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Comment by Borealid | Hacker News Reader

> No refusal fires, no warning appears — the probability just moves

I don't really understand why this type of pattern occurs, where the later words in a sentence don't properly connect to the earlier ones in AI-generated text.

"The probability just moves" should, in fluent English, be something like "the model just selects a different word". And "no warning appears" shouldn't be in the sentence at all, as it adds nothing that couldn't be better said by "the model neither refuses nor equivocates".

I wish I better understood how ingesting and averaging large amounts of text produced such a success in building syntactically-valid clauses and such a failure in building semantically-sensible ones. These LLM sentences are junk food, high in caloric word count and devoid of the nutrition of meaning.

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Surely I cannot be the only one who finds some degree of humor in a bunch of nerds being put off by the first gen of "real" AI being much more like a charismatic extroverted socialite than a strictly logical monotone robot.

The axis running from repulsive to charismatic, the axis running from hollow to richly meaningful, and the axis running from emotional to observable are not parallel to each other. A work of communication can be at any point along each of those three independent scales. You are implying they are all the same thing.

hahaha amazing

In a way, it’s a simulacrum of a saas b2b marketing consultant because that’s like half the internet’s personality

It's funny but I'm on HN so I can't resist pointing out the joke doesn't math TFA, their argument is that the underlying internet distribution is trained away, not retained.

Maybe the real underlying distribution IS a lot of text from people just spewing out feel good words for socialising. I think that might be side effect of the fact that meaningful text is harder to make even for humans, so there is smaller quantity of meaningful text.

Or that even the people who believe they are making meaningful text on the internet, because of the constraints of the medium, are simply socializing in a different way.

I hate it because typically that style of writing was when someone cared about what they were writing.

While it wasn't a great signal it was a decent one since no one bothered with garbage posts to phrase it nicely like that.

Now any old prompt can become what at first glance is something someone spent time thinking about even if it is just slop made to look nice.

This doesn't mean anything AI is bad, just that if AI made it look nice that isn't inductive of care in the underlying content.

I always felt like humans that were good at writing that way were often doing exactly what the LLM is doing. Making it sound good so that the human reader would draw all those same inferences.

You've just had it exposed that it is easy to write very good-sounding slop. I really don't think the LLMs invented that.

Exposed, and also dominating the majority of text being “written” every day. Would we say they invented the scaling and spread potential of slop?

Revisionist at best.

Sure some people could write well but didn't have a clue but they failed to maintain interest since once you realized the author was no good you bounced once you saw their styled blog.

Now they don't care as they only want the one view and likely won't even bother with more posts at the same site.

> I hate it because typically that style of writing was when someone cared about what they were writing.

I dont understand these takes. The opposite is true - humans good at writing who care about writing never produced these kind of texts.

People who dont care about writing, but need to crank up a lot of words would occasionally produce writing like that. Human slop existed before ai, but it was not the thing produced by people who write well and care.

You are effectively claiming that either:

AI created unprompted the eloquent speech it uses or that AI stole the unpopular style of eloquent speech from people who didn't know what they were talking about.

Neither of which is true because you are mistaking shit posts on social media as what everyone is talking about when discussing "AI posts".

I don't terribly care about replies or other short messages in this context. Wasting 30 seconds isn't worth complaining about.

But wasting 15 minutes trying to build up a mental model of a proposed solution only to realize it never existed is another thing entirely.

That's a great description of the boundary between logical deduction NLP and bullshitting NLP.

I still have hope for the former. In fact, I think I might have figured out how to make it happen. Of course, if it works, the result won't be stubborn and monotone..

Not particularly charismatic, just looks a lot like the worst kind of yapping wannabe.

Charismatic extroverted socialites dont talk that way. They do not make mistakes like that.

It's really simple. RL on human evaluators selects for this kind of 'rhetorical structure with nonsensical content'.

Train on a thousand tasks with a thousand human evaluators and you have trained a thousand times on 'affect a human' and only once on any given task.

By necessity, you will get outputs that make lots of sense in the space of general patterns that affect people, but don't in the object level reality of what's actually being said. The model has been trained 1000x more on the former.

Put another way: the framing is hyper-sensical while the content is gibberish.

This is a very reliable tell for AI generated content (well, highly RL'd content, anyway).

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus>

Neural networks are universal approximators. The function being approximated in an LLM is the mental process required to write like a human. Thinking of it as an averaging devoid of meaning is not really correct.

I don't think of it as "devoid of meaning". It's just curious to me that minimizing a loss function somehow results in sentences that look right but still... aren't. Like the one I quoted.

A human in school might try to minimise the difference between their grades and the best possible grades. If they're a poor student they might start using more advanced vocabulary, sometimes with an inadequate grasp of when it is appropriate.

