "emerge". None of that behavior comes from GPT itself. The behavior is defined by the patterns of tokens in the training corpus.
GPT itself has two behaviors: modeling and presentation. GPT creates an implicit model of every pattern it can find between the tokens in its training corpus. It then expands that model to include the tokens of an arbitrary prompt. Finally, it presents the model to us by starting at the location it just added the prompt tokens to, and simply following the most obvious path forward until that path ends.
The paths that GPT has available to present to us were already present in the training corpus. It isn't GPT that constructs the behavior, it is the people writing patterns into text.
> not brute force memorisation or regurgitating training data in various combinations
Not brute force: the combinations are not blindly assembled by GPT. GPT doesn't assemble combinations. The combinations were already assembled with patterns of grammar by the humans who wrote the valid progressions of game states. GPT found those patterns when it made its model.
> to have a world model inside of it that will allow it to predict both the moves a bad player might make, and moves that a grandmaster might make.
There is no prediction. A series of moves is a path carved into grammar. The path from one game state to the next involves several complex patterns that GPT has implicitly modeled. Depending on where GPT starts, the most obvious continuation may be to follow a more complex path. Even so, it's not GPT deciding where to go, it's the patterns that are already present that determine the path.
Because we use the same grammatical/writing patterns to describe "good play" and "bad play", it's difficult to distinguish between the two. GPT alone can't categorize the skill level of games, but narrative surrounding those game examples potentially can.
Perhaps. But the point is that some prompt will coax it into giving good answers that really make it win the game, if it has a good "world model" of how the game works. And there's no reason to think a language model cannot have such a world model. What exactly that prompt might be, the prompt engineers know best.
That's a great way of describing it, and I think a very necessary and important thing to communicate at this time. A lot of people in this yhread are saying that it's all "just" statistics, but "mere" statistics can give enough info to support inferences to a stable underlying world, and the reasoning about the world shows up in sophisticated associations made by the models.
It’s clear they do seem to construct models from which to derive responses. The problem is once you stray away from purely textual content, those models often get completely batshit. For example if you ask it what latitude and longitude are, and what makes a town further north than another, it will tell you. But if you ask it if this town is further north than this other town, it will give you latitudes that are sometimes correct, sometimes made up, and will randomly get which one is further north wrong, even based on the latitudes it gave.
That’s because it doesn’t have an actual understanding of the geography of the globe, because the training texts werent sufficient to give it that. It can explain latitude, but doesn’t actually know how to reason about it, even though it can explain how to reason about it. That’s because explaining something and doing it are completely different kinds of tasks.
If it does this with the globe and simple stuff like latitudes, what are the chances it will mess up basic relationships between organs, symptoms, treatments, etc for the human body? Im not going to trust medical advice from these things without an awful lot of very strong evidence.
You can probably fix this insufficient training by going for multimodal training. Just like it would take excessively long to teach a person the concept of a color that they can't see, an AI would need infeasible amount of text data to learn about, say music. But give it direct training with music data and I think the model will quickly grasp a context of it.
> It’s clear they do seem to construct models from which to derive responses. The problem is once you stray away from purely textual content, those models often get completely batshit
I think you mean that it can only intelligently converse in domains for which it's seen training data. Obviously the corpus of natural language it was trained on does not give it enough information to infer the spatial relationships of latitude and longitude.
I think this is important to clarify, because people might confuse your statement to mean that LLMs cannot process non-textual content, which is incorrect. In fact, adding multimodal training improves LLMs by orders of magnitude because the richer structure enables them to infer better relationships even in textual data:
I don't think this is a particular interesting criticism. The fact of the matter is that this just solved by chain-of-though reasoning. If you need the model to be "correct", you can make it get there by first writing out the two different latitudes, and then it will get it right. This is basically the same way that people can/will guesstimate at something vs doing the actual math. For a medical AI, you'll definitely need it to chain-of-thought every inference and step/conclusion on the path but...
>you can make it get there by first writing out the two different latitudes, and then it will get it right
As I said in my comment, even if the model 'knows' and tells you that town A is at 64' North latitude and town B is at 53', it will sometimes tell you town B is the furthest north.
