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I don't particularly care Hlynka, if this Thanos snapping managed to take both of us, you included, I'd consider it a net positive!
But I fail to see what the difficulty of Turing-testing random pseudonymous accounts on a text-based forum has anything to with it. Last time I checked, we're both operating according to the laws of physics and biology. Your analogy of how ML works is simply painful.
That's not really what his question is about.
I've never accused him of being concise and clear, or having a point.
Am I supposed to sob in horror at the idea of replacing humans with soulless automata instead? He doesn't provide any reason to think that humans or LLMs can't both be represented as the output of statistical processes occurring on computational substrates, even if said processes and substrates are very different.
As @ArjinFerman says, this isn't about "replacing humans with soulless automata" it's about replacing you in particular. I'm asking you whether you believe that the sum of your existence (your thoughts, feelings, memories, physical existence, output here on theMotte, etc...) is meaningfully distinct from that of an arbitrarily complex random number generator in any way?
If so, why do you believe that?
Ironically for how often I get accused of not understanding how machine learning works, I suspect that I have far more practical "hands-on" experience designing, implementing, and working with machine learning algorithms than most users here.
Sure, obviously. I can only assume that you think this is a valid description of ML/LLMs/AI, which it very much is not. If it's "randomness" that has you up and at it, then set the temperature of a model to 0 to get deterministic outputs. Problem solved?
I need no justification for such atomic preferences, I just have them, both in the incredibly stupid case you wish to make, and my vain attempts at steel-manning it in the scenario you're hand-waving at modern ML. LLMs do not capture the complexity of a human, nor do they have other aspects I care about, such as the fact that I'm not talking to a machine that will immediately flush everything out of memory as soon as it's done talking to me. Then again, I think that's a valid description of certain people on this forum, so who am I to judge?
I value my existence for its own sake, but if there's a human intelligence or smarter AI out there that is capable of remembering discussions and updating on them in the future, and capable of modifying future behavior on that basis, then I'm perfectly fine talking with it at length. Even GPT does update, but only slightly so as newer conservations enter the training data for the next one, but not in the same manner as a human.
If you mean a mind upload of myself running in-silico, and not a random LLM fine tuned on me, then yes, I would accept it as a valid replacement, given my conviction that it's very likely that in internally subjective terms it has the same qualia as I do. I would obviously prefer we both co-exist, at least until my flesh fails me, but I accord such an entity every right to use the SMH name to the same extent I do.
Here I was thinking I'm a human chauvinist, and now I'm pitying an ML model. Such insanity is hardly unheard of, I happen to have an uncle who is a professor in microbiology who swears by homeopathy.
I suppose it's a sign of how streamlined the process has become, when people so utterly divorced from the theoretical underpinnings of the technology are making a living off it.
Is it though? If it's obvious it should be trivial to either demonstrate or falsify, should it not?
Says the guy who thinks his ability to type a prompt into Bing makes him oh-so-clever. I would argue that it is my familiarity with the theoretical underpinnings of this technology that enable me to recognize both its utility and its limitations.
Ultimately what a regression-based machine learning algorithm (of which LLMs are a subset) is under the hood, is a random number generator rolling on a table like the one I linked above (Wtf are those goblins doing?). What's happening mechanically when you "train" a regression engine is that you are populating that table and assigning different statistical weights to the various outputs within it based on the prompt provided. EG replacing a 15% chance of 2d6 bandits in the random encounter table with a 30% chance of 3d3 goblins based on whether the
environmentvariable has been set tocityordungeon.While this sort of statistical processes can excel at associative tasks where the bounds of likely inputs and outputs are known in advance such as linguistic translation and ranking search results, it ends up being worse than useless for other more agentic tasks like pathfinding, and is only capable of "finding useful information" in so far as what is "useful" and what is "statistically probable" based on its training data are in alignment.
Dear reader, please don't let Hlynka distract you from the fact that a humble "Stochastic Parrot" did a better job of both understanding a complicated physics question from implied context and answering it correctly than he did.
The most utterly glaring error here is that you're flat out wrong about LLMs being a subset of regression-based ML algorithms. I will risk wasting the time of @curious_straight_ca and @DaseindustriesLtd here to back me up on that, even if a cursory search reveals that they're completely different things.
But Hlynka is of the opinion that Chihuahuas are good hunting dogs, so who's surprised at yet more abuse of truth or the meaning of language?
At any rate, such a combination of such utter confidence while being "not even wrong" levels of confused about things is unique, if not particularly charming.
Besides, maybe the error is on my part, translations to and from "Indian" can be fraught, am I right? It's entirely possible I've mistaken a very subtle and important argument for gish-galloping.
You can talk all the shit you want, but it will still just be talk.
You can yell at clouds all you like, but much like Shamans and their hexes, RCTs have shown that doesn't do much to help with rain ;)
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