I work in this field & it almost pains me to see it come into the mainstream and see all of the terrible takes that pundits can contort this into, ie. LLM as a "lossy jpeg of the internet" (bad, but honestly one of the better ones).
I think most laypeople understand the simple statement, "it's a parrot."
I had the original author of this paper reach out to me about my plagiarism video on Mastodon:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
The idea of a lossy JPEG/Parrot helps capture the idea that there are dangers and opportunities in LLM's. You can have fake or doctored images spread, you can have a Parrot swear at someone and cause un-needed conflict - but they can also be great tools and/or cute and helpful companions, as long as we understand their limitations.
This is what the "lossy compression" and "stochastic parrot" layperson models do not capture. Nonetheless, people will lap them up. They want a more comfortable understanding that lets them avoid having to question their pseudo-belief in souls and the duality of mind and body. Few in the public seem to want to confront the idea of the mind as an emergent phenomenon from interactions of neurons in the brain.
It is not simply regurgitating training data like everyone seems to want it to.
I understand that HN is a civil community. I don't think it is crossing the line to characterize people I disagree with as wrong and also theorize on why they might hold those wrong beliefs. Indeed, you are doing the same thing with my comment - speculating on why I might hold views that are 'asinine' because I see 'nothing but [my] own biases.'
When I do the "same thing" I'm really saying that when you represent yourself as from the field, you might want to cultivate a more nuanced view of the people outside the field, if you want to be taken seriously.
Instead, given the view you presented, I'm forced to give your views the same credence I give a physicist who says their model of quantum gravity is definitely the correct one. I.e: "sure, you'd say that, wouldn't you"
Most people believe in souls. Most people do not believe in minds as emergent out of interactions of neurons. I am not sure how to cultivate a more nuanced view on this when flat majorities of people say when asked that they hold the belief I am imputing on them.
Am I saying that this is where all skepticism comes from? No. Is it a considerable portion? Yes.
No one who has used chatGPT more than a couple of times will argue in good faith that it is a "parrot", however, unless they have an extremely weird definition of "parrot".
I can easily falsify the accusation that, "people underestimate transformers and don't see that they are actually intelligent," by defeating the best open-source transformer-based word embedding (at the time) with a simple TF-DF based detector (this was back in September).
https://www.patdel.com/plagiarism-detector/
No, these things are not, "emergent," they are just rearranging numbers. You don't have to use a transformer or neural network at all to re-arrange numbers and create something that is even more, "artificially intelligent," than one that does use transformers it turns out!
This is a bad take. Most ways to "rearrange numbers" produce noise. That there is a very small subset of permutations that produce meaningful content, and the system consistently produces such permutations, is a substantial result. The question of novelty is whether these particular permutations have been seen before, or perhaps are simple interpolations of what has been seen before. I think its pretty obvious the space of possible meaningful permutations is much larger than what is present in the training set. The question of novelty then is whether the model can produce meaningful output (i.e. grammatically correct, sensible, plausible) in a space that far outpaces what was present in the training corpus. I strongly suspect the answer is yes, but this is ultimately an empirical question.
> I can easily falsify the accusation that, "people underestimate transformers and don't see that they are actually intelligent,"
I think that you have an idiosyncratic definition of what "falsify" means compared to what most might. Getting away from messy definitions of "intelligent" which I think are value-laden, I see nothing in your blog post that falsifies the notion that LLMs can generate novel content (another fuzzy value-laden notion perhaps).
> these things are not, "emergent," they are just rearranging numbers.
It seems non-obvious to me that 'rearranging numbers' cannot lead to anything emergent out of that process, yet cascading voltage (as in our brain) can.
Please substantiate this assertion. People always just state it as a fact without producing an argument for it.
Our minds are emergent out of the interaction of billions of neurons in our brain. Each is individually pretty dumb, just taking in voltage and outputting voltage (to somewhat oversimplify). Out of that simple interaction & under the pressures of evolutionary optimization, we have reached a more emergent whole.
Linear transformations stacked with non-linearities can similarly create an individually dumb input and output that under the pressure of optimization lead to a more emergent whole. If there is a reason why this has to be tied to voltage regulating neuron substrate, I have yet to see a compelling one.
At least "lossy JPEG" feels vague enough to be unfalsifiable.