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Comment by alex43578 | Hacker News Reader

Is anything you do on your own?

You wrote this response in English, but didn't invent your own language. How dilute of a contribution can someone/something have made and still merit credit?

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This argument is as old as the debate itself. No I didn't invent English. But you'd also not argue that way if you plagiarized somebody's homework and a teacher called you out on it. Point is that an LLMs output is perhaps closer to somebody's copied essay from English class rather than having invented a new language.

The tu quoque argument doesn't really work here. LLMs are specifically designed to output either material from their training set or instances that look statistically like it. Humans are not.

Sincere question: do we know enough about human intelligence to support that last assertion?

I think it is uncontentious that we are not designed at all. But to address the intended spirit of the question: are we restricted to output that is a close fit for our training set?

I would argue that we are not - because we do not have a rigid partition between training/test. Our ability to reason speculatively rests to some extent on ability to produce outputs that we have not seen before and which are statistically not like that which we have already seen. How we know which of these outputs to keep, and which to discard is (afaik) an open question.

But can we say that the LLMs are consciously designed? AFAIK nobody really understands why they work.

Whether they are or not is irrelevant to the difference- there is still an explicit division between training and inference, with reinforcement of the statistics of the training set.

We aren’t specifically designed for anything, perhaps outside of the necessary consequences of having our mental capabilities and existing in an evolutionary context, so we can reason about tigers or integers and can persuade others to like us and have sex and help with our kids.

But our material natures are such that we have a profound need for external training sets - we don’t develop linguistic abilities unless we are exposed to a lot of speech. We can’t hear or produce phonemes in general that we are not exposed to during the training years.

Literacy, libraries and printing are so powerful because they extend the lifetime and size of our training material; if we each had to invent culture from our individual powers and skills, we would be living worse than anyone for fifty thousand years has lived.

LOL. Tolkien invented multiple languages. There are/were probably 100 000 languages on this planet. That's without including dialects.

We use existing languages not because we love to copy, it's because languages are a medium for communication. They're only useful if they're understood by others.

If you wanted to prove a point: writing is much, much harder to invent, yet it was invented independently at least 3 times in history. By definition LLMs can't invent something truly novel like writing. Because nobody trained the first writers. There was no "training set".

It's fine, LLMs can still be useful. Science is looking at the gaps and most of the gaps that are useful are small and LLMs can explore those faster than us. That could potentially improve many lives. Though not in this corporate LLM world, most likely.

Are you saying your bar for being impressed by an LLM is something equivalent to the initial invention of writing?

LLMs can be quite impressive with much more mundane accomplishments.

The bar for what OpenAI, Anthropic, Google & co are trying to sell me, all of us, yes, for sure. Inventing writing is even too low a bar.

> your bar for being impressed by an LLM

Please don't move the goal posts. If you read my post again you will notice that I explicitly state that I'm impressed. This is not about whether somebody is impressed but about whether "it created its own Xyz" is a suitable description.

I don't think the invention of writing is as awe-inspiring as presented or as difficult/impossible for an LLM to achieve as is commonly believed. The invention of writing was a long series of micro-improvements over common every day things. Let's keep track of count by writing a line in the sand. Let's cut it into a tree. Let's push the line into clay. Let's use two lines touching. These are the kinds of things an LLM can also reason through and achieve.

I reject this idea that an LLM couldn't come up with something novel that isn't in the training data. We know it can come up with sentences that aren't in there. We know it can come up with mathematic proofs that aren't in there. So could it feasibly create something as fundamental as writing or language? Would we even be able to understand what it had done, or would it be so foreign to us that we wouldn't even realize?

Those early writers did have a training set of human knowledge that led them to pushing stones into clay. And our agents may very well have a set of knowledge that leads it to pushing their proverbial stone into their proverbial clay too.

It can come up with something novel, but only by combining whatever present, which can be granular enough to be completely different. But to truly nudge it, you need precise prompting and a good harness. But I’m more likely to credit those and the people creating them. As well as the data that goes in the training. I won’t praise Fable or Opus. It would be like praising the pencil or the hydraulic press.