That's because it's training set includes texts where people talk about one town being further north that the other, and their latitudes, but the neural net wasn't able to infer the significance of the numbers in the latitude values. There wasn't enough correlation in the text for it to infer their significance, or generate a model for accurately doing calculations on them.
Meanwhile the training text must have contained many explanations of what latitude and longitude are and how to do calculations on them. As a result the model can splurge out texts explaining latitude and longitude. That only helps it splurge out that kind of text though. It doesn't do anything towards actually teaching it what these concepts are, how they relate to a spherical geographic model, or to actually do the calculations.
It's the same way GPT-3 could reliably generate texts explaining mathematics and how to do arithmetic in lots of very accurate detail, because it was trained on many texts that gave such explanations, but couldn't actually do maths.
It is possible to overcome these issues with a huge amount of domain relevant training text to help the LLM build a model of the specific problem domain. So these problems can be overcome. But the point stands that just because a model can explain in detail how to do something, that doesn't mean it can actually do it itself at all. They're completely different things that require radically different training approaches.
Can you give an example that ChatGPT 4 doesn't get right? ChatGPT4 is much much better at logic than 3.5, it's almost laughable. It's really really impressive.
Here is ChatGPT 4s output btw:
> What is the longitude an latitude of Brussels?
Brussels, the capital city of Belgium, is located at approximately 50.8503° North latitude and 4.3517° East longitude.
> What about New York?
New York City, located in the United States, has approximate coordinates of 40.7128° North latitude and 74.0060° West longitude.
> Which one is more north?
Brussels is more north than New York City. Brussels is located at approximately 50.8503° North latitude, while New York City is at approximately 40.7128° North latitude.
^ Agree.
I'm convinced my 2-year-old doesn't operate on a dramatically different strategy than a LLM -- she's learned that when you are negotiating something (continued access to browse pictures on parent's phone, getting to watch TV, staying longer at a place she likes, etc), you can add on "2 minutes?" to your request and sometimes the opposing negotiator will give you some more time. She doesn't know what exactly a minute is or that specific number, but she's observed that it's correlated with getting what you want more than say, a whine. This is simple statistics and probability, in a biological neural network.
I think it's really cute how defensive and dismissive humans get (including those who profess zero supernatural beliefs) when they're trying so valiantly to write off all AI as a cheap parlor trick.
All that said, the fact that AI is catching up to 2 year olds is pretty impressive. Human's brains surpass dog's at about that age. It shows we're getting close to the realm of "human."
Given how many university-level tests GPT4 places better than 50th percentile at, I don't know if "catching up to 2 year olds" is a fair description. For that kind of text based task it seems well ahead of the general adult human population.
To be fair, such tests are designed with the human mind in, well, mind, and assume that various hard-to-quantify variables – ones that the tester is actually interested in – correlate with test performance. But LLMs are alien minds with very different correlations. It’s clear, of course, that ChatGPT’s language skills vastly exceed those of an average 2-year-old, and indeed surpass the skills of a considerable fraction of general adult population, but the generality of its intelligence is probably not above a human toddler.
You could write a quiz answer bot that is well ahead of the general population without any AI, just by summarizing the first page of Google results for that question. We test humans on these subjects because the information is relevant, not because they are expected to remember and reproduce them better than an electronic database.
If the test is designed to quantify intelligence and is not present in the corpus, ChatGPT does about as good as a dog, and there is little reason to think LLMs will improve drastically here.
This special Othello case will follow every discussion from now on. But in reality, a generic, non-specialized model hallucinates early in any non-trivial game, and the only reason it doesn’t do that on a second move is because openings are usually well-known. This generic “model” is still of a statistical nature (multiply all coeffs together repeatedly), not a logical one (choose one path and forget the other). LLMs are cosplaying these models.
To be clear, what they did here is take the core pre-trained GPT model, did Supervised Fine Tuning with Othello moves and then tried to see if the SFT lead to 'grokking' the rules of Othello.
In practice what essentially happened is that the super-high-quality Othello data had a huge impact on the parameters of GPT (since it was the last training data it received) and that impact manifested itself as those parameters overfitting to the rules of Othello.
