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Today's Large Language Models are Essentially BS Machines (quandyfactory.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

I believe I understand everything you are saying and why you are saying it. I think you are completely missing the point, though. LLMs already do quite a few things they were not designed to do. Also, your idea of sentience seems very limited. Yes, with our biological computers we have some degree of presence over "time", but is that critical - or is it just critical for us due to our limited faculties.

What if "the internet" developed some form of self-awareness - would we know? Our entire society could be subtly manipulated through carefully placed latency spikes, for example. I'm not saying this is happening, just that I think you are incredibly overconfident because you have an understanding of LLMs current lack of state etc.

If we added a direct feedback mechanism - realtime or otherwise - we could start seeing more compelling emergent properties develop. What about feedback and ability to self-modify?

These systems are processing information on a level we cannot even pretend to comprehend. How can you be so certain that a single training refinement couldn't result in some sort of spark - curiosity, desire to be introspective, whatever.

Perhaps Hofstadter is losing his mind - but I think we should at least consider the possibility that his concern is warranted. We are not special.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    LLMs already do quite a few things they were not designed to do.

    No; they do exactly what they were designed to do, which is convert words to vectors, do math with them, and convert it back again. That we've find more utility in this use does not change their design.

    What if “the internet” developed some form of self-awareness - would we know?

    Uh what? Like how would it? This is just technomystical garbage. Enough data in one place and enough CPU in one place doesn't magically make that place sentient. I love it as a book idea, but this is real life.

    What about feedback and ability to self-modify?

    This would be a significant design divergence from what LLMs are, so I'd call those things something different.

    But in any event that still would not actually give LLMs anything approaching: thoughts, feelings, or rationality. Or even the capability to understand what they were operating on. Again, they have none of those things and they aren't close to them. They are word completion algorithms.

    Humans are not word completion algorithms. We have an internal existence and thought process that LLMs do not have and will never have.

    Perhaps at some point we will have true artificial intelligence. But LLMs are not that, and they are not close.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    No; they do exactly what they were designed to do

    Are we arguing semantics here?

    https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/emergence https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.07682.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.15004.pdf

    I could be wrong, obviously, but I don't think this is as straightforward or settled as you are suggesting.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago

    Lol... come on. Your second source disagrees with your assertion:

    Via all three analyses, we provide evidence that alleged emergent abilities evaporate with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.

    You are wrong and it is quite settled. Read more, including the very sources you're trying to recommend others read.

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