←back to thread

A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

(addxorrol.blogspot.com)
477 points zdw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.325s | source
Show context
ants_everywhere ◴[] No.44485225[source]
> I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human.

This is such a bizarre take.

The relation associating each human to the list of all words they will ever say is obviously a function.

> almost magical human-like powers to something that - in my mind - is just MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities.

There's a rich family of universal approximation theorems [0]. Combining layers of linear maps with nonlinear cutoffs can intuitively approximate any nonlinear function in ways that can be made rigorous.

The reason LLMs are big now is that transformers and large amounts of data made it economical to compute a family of reasonably good approximations.

> The following is uncomfortably philosophical, but: In my worldview, humans are dramatically different things than a function . For hundreds of millions of years, nature generated new versions, and only a small number of these versions survived.

This is just a way of generating certain kinds of functions.

Think of it this way: do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics? If so that's essentially a religious position (or more literally, a belief in the supernatural). If not, then functions and approximations to functions are what the human experience boils down to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...

replies(5): >>44485574 #>>44486015 #>>44487960 #>>44488003 #>>44495590 #
LeifCarrotson ◴[] No.44485574[source]
> I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human.

You appear to be disagreeing with the author and others who suggest that there's some element of human consciousness that's beyond than what's observable from the outside, whether due to religion or philosophy or whatever, and suggesting that they just not do that.

In my experience, that's not a particularly effective tactic.

Rather, we can make progress by assuming their predicate: Sure, it's a room that translates Chinese into English without understanding, yes, it's a function that generates sequences of words that's not a human... but you and I are not "it" and it behaves rather an awful lot like a thing that understands Chinese or like a human using words. If we simply anthropomorphize the thing, acknowledging that this is technically incorrect, we can get a lot closer to predicting the behavior of the system and making effective use of it.

Conversely, when speaking with such a person about the nature of humans, we'll have to agree to dismiss the elements that are different from a function. The author says:

> In my worldview, humans are dramatically different things than a function... In contrast to an LLM, given a human and a sequence of words, I cannot begin putting a probability on "will this human generate this sequence".

Sure you can! If you address an American crowd of a certain age range with "We’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got. It doesn’t make a difference if..." I'd give a very high probability that someone will answer "... we make it or not". Maybe that human has a unique understanding of the nature of that particular piece of pop culture artwork, maybe it makes them feel things that an LLM cannot feel in a part of their consciousness that an LLM does not possess. But for the purposes of the question, we're merely concerned with whether a human or LLM will generate a particular sequence of words.

replies(2): >>44485835 #>>44487723 #
1. ants_everywhere ◴[] No.44485835[source]
I see your point, and I like that you're thinking about this from the perspective of how to win hearts and minds.

I agree my approach is unlikely to win over the author or other skeptics. But after years of seeing scientists waste time trying to debate creationists and climate deniers I've kind of given up on trying to convince the skeptics. So I was talking more to HN in general.

> You appear to be disagreeing with the author and others who suggest that there's some element of human consciousness that's beyond than what's observable from the outside

I'm not sure what it means to be observable or not from the outside. I think this is at least partially because I don't know what it means to be inside either. My point was just that whatever consciousness is, it takes place in the physical world and the laws of physics apply to it. I mean that to be as weak a claim as possible: I'm not taking any position on what consciousness is or how it works etc.

Searle's Chinese room argument attacks attacks a particular theory about the mind based essentially turing machines or digital computers. This theory was popular when I was in grad school for psychology. Among other things, people holding the view that Searle was attacking didn't believe that non-symbolic computers like neural networks could be intelligent or even learn language. I thought this was total nonsense, so I side with Searle in my opposition to it. I'm not sure how I feel about the Chinese room argument in particular, though. For one thing it entirely depends on what it means to "understand" something, and I'm skeptical that humans ever "understand" anything.

> If we simply anthropomorphize the thing, acknowledging that this is technically incorrect, we can get a lot closer to predicting the behavior of the system and making effective use of it.

I see what you're saying: that a technically incorrect assumption can bring to bear tools that improve our analysis. My nitpick here is I agree with OP that we shouldn't anthropomorphize LLMs, any more than we should anthropomorphize dogs or cats. But OP's arguments weren't actually about anthropomorphizing IMO, they were about things like functions that are more fundamental than humans. I think artificial intelligence will be non-human intelligence just like we have many examples of non-human intelligence in animals. No attribution of human characteristics needed.

> If we simply anthropomorphize the thing, acknowledging that this is technically incorrect, we can get a lot closer to predicting the behavior of the system and making effective use of it.

Yes I agree with you about your lyrics example. But again here I think OP is incorrect to focus on the token generation argument. We all agree human speech generates tokens. Hopefully we all agree that token generation is not completely predictable. Therefore it's by definition a randomized algorithm and it needs to take an RNG. So pointing out that it takes an RNG is not a valid criticism of LLMs.

Unless one is a super-determinist then there's randomness at the most basic level of physics. And you should expect that any physical process we don't understand well yet (like consciousness or speech) likely involves randomness. If one *is* a super-determinist then there is no randomness, even in LLMs and so the whole point is moot.