[Jack000]

There’s too much focus on AGI.

Language models do not emulate human minds - they are models of language. The emergent behavior from these models are only a side effect of their main training task, which is to build a model of all meaningful sequences of words. We then use RFHL to bias the model toward a small area of the language latent space which conforms to our idea of intelligent behavior.

Humans (a GI) have zero ability to do language modeling. Human equivalent AGI would similarly fail at this task.

The technology behind language models is more important than general intelligence - it is a universal induction engine that can model (and truly understand) the latent structure of any signal.

[srslack]

Wow, this is refreshing. To your point - the underpinning technology (regression based function approximation) holds more importance than general and adaptable intelligence. It holds more importance than something that is going to, or is capable of, "escaping the box and killing us all."

"Emergent behavior", when it's not just a mirage or poor word choice of wishful researchers (that it does things previous models did not do, iirc, very poor word choice - https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004) and if it even could exist, is only a side effect of the regression based function approximation to generate a structure that encapsulates all substantive chains of words in this case (a model).

I understand, to an extent, why people have lost their minds around this topic. Anthropomorphism is one hell of a drug for humans. But we're getting a bit too detached from fundamentals when we're arguing for regulation and restriction of this important technology.

The result is a model. A specialized intelligence. A non-adaptable intelligence, outside of its corpus. Outside of the data that it "fits." An approximated function, a human language calculator. It can't translate whale song, or an extraterrestrial language, though it may opine on how to do so.

To say nothing of other applications of the underpinning technology, as well.

It's exciting that it exists, but disappointing for potential restrictions of the underlying because of the tendency to anthropomorphize.

[TeMPOraL]

> Humans (a GI) have zero ability to do language modeling.

But perhaps they have a component that has this ability.

I maintain that LLMs are best compared not to the entire human mind/intelligence, but rather to the "inner voice" - that bit that sits between conscious and unconscious, having a part on each site, and uses natural language as an interface to the conscious side.

I.e. imagine someone hooked up electrodes to your brain and was able to eavesdrop on the thoughts that you consciously notice, and which are expressed in natural language. If they had the device print those thoughts out as it "hears" them, I think the output - and changes to it in response to what's going on in and around you - would quite resemble the way LLMs respond to prompts.

[luckydata]

I think LLMs do emulate human minds, there's too much similarity of emergent behaviors and quirks for that not being the case, they just don't emulate everything our brains do. We have other systems that take the results of our LLM-like circuits and do filtering and symbolic processing on top of it, and those are the parts we're missing to get to AGI.

I don't think it's necessarily going to be trivial to get there either.

[neatze]

> zero ability to do language modeling

If I am reading this correctly; then who invented/discovered attention networks ?

[Jack000]

Humans use language for communicating ideas, which is very different from language modeling. Here's some discussion on this topic: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/htrZrxduciZ5QaCjw/langu...

I would add that the above comparison is misleading, because humans have a massive advantage in that they have prior knowledge of what words mean. A more apples-to-apples comparison would have the human do next word prediction on a language they don't know.

This would be akin to me giving you a few GBs of Chinese text, with no grounding or translation, then try to communicate with you in Chinese after you've read the whole thing.

[srslack]

The human being, who instructed the computer to use it to do the language modeling? What does attention have to do, exclusively, with language modeling?