Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by qudat 643 days ago
> I hate that the AI pundits have succeeded in popularizing the notion of "hallucination", anthropomorphizing these balls of statistics into something that seems like it's actually in some sort of deep thought process akin to a person's mind.

I'd argue the opposite: people think a person's mind is in "deep thought" when it's actually just a ball of statistics.
1 comments
whiplash451 643 days ago
Do you think that an LLM would spit out Latin and English if you trained it with homo sapiens mumbling?

Yet, humans managed to do that (albeit over many generations)

Ergo, humans are not just balls of statistics

link
fleshmonad 643 days ago
Not intended to be snarky, but what would you consider them? Is it akin to a function in the mathematical sense, that takes (sensory) input and creates output based on that? If so, how does this function work, if not by statistics? I am genuinely interested in your point of view. Also: Don't you think humans can be somewhat compared to a "pretrained model", as in human genetics gives the brain a head start, so that it can start speaking latin from what you deam "homo sapiens mumbling?
link
whiplash451 636 days ago
Not a specialist, but I think each individual is just a small step of gradient descent for the large neural network of humankind.

At our individual scale, we look like a rigid ball of statistics, but at the global scale, we carry a small amount of gradient/delta that pushes humankind in a broader direction.

LLMs have been able to reproduce the former, it is unclear how they can contribute to/replicate the latter.

link