It's like the infinite monkeys on typewrighters that will type whatever you are looking for, given infinite time. LLMs are just tuned to much better odds than the monkeys are. But it's still a lot of randomness, with random results.
In the monkey example the infinite time is doing a lot of work there. The fact that LLMs can search through semantic space and find reasonably correct paths in a reasonable time is directly tied to the reason why they are valuable.
Saying "these two things are similar except one can be useful and one can't" is not a great comparison.
For me the real lesson learned isn't how "smart" LLMs are, but rather how much human work is basically reducible to repeating past work with minor variation. Human's believe they are "reasoning" but so much code writen is just the human brain doing the same autocomplete style work that LLMs can do now.
You do have to successfully write something the first time
We already acknowledge this to a degree, what is experience other than having done something similar before?
That first time though, you've got to figure something out that time
That's the part they are really good at. But they are really bad at taking complex decisions. Most of them are just guesses from a finite amount of solutions they were trained on, or from options they have in context.
And nothing about this makes your initial comment any less goofy. Anyone who has ever had to make a difficult decision knows more than half the battle is preparation. Where do you think complex decisions come from? Have current events left you with the impression that people just waltz into idk say the Situation Room and just big brain their way through world events? That's how the current administration seems to think the world works, with quite predictable results.
Society is already algorithmic. To optimize for humans being dumb. AI is nothing more than another advance along this continuum. No one is impressed by your ability to remember something years ago, many if not most mammals have the same capability. Human recall is also notoriously bad in many cases - see numerous studies on the reliability of eye witnesses testimony.
AI is smart because most people are dumb. Come to terms with the fact that your anthropocentrism need not be based on a notion of intellectual supremacy and you'll be a far less tedious person to deal with.
This seems like a reasonable view to me. It's surprising just how much better priors matter and how we can develop those priors by training on a bunch of text. But it also explains, or at least hints at an explanation, for why LLM capabilities are so jagged, and in such inhuman ways.
Except it’s not at all the same process. The fact that LLM are non deterministic is not the same as churning out random garbage.
It’s training monkeys at typewriters through reinforcement.
So not random.
> acceptable outcome to humans
And not garbage.
It’s real weird to see people argue that LLM output is no different than random gibberish and then handwave over the fact that it’s clearly not with terms like “training”, as if a steam of random garbage is trainable.
I quite literally created and productized predictive linguistics and behavioral vectors at Google.
If you had stopped to consider what I explained; you’d understand that it’s the process of turning random garbage into increasingly acceptable outputs.
Ie training the monkeys.
The insight you are missing is the rule of networked scale. It turns out that any reactive node scaled enough can form sophisticated predictive system given reward over a training topography, even if it starts out at garbage or is literally made of monkeys.
So it is garbage. And you can turn garbage into semi-intelligence.
The act of successful training means it’s not garbage anymore.
> So it is garbage.
This statement is ultimately meaningless and I continue to find it weird that someone who works in this space would support this view. If you fundamentally change the nature of a thing, it’s no longer that original thing. Is tan HDD still random garbage after you fill it with family photos just because that’s how it starts?
You can start with garbage.
This is not human. Humans are billions of years in passed DNA learning. Babies are born to a sophistication level millions of times higher than this.
I’m pretty surprised you don’t know this.
I don’t believe that you can’t understand the distinction between “at one point this was garbage” and “at the present time this is still garbage”. You’re clearly smarter than that.
Launching a nuclear war is an interesting definition of "useful", not one I'd agree with and that exact scenario is what is being discussed.
So yes this is a perfectly valid and useful comparison in examining this particular, civilisation ending limitation.
So I can’t fully see how that’s related to the infinite monkeys. A typewriting monkey doesn’t have access to a verification function. And even if it did, it would not be the original concept anymore with infinite typewriting monkeys producing the works of Shakespeare.
Nevertheless, I upvoted your comment because it’s definitely insightful.
They train on a billion "jobs". Which is not terribly efficient but oh man they do train.
This fact is currently the most limiting factor for LLMs.
Agent reads a skill file about how to use a CLI tool. It tries to use the tool but gets an error about the input format. It tries again with a different format based on the error message, and sees that command succeeded. It compares what worked to what was in the skill file and notes the difference. On future invocations it continues to use the new format.
Is that not "understanding" how to use the tool?
That is really about as undesirable a behavior as possible considering how many programs humans kill every day.
I have not seen any evidence of intelligence or self awareness. It mimics human behavior and I suspect that is what gives people the impression of awareness. The same problem happened with Tamagotchi toys. The human mimicry caused kids to get in trouble because if they did not "feed" their pet it would "die". [1]
It's a hack of the human brain. A exploit of the psyche.
The thought experiment is what would happen if you trained LLMs in an environment where they had to fight each other for resources.
In so many of these scenarios, they're basically being asked to play an RPG.
The problem is many people seem to believe they have these things and some of those people will put LLMs into situations where this becomes dangerous.
The LLM weights are not intelligent. But if you give an agent a mutable memory store and allow it to iterate, it is obviously intelligent. Not massively - it's constrained by the context window - but definitely somewhat.
The confusing thing is that their language ability far outpaces their true intelligence, and humans aren't used to that. Normally those things are highly correlated, so it tricks us.
A robot body, to really feel the world and get real feedback?
We are working on it. Also on automating the whole production pipeline. Right now a "evil" LLM could indeed not do much, but destroy. But once the whole industry is automate, things are different. I don't believe in AI becoming sentinent and taking over the world any time soon, but I do believe most don't see a danger when it would be inconvenient to see a danger. After all, lots of good and bad sci fi stories about exactly this went into their training.
Humans are conscious which means we experience things, then we develop preferences for certain experiences, then we develop skills for achieving those preferences.
Without consciousness, what is there to be aware of? And why would intelligence emerge and/or what end would it serve?
Clearly other animals have "phenomenological experience" i.e. consciousness / qualia without being as intelligent as humans (or necessarily "self aware"). Many people believe consciousness is simply a side effect of intelligence rather than the other way around.
Eg we optimize for survival but without the ability to experience things, why survive?
Why would that instinct or any other preference for a course of action emerge?
But your body is just a robot suit for replicating nucleic acids and you can follow an unbroken chain of those chemical reactions all the way to the first microbes. Which were still "optimizing for survival" without any intelligence beyond following chemical gradients.
If you say that means even microbes have some amount of qualia then I can't dispute it. Pure physicalism may necessitate panpsychism of some form.
However, it makes more sense to me that consciousness precedes the will to survive. And that doesn't mean the way a microbe experiences life is the same as us. E.g. the fact that we have so much control over our environment might mean we have a much more sensitive and reactive way of engaging with consciousness, whereas maybe a microbe is like an enlightened monk, just chillin because it can't do much about what it experiences anyways.
Self awareness? Probably not. Intelligence? You would have to be high to think that’s not the case.
People are feeling threatened, and rightfully so. LLMs are already insanely intelligent and continue to improve
It’s just starting to be trained on svgs, which is a really hard problem
Vision tokens for transformers aren't really well solved yet, which is why they can smash a phd math problem and trip over a "count the cats on the chair" problem.
So, seeing?
No, it isn't. Look at the absolutely trivial code used to simulate war: https://github.com/kennethpayne01/project_kahn_public/blob/m...
Having LLMs play nonsense toy simulations like this tells us very, very little about whether they would use nukes in real life war.