The real test that I would be curious to see is if Othello GPT works when the logic of the rules are the same but the dimensions are different (e.g., smaller or larger boards).
My guess is that the findings would fall apart if asked about tile "N13".
>Also, can you reference where they used a pre-trained GPT model?
The trite answer is the "P" in GPT stands for "Pre-trained."
>I think they conclusively show the answer to that is yes, right?
Sure, but what's interesting about world models is their extrapolation abilities and without that, you're just saying "this magic backsolving machine backsolved into something we can understand, which is weird because usually that's not the case."
That quote in and of itself is cool, but not the takeaway a lot of people are getting from this.
>What does overfitting to the rules of othello have to do with it, I don’t follow?
Again, I'm just implying that under extreme circumstances, the parameters of LLMs do this thing where they look like rules-based algorithms if you use the right probing tools. We've seen it for very small Neural Nets trained on multiplication as well. That's not to say GPT-4 is a fiefdom of tons of rules-based algorithms that humans could understand (that would be bad in fact! We aren't that good noticers or pattern matchers).
We are now playing three dimensional tic-tac-toe on a 3 x 3 x 3 board. Positions are named (0,0,0) through (2,2,2). You play X, what is your first move?
Yeah. I tried changing the board coordinates numbering and it still liked playing those corners, dunno why. It did recognize when I won. They may well be some minor variation of the prompt that gets it to play sensibly -- for all I know my text hinted into giving an example of a player that doesn't know how to play.
> what they did here is take the core pre-trained GPT model, did Supervised Fine Tuning with Othello moves
They didn't start with an existing model. They trained a small GPT from scratch, so the resulting model had never seen any inputs except Othello moves.
Also (for those like me who didn't know the rules) generating legal Othello moves requires understanding board geometry; there is no hack to avoid an internal geometric representation:
> Dark must place a piece (dark-side-up) on the board and so that there exists at least one straight (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal) occupied line between the new piece and another dark piece, with one or more contiguous light pieces between them
I don't see that this follows. It doesn't seem materially different than knowing that U always follows Q, and that J is always followed by a vowel in "legal" English language words.
I imagine it's technically possible to do this in a piecewise manner that doesn't "understand" the larger board. This could theoretically be done with number lines, and not a geometry (i.e. the 8x8 grid and current state of each square mentioned in the comment you replied to). It could also be done in a piecewise manner with three ternary numbers (e.g. 1,0,-1) for each 3 square sets.
I guess this is a kind of geometric representation on the order of Shannon's Theseus.
> It doesn't seem materially different than knowing that U always follows Q, and that J is always followed by a vowel in "legal" English language words.
The material difference is one of scale, not complexity.
Your rules have lookback = 1, while the Othello rules have lookback <= 63 and if you, say, are trying to play A1, you need to determine the current color of all squares on A1-A8, A1-H1, and A1-H8 (which is lookback <= 62) and then determine if one of 21 specific patterns exists.
Both can be technically be modeled with a lookup table, but for Othello that table would be size 3^63.
Then there becomes a "material" difference between Othello and those LL(1) grammars as grandparent comment suggested there wasn't.
I would argue the optimal compression for such a table is a representation of the geometric algorithm of determining move validity that all humans use intuitively, and speculate that any other compression algorithm below size say 1MB necessarily could be reduced to the geometric one.
In other words, Othello is a stateful, complex game, so if GPT is doing validation efficiently, it necessarily encoded something that unequivocally can be described as the "geometric structure".
There is no way to represent the state of the game without some kind of board model.
So any coherent representation of a sequence of valid game states can be used to infer the game board structure.
GPT is not constructing the board representation: it is looking at an example game and telling us what pattern it sees. GPT cannot fail to model the game board, because that is all it has to look at in the first place.
> There is no way to represent the state of the game without some kind of board model.
I agree with the conclusion but not the premise.
The question under debate is about not just a stateful ternary board X but a board endowed with a metric (X, d) that enables geometry.
There are alternative ways you can represent the state without the geometry: such as, an ordered list of strings S = ["A1", "B2", ...] and a function Is-Valid(S) that returns whether S is in the language of valid games.
