[dvt]

> 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.

[Tossrock]

> 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.

[dvt]

> 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.

[Borealid]

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.

[8note]

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

[gopher_space]

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.

[handoflixue]

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.

[joquarky]

Repair manuals don't continue.

[Jensson]

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

[thrownthatway]

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?

[dvt]

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.

[joquarky]

> 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.

[thrownthatway]

What are talking about?

These are all provable, proven facts.

[joquarky]

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

[Borealid]

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.

[dvt]

> 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."

[WarmWash]

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.

[dvt]

> 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.

[WarmWash]

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.

[Jblx2]

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

[joquarky]

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).

[Jensson]

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.

[staticassertion]

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.

[pixl97]

What does an experience map to?

[staticassertion]

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.

[pixl97]

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.

[staticassertion]

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?

[codebje]

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.

[thrownthatway]

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…

[joquarky]

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

[CamperBob2]

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.

[codebje]

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?

[CamperBob2]

No.