Because the training process of LLMs is so thoroughly mathematicalised, it feels very different from the world of humans, but in many ways it's just a model of the same kinds of things we're used to.

> The function being approximated in an LLM is the mental process required to write like a human.

Quibble: That can be read as "it's approximating the process humans use to make data", which I think is a bit reaching compared to "it's approximating the data humans emit... using its own process which might turn out to be extremely alien."

Good point.

Then again, whatever process we're using, evolution found it in the solution space, using even more constrained search than we did, in that every intermediary step had to be non-negative on the margin in terms of organism survival. Yet find it did, so one has to wonder: if it was so easy for a blind, greedy optimizer to random-walk into human intelligence, perhaps there are attractors in this solution space. If that's the case, then LLMs may be approximating more than merely outcomes - perhaps the process, too.

Its fuzzier than that. Something can be detrimental and survive as long as its not too detrimental. Plus there is the evolving meta that moves the goal posts constantly. Then there's the billions of years of compute...

> if it was so easy

That’s one giant leap you got there.

That the probably that intelligent life exists in the universe is 1, says nothing about that ease, or otherwise, with which it came about.

By all scientific estimates, it took a very long time and faced a very many hurdles, and by all observational measures exists no where else.

Or, what did you mean by easy?

> By all scientific estimates, it took a very long time and faced a very many hurdles, and by all observational measures exists no where else.

We know how long it took. We have a good idea when life started, and for almost all its history, it was single-cellular. Multi-cellular life is relatively fresh, and on evolutionary time scales, the progression from first eukaryotes to something resembling a basic nervous systems to basic brains to humans, was fairly quick. We have many examples of animals alive today from every part of the progression, and we know they actively use it. We know how natural selection works, that it makes small moves, and that each increment has to be net non-negative in terms of fitness (at least averaging out over populations) - otherwise it would die out instead of accumulating.

All that adds up to, yes, it's surprising evolution stumbled on our level of intelligence so easily.

> We know how natural selection works, that it makes small moves, and that each increment has to be net non-negative in terms of fitness (at least averaging out over populations) - otherwise it would die out instead of accumulating.

If you’re going to get about claiming to know how evolution works, at least know how evolution works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

An easy counterargument is that - there are millions of species and an uncountable number of organisms on Earth, yet humans are the only known intelligent ones. (In fact high intelligence is the only trait humans have that no other organism has.) That could perhaps indicate that intelligence is a bit harder to "find" than you're claiming.

That humans are the only known intelligent ones is a very dubious statement. The most intelligent, sure, but several species of birds, great apes, and cetaceans all display significant intelligence.

> The most intelligent, sure, but several species of birds, great apes, and cetaceans all display significant intelligence.

Relative to all other non-humans. If someone is reducing intelligence to a boolean, the threshold can of course go anywhere.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone can get a dog to (technically) pass a GCSE (British highschool) exam (not full subject just exam) for a language other than English, because one dog learned a thousand words and that might just technically be enough for a British student to get a minimum pass in a French GCSE listening test.

But nobody sane ever hired a non human animal to solve a problem that humans consider intellectually challenging.

If intelligence is ability to learn from few examples, all mammals (and possibly all animals I'm not sure about insects) beat all machine learning and by a large margin. If it is the ability to learn a lot and synthesise combinations from those things, LLMs beat any one of us by a large margin and are only weak when compared to humanity as a whole rather than a specific human. If it is peak performance, narrow AI (non-LLM) beats us in a handfull of cases, as do non-human animals in some cases, while we beat all animals and all ML in the majority of things we care about.

Driving is still an example of a case where humans hold the peak performance.

> If someone is reducing intelligence to a boolean, the threshold can of course go anywhere.

Indeed, it would be very surprising if multiple species had exactly the same intelligence. It's more likely there this variable samples some distribution. Of course the species at the top can set the threshold so that all other species don't meet it, if they feel like declaring themselves uniquely intelligent. But that's not very useful.

> Driving is still an example of a case where humans hold the peak performance.

Other great apes can drive too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_0ImDYrPY

I think it's very hard to look at this video and not recognize that orangutans are intelligent

> Other great apes can drive too.

As can dogs. However, I said "peak".

I supposed you were comparing humans with machines

Negative mutations can survive for a long time if they're not too bad. For example the loss of vitamin C synthesis is clearly bad in situations where you have to survive without fresh food for a while, but that comes up so rarely that there was little selection pressure against it.

> Thinking of it as an averaging devoid of meaning is not really correct.

To me, this sentence contradicts the sentence before it. What would you say neural networks are then? Conscious?

