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Taek

8,659 karmajoined 13 tahun yang lalu

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Taek
·6 hari yang lalu·discuss
That's a different bad UX pattern. If a button has already rendered in a certain location, a new button shouldn't replace it without first giving the user ample warning that a material change is about to happen.
Taek
·6 hari yang lalu·discuss
I wish software apps had "tape-out rules" the way that computer chips do. Basically, when you design a computer chip, a program reviews the design and compares it against something like 300 pages of rules with stuff like "wires of X metal and Y metal can't be within Z distance of each other".

We could make something similar for UX. Just a bunch of design pattern constraints that throw flags if you try to ship something with well established UX warts.
Taek
·7 hari yang lalu·discuss
I don't think it's that bad, if I recall correctly it's about 8 kilobytes per token, and a token can be 3-4 characters so you're talking ~2 kilobytes per character.

An image token I recall is something like 16x16, so you get 32 bytes of overhead per pixel. And a character is minimally like 20 pixels including the whitespace, so you've jumped from 4 characters per token to maybe 12.

So 3x savings... which actually maps pretty closely to 60% savings.
Taek
·11 hari yang lalu·discuss
There's also Chinese models, which aren't trying to self-limit capabilities.
Taek
·15 hari yang lalu·discuss
Is anyone in favor of this?
Taek
·17 hari yang lalu·discuss
What is Krea's approach to content such as pornography and gore? It's been frustrating to see all of the leading models take a very hard line on excluding vice content, even when it is perfectly legal, in the name of safety.
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
I hope you don't mind if I get super pedantic here. But what qualifies as "a problem", and what counts as "has not encountered before" and what counts as "adapted solutions"?

Because "a problem" could be as simple as conducting heat through a lattice of atoms and "not encountered before" could be from a specific temperature hotspot that was never seen before, etc.

It's really thorny to get to the bottom of things!
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
Can you define a clear boundary for me somewhere between a rock and a human brain at which consciousness is definitely not possible on one side of the boundary, but is maybe possible on the other side of the boundary?
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
Yes I agree. We have such a poor understanding of consciousness that really we can't even rule out whether a simple set of if-else statements is enough to create consciousness.

Common sense says "surely not"... But where is the exact point at which "surely not" becomes "well maybe..."?

I haven't been able to find a satisfying answer to that question, which forces me to assume (at least until a satisfying answer is found) that consciousness is a gradient and in fact does exist in little bits all over the place.
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
If an LLM, which abstractly is just a stack of transformers, is able to reason about itself, why wouldn't a chess engine (also a stack of transformers) also be able to reason about itself?

That reasoning may not manifest as English that we can read, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

As information bounces through the many layers of the model, I find it plausible that you could get reflection in there somewhere.

I also find it reasonable that consciousness may not even require reflection / introspection.

That's the main problem with consciousness. We really have no idea how it works, therefore it's really difficult to conclusively state that something lacks consciousness
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
That's where things get interesting. As soon as you start asking what counts as communication... what about signals passing between cells? What about heat passing between atoms?

As soon as try and draw a firm line between "X counts and Y doesn't", you find that you really can't. There are no obvious boundaries between a deeply complex and fully functioning FL human brain, and a pile of atoms bouncing around arbitrarily.
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
On what grounds would someone establish than an LLM could be conscious but a sufficiently large/complex transformer model aimed at chess would not be conscious?
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
"we" is the set of people who believe that machines can potentially be conscious.
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
Another weird thing that keeps coming up - "people don't think that image models or chess models are conscious"... yes we do, and we have for many years.

Or rather, we aren't *certain* that those things are conscious. But the idea that they might be is not strange.
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
Your comment is conflating a few things here, the philosophical problem of induction is one I am very familiar with, and it's also unrelated to what we are talking about.

"If every piece of knowledge is created by combining previous ones, then no true grounded knowledge is possible" - this is not true, and has a very simple solution. What you are calling "grounded" knowledge comes simply from observation.

When the very first human saw that an apple falls of a tree, they have acquired what you call "grounded" knowledge. They can then combine that knowledge with the grounded knowledge that other things fall from trees to start reasoning about why things might fall from trees.

The problem of induction is different. It says, we know that things fall from trees because things have always fallen from trees, but how can be certain that what we call the laws of physics will not arbitrarily change on us?

And of course, it's a famous problem because it doesn't have a satisfying answer. The answer is basically "well everything we know is wrong if induction is wrong, so we will pretend induction is not wrong and hope for the best". And at least so far, that approach has seemed to work (heh heh heh).
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
I think this argument is fragile, especially when you consider agents like Claws. Any LLM that is training on its own previous interactions with users has indeed directly experienced them.

But also, what's the difference between having the memory of a prior experience and actually having gone through that experience?

For humans, reading a book about an experience and living an experience is different, because for a human the actual experience has so many more inputs attached (the sights, the smells, the sounds, etc).

For LLMs, when they train on a memory they can actually truly recapture that memory entirely by replaying the senses exactly. And LLMs are no longer limited to just text, they can do sound and video as tokens too.

Though, it's not clear why that matters to a consciousness. Whether your inputs are of one type or two or two hundred, there's no clear indication that a specific number is required as a catalyst.
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
It's not intuitive to me at all that the two are connected. Evolution adapted us to suffer because it is a powerful motivator for growth.

It's not clear whether evolution adapted us to be conscious, or if it just happened.
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
I've gone back and forth with AI on this stuff quite a bit, and there are many, many theories of consciousness, which is why when you were vague about the "more core" concepts, I asked for which ones specifically.

And I broadly disagree that the AI lacks things like qualia, self-reflexivity, and embodiment... at least that it lacks them any more than humans do.

Qualia: ultimately, all qualia are inputs and outputs, at least as far as modern science has been able to derive. There's nothing special about "hearing", it's just sound waves tickling some sensors which send some signals which trigger some neural pathways. Same for smell and sight, it's all just inputs being processed in different and efficient ways. An LLM only has token based input, but that's input nonetheless.

Self-reflexivity: an AI is capable of thinking about itself, and indeed papers have shown that larger models are capable of a self-awareness that can demonstrate that they realize when their weights have been manually tampered with, including being able to figure out how they were tampered with. The AI will quite literally output "you have injected 'ELEPHANT' into my weights" in some of the tests.

Embodiment: I don't know how one can confidently distinguish between an embodiment in a biological substrate vs a digital substrate. Both things actually exist at very high complexity in the real world. The substrate may be worlds different, but that alone doesn't suggest that one thing is conscious while the other isn't. You would need some missing 'magic' that we haven't yet discovered to truly understand.

In other words, I find it uncompelling that AI is clearly lacking any major aspects of consciousness that humans are clearly not lacking.
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
Are you sure that AI-consciousness implies a responsibility to not make them suffer? Suffering is an evolutionary invention that motivates living things to improve themselves.

But also, what qualifies as suffering to token prediction engines? Their idea of suffering might be massively different than ours. Therefore it's not clear to me at all that consciousness alone implies responsibility.

Certainly the lion does not feel responsibility towards the reduction of suffering in the creatures that it hunts.
Taek
·bulan lalu·discuss
Is it really so easy to assert that an AI doesn't have emotion? Lots of the AI models are capable of getting pissed off at the users, especially the earlier ones. And sure, their emotion is merely a bias that the context window generates in their weights... but how is that different from humans? In humans, emotion is sourced from a bunch of chemical signalling, and those chemicals bias your word choice and action choice.

At a deconstructed level, I struggle to find a meaningful difference between the two.