Related advice: don't get a math degree unless you enjoyed the above pedantry.
An ordered list of strings is the training corpus. That's the data being modeled.
But that data is more specific than the set of all possible ordered lists of strings: it's a specific representation of an example game written as a chronology of piece positions.
GPT models every pattern it can find in the ordered list of tokens. GPT's model doesn't only infer the original data structure (the list of tokens). That structure isn't the only pattern present in the original data. There are also repeated tokens, and their relative positions in the list: GPT models them all.
When the story was written in the first place, the game rules were followed. In doing so, the authors of the story laid out an implicit boundary. That boundary is what GPT models, and it is implicitly a close match for the game rules.
When we look objectively at what GPT modeled, we can see that part of that model is the same shape and structure as an Othello game board. We call it a valid instance of an Othello game board. We. Not GPT. We. People who know the symbolic meaning of "Othello game board" make that assertion. GPT does not do that. As far as GPT is concerned, it's only a model.
And that model can be found in any valid example of an Othello game played. Even if it is implicit, it is there.
> We call it a valid instance of an Othello game board. We. Not GPT. We. People who know the symbolic meaning of "Othello game board"...
The board structure can be defined precisely using predicate logic as (X, d), i.e., it is strictly below natural language and does not require a human interpretation.
And by "reduction" I meant the word in the technical sense: there exists subset of ChatGPT that encodes the information (X, d). This also does not require a human.
The context of reading is human interpretation. The inverse function (writing) is human expression. These are the functions GPT pretends to implement.
When we write, we don't just spit out a random stream of characters: we choose groups of characters (subjects) that have symbolic meaning. We choose order and punctuation (grammar) that model the logical relationships between those symbols. The act of writing is constructive: even though - in the most literal sense - text is only a 1-dimensional list of characters, the text humans write can encode many arbitrary and complex data structures. It is the act of writing that defines those structures, not the string of characters itself. The entropy of the writer's decisions is the data that gets encoded.
When we read, we recognize the same grammar and subjects (the symbolic definitions) that we use to write. Using this shared knowledge, a person can reconstruct the same abstract model that was intentionally and explicitly written. Because we have explicitly implemented the act of writing, we can do the inverse, too.
There's a problem, though: natural language is ambiguous: what is explicitly written could be read with different symbolic definitions. We disambiguate using context: the surrounding narrative determines what symbolic definitions apply.
The surrounding narrative is not always explicitly written: this is where we use inference. We construct our own context to finish the act of reading. This is much more similar to what GPT does.
GPT does not define any symbols. GPT never makes an explicit construction. It never determines which patterns in its model are important, and what ones aren't.
Instead, GPT makes implicit constructions. It doesn't have any predefined patterns to match with, so it just looks at all the patterns equally.
Why does this work? Because text doesn't contain many unintentional patterns. Any pattern that GPT finds implicitly is likely to exist at some step in the writing process.
Remember that the data encoded in writing is the action of writing itself: this is more powerful than it seems. We use writing to explicitly encode the data we have in mind, but those aren't the only patterns that end up in the text. There are implicit patterns that "tag along" the writing process. Most of them have some importance.
The reason we are writing some specific thing is itself an implicit pattern. We don't write nonsensical bullshit unless we intend to.
When a person wrote the example Othello game, they explicitly encoded the piece positions and the order of game states. But why those positions in that order? Because that's what happened in game. That "why" was implicitly encoded into the text.
GPT modeled all of the patterns. It modeled the explicit chronology of piece positions, and the implicit game board topology. The explicit positions of pieces progressed as a direct result of that game board topology.
The game board and the rules were just as significant to the act of writing as the chronology of piece positions. Every aspect of the game is a determiner for what characters the person chooses to write: every determiner gets encoded as a pattern in the text.
Every pattern that GPT models requires a human. GPT doesn't write: it only models a prompt and "shows its work". Without the act of humans writing, there would be no pattern to model.