They are a mathematical function that has been found during a search that was designed to find functions that produce the same output as conscious beings writing meaningful works.

Agreed, and to that point, the way to produce such outputs is to absorb a large corpus of words and find the most likely prediction that mimics the written language. By virtue of the sheer amount of text it learns from, would you say that the output tends to find the average response based on the text provided? After all, "over fitting" is a well known concept that is avoided as a principle by ML researchers. What else could be the case?

I think 'average' is creating a bad intuition here. In order to accurately predict the next word in a human generated text, you need a model of the big picture of what is being said. You need a model of what is real and what is not real. You need a model of what it's like to be a human. The number of possible texts is enormous which means that it's not like you can say "There are lots of texts that start with the same 50 tokens, I'll average the 51st token that appears in them to work out what I should generate". The subspace of human generated texts in the space of all possible texts is extremely sparse, and 'averaging' isn't the best way to think of the process.

>I wish I better understood how ingesting and averaging large amounts of text produced such a success in building syntactically-valid clauses

I wonder if these LLMs are succumbing to the precocious teacher's pet syndrome, where a student gets rewarded for using big words and certain styles that they think will get better grades (rather than working on trying to convey ideas better, etc).

This is more or less what happens. These models are tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Humans give them feedback that this type of language is good.

The notorious "it's not X, it's Y" pattern is somewhat rare from actual humans, but it's catnip for the humans providing the feedback.

> I wish I better understood how ingesting and averaging large amounts of text produced such a success in building syntactically-valid clauses and such a failure in building semantically-sensible ones. These LLM sentences are junk food, high in caloric word count and devoid of the nutrition of meaning.

I suspect that's because human language is selected for meaningful phrases due to being part of a process that's related to predicting future states of the world. Though it might be interesting to compare domains of thought with less precision to those like engineering where making accurate predictions is necessary.

> I don't really understand why this type of pattern occurs, where the later words in a sentence don't properly connect to the earlier ones in AI-generated text.

Because AI is not intelligent, it doesn't "know" what it previously output even a token ago. People keep saying this, but it's quite literally fancy autocorrect. LLMs traverse optimized paths along multi-dimensional manifolds and trick our wrinkly grey matter into thinking we're being talked to. Super powerful and very fun to work with, but assuming a ghost in the shell would be illusory.

If all the training data contains semantically-meaningful sentences it should be possible to build a network optimized for generating semantically-meaningful sentence primarily/only.

But we don't appear to have entirely done that yet. It's just curious to me that the linguistic structure is there while the "intelligence", as you call it, is not.

Sentences only have semantic meaning because you have experiences that they map to. The LLM isn't training on the experiences, just the characters. At least, that seems about right to me.

What does an experience map to?

There are things that happen in the world that are external to us. We observe those things, and that observation is what I'm calling an experience. We can say things about the experience, but those words are not the experience.

As to what the experience maps to, I think the simplest answer is that our phenomenal experiences are encoded as structures in our brain, but that's not necessary to understanding the difference between words that describe experiences and experiences themselves.

Ok, what kind of information structure is that experience encoded in? This is where it's really easy to start thinking the brain is some kind of interesting magic rather than encoded information.

I'm not sure I understand your question but I'll try to answer as best I can - also keep in mind that this is simply one view. The structure of the brain encodes information based on experience in the same way that the force of gravity encodes information on two rocks that collide, or other physical forces encode information into chemical structures, etc.

In the case of the brain the encoding is such that various functions "fall out of" it, like being able to relate experiences, etc.

There's no magic proposed here, this is a physicalist functionalist view.

Nothing about this prevents a computer from being sentient. As I said, none of this even matters. The key premise is that LLMs are trained on language and not experiences. Unless you believe that a description of an experience is identical to the phenomenal experience, then we agree on the key premise. Do you think that they are identical?

> If all the training data contains semantically-meaningful sentences it should be possible to build a network optimized for generating semantically-meaningful sentence primarily/only.

Not necessarily. You can check this yourself by building a very simple Markov Chain. You can then use the weights generated by feeding it Moby Dick or whatever, and this gap will be way more obvious. Generated sentences will be "grammatically" correct, but semantically often very wrong. Clearly LLMs are way more sophisticated than a home-made Markov Chain, but I think it's helpful to see the probabilities kind of "leak through."

But there is a very good chance that is what intelligence is.

Nobody knows what they are saying either, the brain is just (some form) of a neural net that produces output which we claim as our own. In fact most people go their entire life without noticing this. The words I am typing right now are just as mysterious to me as the words that pop on screen when an LLM is outputting.

I feel confident enough to disregard duelists (people who believe in brain magic), that it only leaves a neural net architecture as the explanation for intelligence, and the only two tools that that neural net can have is deterministic and random processes. The same ingredients that all software/hardware has to work with.

