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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

(addxorrol.blogspot.com)
475 points zdw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.225s | source
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szvsw ◴[] No.44484909[source]
So the author’s core view is ultimately a Searle-like view: a computational, functional, syntactic rules based system cannot reproduce a mind. Plenty of people will agree, plenty of people will disagree, and the answer is probably unknowable and just comes down to whatever axioms you subscribe to in re: consciousness.

The author largely takes the view that it is more productive for us to ignore any anthropomorphic representations and focus on the more concrete, material, technical systems - I’m with them there… but only to a point. The flip side of all this is of course the idea that there is still something emergent, unplanned, and mind-like. So even if it is a stochastic system following rules, clearly the rules are complex enough (to the tune of billions of operations, with signals propagating through some sort of resonant structure, if you take a more filter impulse response like view of a sequential matmuls) to result in emergent properties. Even if we (people interested in LLMs with at least some level of knowledge of ML mathematics and systems) “know better” than to believe these systems to possess morals, ethics, feelings, personalities, etc, the vast majority of people do not have any access to meaningful understanding of the mathematical, functional representation of an LLM and will not take that view, and for all intents and purposes the systems will at least seem to have those anthropomorphic properties, and so it seems like it is in fact useful to ask questions from that lens as well.

In other words, just as it’s useful to analyze and study these things as the purely technical systems they ultimately are, it is also, probably, useful to analyze them from the qualitative, ephemeral, experiential perspective that most people engage with them from, no?

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HeartStrings[dead post] ◴[] No.44487589[source]
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tomhow ◴[] No.44487882[source]
Please don't do this here. If a comment seems unfit for HN, please flag it and email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can have a look.
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1. szvsw ◴[] No.44513878[source]
Hey out of curiosity were there any issues with my top level comment? Seemed pretty innocuous, curious what the problem was. Feel free to email me if it’s better suited for discussion outside of post context.