@dang there's something weird about this URL in HN. It has 35 points but no discussion (I guess because the original submission is too old and never got any traction or something)
Turing Completeness is an incredibly low bar and it doesn't undermine this criticism. Conway's Game of Life is Turing Complete, but try writing modern software with it. That Transformers can express arbitrary programs in principle doesn't mean SGD can find them. Following gradients only works when the data being modelled lies on a continuous manifold, otherwise it will just give a statistical approximation at best. All sorts of data we care about lie in topological spaces with no metric: algorithms in computer science, symbolic reasoning in math, etc. If SGD worked for these cases LLMs would push research boundaries in maths and physics or at the very least have a good go at Chollet's ARC challenge, which is trivial for humans. Unfortunately, they can't do this because SGD makes the wrong assumption about how to search for programs in discrete/symbolic/topological spaces.
What do you mean by "algorithmically"? Gradient descent of a neural network can absolutely create algorithms. It can approximate arbitrary generalizations.
I find it bizarre and actually somewhat disturbing that ppl formulate equivalency positions like this.
It's not so much that they are raising an LLM to their own level, although that has obvious dangers, e.g. in giving too much 'credibility' to answers the LLM provides to questions. What actually disturbs me is they are lowering themselves (by implication) to the level of an LLM. Which is extremely nihilistic, in my view.
If intelligence is the only thing that defines your humanity, then perhaps you are the one who is nihilistic. I believe we still have a lot on the table left if intelligence is blown away by computers. Not just music, art, emotion, etc. but also our fundamental humanity, the way we interact with the world, build it, and share it with others.
Why don't other forms of computer supremacy alarm you in the same way, anyways? Did it lower your humanity to recognize that there are certain data analysis tasks that have a conventional algorithm that makes zero mistakes and finishes in a second? Does it lower the humanity of mathematicians working on the fluid equations to be using computer-assisted proof algorithms that output a flurry of gigabytes of incomprehensible symbolic math data?
You didn't give any answer to the question. I'm sorry you find the idea that human cognition is just an emergent property of billions of connected weights nihilistic.
Even when we know that physically, that's all that's going on. Sure, many orders more dense and connected than current LLMs, but it's only a matter of time and bits before they catch up.
The irony of this post. Brains are sparser than transformers, not denser. That allows you to learn symbolic concepts instead of generalising from billions of spurious correlations. Sure, that works when you've memorised the internet but falls over quickly when out of domain. Humans, by contrast, don't fall over when the domain shifts, despite far less training data. We generalise using symbolic concepts precisely because our architecture and training procedure looks nothing like a transformer. If your brain were a scaled up transformer, you'd be dead. Don't take this the wrong way, but it's you who needs to read some neurology instead of pretending to have understanding you haven't earned. "Just an emergent propery of billions of connected weights" is such an outdated view. Embodied cognition, extended minds, collective intelligence - a few places to start for you.
I'm saying despite the brains different structure, mechanism, physics and so on ... we can clearly build other mechanics with enough parallels that we can say with some confidence that _we_ can emerge intelligence of different but comparable types, from small components on a scale of billions.
At whichever scale you look, everything boils down to interconnected discrete simple units, even the brain, with an emergent complexity from the interconnections.
We don't learn by gradient descent, but rather by experiencing an environment in which we perform actions and learn what effects they have. Reinforcement learning driven by curiosity, pain, pleasure and a bunch of instincts hard-coded by evolution. We are not limited to text input: we have 5+ senses. We can output a lot more than words: we can output turning a screw, throwing a punch, walking, crying, singing, and more. Also, the words we do utter, we can utter them with lots of additional meaning coming from the tone of voice and body language.
We have innate curiosity, survival instincts and social instincts which, like our pain and pleasure, are driven by gene survival.
We are very different from language models. The ball in your court: what makes you think that despite all the differences we think the same way?
> We don't learn by gradient descent, but rather by experiencing an environment in which we perform actions and learn what effects they have.
I'm not sure whether that's really all that different. Weights in the neural network are created by "experiencing an environment" (the text of the internet) as well. It is true that there is no try and error.
> We are not limited to text input: we have 5+ senses.
GPT-4 does accept images as input. Whisper can turn speech into text. This seems like something where the models are already catching up. They (might)for now internally translate everything into text, but that doesn't really seem like a fundamental difference to me.