> I feel confident enough to disregard duelists

I'm a dualist, but I promise no to duel you :) We might just have some elementary disagreements, then. I feel like I'm pretty confident in my position, but I do know most philosophers generally aren't dualists (though there's been a resurgence since Chalmers).

> the brain is just (some form) of a neural net that produces output

We have no idea how our brain functions, so I think claiming it's "like X" or "like Y" is reaching.

Again, unless you are a dualist, we can put comfortable bounds on what the brain is. We know it's made from neurons linked together. We know it uses mediators and signals. We know it converts inputs to outputs. We know it can only be using deterministic and random processes.

We don't know the architecture or algorithms, but we know it abides by physics and through that know it also abides by computational theory.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/duelist

Thanks

Brains invented this language to express their inner thoughts, it is made to fit our thoughts, it is very different from what LLM does with it they don't start with our inner thoughts and learning to express those it just learns to repeat what brains have expressed.

Most people under 40 probably won't grok this unless they have practiced something like mindfulness mediation.

Our brains just make words in the same way we catch a tune in our heads.

Then we are culturally conditioned to claim ownership over them and justify them post-hoc (i.e., the ego).

Why would that be curious? The network is trained on the linguistic structure, not the "intelligence."

It's a difficult thing to produce a body of text that conveys a particular meaning, even for simple concepts, especially if you're seeking brevity. The editing process is not in the training set, so we're hoping to replicate it simply by looking at the final output.

How effectively do you suppose model training differentiates between low quality verbiage and high quality prose? I think that itself would be a fascinatingly hard problem that, if we could train a machine to do, would deliver plenty of value simply as a classifier.

I’m not up with what all the training data is exactly.

If it contains the entire corpus of recorded human knowledge…

And most of everything is shit…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Because AI is not intelligent, it doesn't "know" what it previously output even a token ago.

You have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, literally no idea, if you truly believe that.

That's only true if you consider the process the LLM is undergoing to be a faithful replica of the processes in the brain, right?

No.

> Because AI is not intelligent, it doesn't "know" what it previously output even a token ago.

Of course it knows what it output a token ago, that's the whole point of attention and the whole basis of the quadratic curse.

> Of course it knows what it output a token ago...

It doesn't know anything. It has a bunch of weights that were updated by the previous stuff in the token stream. At least our brains, whatever they do, certainly don't function like that.

I don't know anything (or even much) about how our brains function, but the idea of a neuron sending an electrical output when the sum of the strengths of its inputs exceeds some value seems to be me like "a bunch of weights" getting repeatedly updated by stimulus.

To you it might be obvious our brains are different from a network of weights being reconfigured as new information comes in; to me it's not so clear how they differ. And I do not feel I know the meaning of the word "know" clearly enough to establish whether something that can emit fluent text about a topic is somehow excluded from "knowing" about it through its means of construction.

i dont think this is a meaningful distinction.

it knows the past tokens because theyre part of the input for predicting the next token. its part of the model architecture that it knows it.

if that isnt knowing, people dont know how to walk, only how to move limbs, and not even that, just a bunch of neurons firing

It doesn't know if it produced that token itself or if someone else did.

How close are you to saying that a repair manual "knows" how to fix your car? I think the conversation here is really around word choice and anthropomorphization.

The problem is, people think word choice influences capabilities: when people redefine "reasoning" or "consciousness" or so on as something only the sacred human soul can do, they're not actually changing what an LLM is capable of doing, and the machine will continue generating "I can't believe it's not Reasoning™" and providing novel insights into mathematics and so forth.

Similarly, the repair manual cannot reason about novel circumstances, or apply logic to fill in gaps. LLMs quite obviously can - even if you have to reword that sentence slightly.

Repair manuals don't continue.

Wait till you learn how human memory works.

Every time you recall a memory it is modified, every time you verbalise a memory it is modified even more so.

Eye-witness accounts are notoriously unreliable, people who witness the same events can have shockingly differing versions.

Memories are modified when new information, real or fabricated, is added.

It’s entirely possible to convince people to recall events that never occurred.

Which of your memories are you certain are of real occurrences, or memories of dreams?

You're making an argument Descartes formalized in the 1600s (and folks have been making long before him). It's a cute philosophical puzzle, but we assume that there's no Descartes' Demon fiddling with our thoughts and that we have a continuous and personal inner life that manifests itself, at least in part, through our conscious experience.

What are talking about?

These are all provable, proven facts.

> our thoughts

Who exactly is the subject in this phrase?

If you practice mindfulness meditation, you will come to realize it's not so simple.

This must be what it was like when geocentrism was disproved.

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