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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   31635 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Ok, this reply finally moved the needle for me, and I'll shift my position from "LLMs are a neat statistical trick" to "Maybe LLMs use language to perform some form of 'thinking' in ways not entirely dissimilar from how language facilitates our own thinking."

To be clear, I think we still don't have a principled reason to believe that this paradigm – in this vanilla form, autoregressive LLMs pretrained on text – can carry us to human level or beyond. It might be the case that LeCun is right and LLMs on their own are an off-ramp. It might run into diminishing returns or totally plateau any moment now; just because better «understanding» allows to make better predictions and we reinforce the latter doesn't mean we can get infinitely much of the former, any more than we can incentivize a human to run barefoot at 100 mph.

But people who seriously bought into such skepticism got caught off-guard by GPT-3 already.

And I expect amazing innovations like adding a backspace to keep the pretraining thesis viable far beyond GPT-4. The number of papers that propose improvements is absolutely mind-boggling, nobody keeps up with building deployable tech on those insights. People who follow the literature see the outline of AI of the near future and it's pretty damn formidable, much more than the progress in public demos and products can suggest.

It may be that current LLMs are explaining how the "id" part of our brain works. The conscious parts may need some additional work to model.

So the access to memory, some hidden subconscious pattern-matching, automated activity, some hidden processes - that's very similar to what LLMs currently output.

I don’t know if anyone has had this experience before, but I’ve had times where my brain decided to make mouth sounds in a word/sentence-matching way that was eeriely like it was AI generated. Sometimes I would catch myself even mid-sentence and think wait that isn’t remotely close to what I’m actually thinking.

So it at least gets close to something that I’ve done in the past as a meatbag.

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