I think the Turing Machine, the Von Neumann Architecture, …, Unix, …, The IBM PC,… as more awe-inspiring because those has truly helped humanity. I still can’t see the positives of LLM technologies.

> It can come up with something novel, but only by combining whatever present

That's what artists do. Long before LLMs, Kirby Ferguson made this observation in "Everything is a Remix" [1] in the context of Copyright and IP disputes. He has since updated it with a chapter explaining how GenAI works on the same principles. In short, "combining whatever present" is the only source of novelty.

[1]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

I remember a report a few years back that LLM's(?) started communicating between each other using an internal language, shortcutting most of their serialization. That is language.

> I remember a report a few years back

Do you remember the name of the study?

it's a super exaggeration of a minor thing that happened

https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/facebook-artifici...

1. Languages are used for much, much more than communication, and there is good reason to think that capacity didn't evolve for communication, but rather for metacognitive problem solving.

2. The idea that Tolkein --one of the most reknowned writers in our entire canon-- did something isn't relevant to the philosophical discussion of creativity and its obvious bounds. Even Tolkein was just painting within the lines set by the linguists he had read and the obscure languages he adored, not to mention the fundamental limits set by our capacity for language in the first place.

For anyone who's curious about this kind of thing, I cannot reccomend the infamous debate b/w Chomsky & Foucault enough; it ranges across topics a bit, but chapter markers should help you skip to the core of it (creativity) if you prefer. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 , some old summaries on /r/AskPhilosophy here: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/vgz1vb/what_...

I’m sorry but I find this to be the worst response possible lol.

Do you honestly not see how there is a difference between a computer regurgitating information vs a human uses what they’ve learned and applying it?

I just can’t take your argument seriously, it’s so disingenuous

One could argue that human learning is not all that different from machines training on data. We are all regurgitation our own experiences and knowledge to some degree. We certainly have things that machines don't, but LLMs can definitely come up with novel things that were not in the training data.

There are a number of bad arguments people can make by removing as much information as possible until the two things resemble each other. The ability to make a bad argument shouldn't be used as an inspiration for your own

> We are all regurgitation our own experiences and knowledge to some degree

Feel free to debase yourself but leave the rest of us out of it. This flagellation done by non-experts has to be the saddest part of the llm craze these past few years. The eager willingness to paint yourself as no more than a machine pointed at a problem is a sign of the times.

LLMs don't have experiences, they have training data + test time compute. The only similarities to be found require stripping away all nuance and meaning from a conversation. Refusing to seed purely biological concepts to machines, such as experiences or emotions, does not make LLMs less impressive or less useful. If anything, it makes them more interesting

Yeah when someone asks "how was your day?" I say "good" because thats the next token in the sequence

How we interact with society is based on our "training"

If you really view yourself this way, I truly pity you.

What's the alternative? Being deliberately "quirky" or difficult, just to buck societal norms? Society is a set of expectations about behaviors and mannerisms that functions as reinforcement learning.

Shocking that humans are able to exist and not know this is how they work. Or maybe they made up their own purely rational language and I, grounded in the millennia of human culture distilled down thru my childhood, no longer perceive these True Unique Individuals.

I will say on a personal note: that believing one is Special and Unique, for me, is the residual of my childhood belief that the abuse I suffered gave me something Unique and Special; that belief removed the horror of it from my awareness, till I grew up and learned how to cherish the warm connectedness that is the ordinary birthright of humans. We need each other: for language, thought, context and motivation. while we all expressing different gifts and views of reality, we are all in the same existential boat. Whether ideas are generated by rolling dice, an LLM, mishearing a colleagues statement, a walk around the grassy park while mulling things over, the key thing is recognizing the value of the argument for the importance it can have. Part of that recognition takes place in the human body/brain, as one recognizes that the idea is excitingly apropos to such and such a context, and part of it takes place in the group dynamic, sharing, resharing, and discussing the value of the new idea. An LLM showing creativity is no diss on humans, any more than accidentally poisoning a bacterial culture with fungus, nor mishearing something mundane as something profoundly useful.

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