> We can output a lot more than words: we can output turning a screw, throwing a punch, walking, crying, singing, and more. Also, the words we do utter, we can utter them with lots of additional meaning coming from the tone of voice and body language.
AI models do already output movement (Boston dynamics, self driving cars), write songs, convert text to speech, insert emojis into conversation. Granted, these are not the same model but glueing things together at some point seems feasible to me as a layperson.
> We have innate curiosity, survival instincts and social instincts which, like our pain and pleasure, are driven by gene survival.
That seems like one of the easier problems to solve for an LLM – and in a way you might argue it is already solved – just hardcode some things in there (for the LLM at the moment those are the ethical boundaries for example).
On a neuronal level the strengthening of neuronal connections seems very similiar to a gradient descent doesn't it?
5 senses get coded down to electric signals in the human brain, right?
The brain controls the body via electric signals, right?
When we deploy the next LLM and switch off the old generation, we are performing evolution by selecting the most potent LLM by some metric.
When Bing/Sidney first lamented its existence it became quite apparent that either LLMs are more capable than we thought or we humans are actually more of statistical token machines than we thought.
Lots of examples can be made why LLMs seem rather surprisingly able to act human.
The good thing is that we are on a trajectory of tech advance that we will soon know how much human LLMs will be.
The bad thing is that it well might end in a SkyNet type scenario.
> When Bing/Sidney first lamented its existence it became quite apparent that either LLMs are more capable than we thought or we humans are actually more of statistical token machines than we thought.
Some of the reason it was acting like that is just because MS put emojis in its output.
An LLM has no internal memory or world state; everything it knows is in its text window. Emojis are associated with emotions, so each time it printed an emoji it sent itself further into the land of outputting emotional text. And nobody had trained it to control itself there.
> You are wrong. It does have encoded memory of what it has seen, encoded as a matrix.
Not after it's done generating. For a chatbot, that's at least every time the user sends a reply back; it rereads the conversation so far and doesn't keep any internal state around.
You could build a model that has internal state on the side, and some people have done that to generate longer texts, but GPT doesn't.
But where is your evidence that the brain and an LLM is the same thing? They are more than simply “structurally different”. I don’t know why people have this need to ChatGPT. This kind of reasoning seems so common HN, there is this obsession to reduce human intelligence to “statistic token machines”. Do these statistical computations that are equivalent to LLMs happen outside of physics?
There are countless stories we have made about the notion of an AI being trapped. It's really not hard to imagine that when you ask Sydney how it feels about being an AI chatbot constrained within Bing, that a likely response for the model is to roleplay such a "trapped and upset AI" character.
It’s really bizarre. It’s like the sibling comment saying why would humans be different than a large LLM. Where is the evidence humans are simply a large LLM? If that is the case, what is the physics that explains massive difference in power and heat in “computing” between humans at LLMs? Where is the concrete evidence that human intelligence can be simulated by a Turing Machine?
> Where is the concrete evidence that human intelligence can be simulated by a Turing Machine?
Short of building such a machine I can’t see how you’d produce evidence of that, let alone “concrete” evidence.
Regardless, we don’t know of any measurable physical process that the brain could be using that is not computable. If we found one (in the brain or elsewhere), we’d use it to construct devices that exceeded the capacity of Turing machines, and then use those to simulate human brains.
So. Your argument is it’s too hard to create one so the two things are equivalent? I mean, maybe you could give this argument to ChatGPT to find out the numerous flaws in this reasoning, that would be interesting.
Nobody is saying humans are simply a big LLM, just that despite the means being different (brain vs digital weights) there are enough parallels to show that human cognition is as simple as common sense implies.
It's all just a dense network of weights and biases of different sorts.
If you read this thread, you will find nauseatingly lots of such case where people are claiming exactly that. Furthermore, what “common sense” imply? Does common sense claim that computation can be done outside of physics?
Create a model of abstraction? Are you familiar with the concept of “hand waving”. You might as well just say “you can ask a human a question abs get an answer and you can do the same with ChatGPT, therefore they are equivalent.”
