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Re:Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone by Intralexical on Friday September 06, 2024 @06:33AM (#41464784)
That's all they can do. They seem impressive at first because they're basically trained as an adversarial attack on the ways we express our own intelligence. But they fall apart quickly because they don't have actually have any of the internal state that allows our words to mean anything. They're a mask with nothing behind it.

Ctrl+F for "Central nervous system":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_cell_types

Choose any five wikilinks. Skim their distinct functions and pathologies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_in_the_human_b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_brain_network

Evolution's many things, but maybe most of all lazy. Human intelligence has dozens of distinct neuron types and at least hundreds of differentiated regions/neural subnetworks because we need all those parts in order to be both sentient and sapient. If you lesion parts of the human brain, you lose the associated functions, and eventually end up with what we'd call mental/neurological illnesses. Delusions, obsessions, solipsism, amorality, shakes, self-contradiction, aggression, manipulation, etc.

LLMs don't have any of those parts at all. They only have pattern-matching. They can only lie, because they don't have the sensory, object permanence, and memory faculties to conceive of an immutable external "truth"/reality. They can only be hypocritical, because they don't have the internal identity and introspective abilities to be able to have consistent values. They cannot apologize in substance, because they have neither the theory of mind and self-awareness to understand what they did wrong, the social motivation to care, nor the neuroplasticity to change and be better. They can only ever be manipulative, because they don't have emotions to express honestly. And I think it speaks to a not-atypical Silicon Valley arrogance to pretend that they can replicate "intelligence", without apparently ever considering a high-school-level philosophy or psychology course to understand what actually lets human intelligence tick.

At most they're mechanical psychopaths [1]. They might have some uses, but never outweighing the dangers for anything serious. Some of the individuals who think this technology is anything remotely close to "intelligent" have probably genuinely fallen for it. The rest, I suppose, see nothing wrong because they've created a tool in their own image…

[1]: I use this term loosely. "Psychopathy" is not a diagnosis in the DSM-V, but psychopathic traits are associated with multiple disorders that share similar characteristics.

Re:Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone by DoctorOetker on Friday September 06, 2024 @07:41AM (#41465215)
Wait for the first large scale LLM using source-aware training:

https://github.com/mukhal/intrinsic-source-citation

This is not something that can be LoRa finetuned after the pretraining step.

What we need is a human curated benchmark for different types of source-aware training, to allow competition, and an extra column in the most popular leaderboards, including it in the Average column, to incentivice AI companies to train in a source aware way, of course this will instantly invalidate the black-box-veil LLM companies love to hide behind so as not to credit original authors and content creators, they prefer regulators to believe such a thing can not be done.

In meantime such regulators are not thinking creatively and are clearly just looking for ways to tax AI companies, and in turn hiding behind copyright complications as an excuse to tax the flow of money wherever they smell it.

Source aware training also has the potential to decentralize search!

Re:Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone by Intralexical on Friday September 06, 2024 @08:25AM (#41465524)
Yeah. Treating these things as advanced, semantically aware search engines would actually be really cool.

But I find the anthropomorphization and "AGI" narrative really creepy and grifty. Such a waste that that's the direction it's going.

Re:Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone by fennecfoxy on Friday September 06, 2024 @09:28AM (#41466007)
This is just the start. Imagine giving up on progressing these models because they're not yet perfect (and probably never will be). Humans wouldn't accomplish anything at all this way, aha.

And I wouldn't say lazy at _all_. I would say efficient. Even evolutionary features that look "bad" on the surface can still make sense if you look at the wider system they're a part of. If our tailbone caused us problems, then we'd evolve it away, but instead we have a vestigial part that remains because there are no forces driving its removal.

Re:Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone by mdp2021 on Friday September 06, 2024 @11:02AM (#41466844)
> This is just the start

But the issue is with calling finished products what are laboratory partials. "Oh look, they invented a puppet" // "Oh, nice!" // "It's alive..."

Re:Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone by fennecfoxy on Monday September 09, 2024 @06:32AM (#41487115)
Oh yeah for sure, it's totally just more beta culture. But at the same time the first iPhone was called a "finished product" but it's missing a lot of what we would consider essential today.

In terms of people thinking LLMs are smarter than they really are, well...that's just people. Who hate each other for skin colour and sexuality, who believe that throwing salt over your shoulder wards away bad luck; we're still biological at the end of the day, we're not machines. Yet.

Re:Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone by amelius on Friday September 06, 2024 @07:26AM (#41465115)
> They can only lie

That is definitely not true.

Re:Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone by Intralexical on Friday September 06, 2024 @08:23AM (#41465507)
Lying is a state of mind. LLMs can output true statements, and they can even do so consistently for a range of inputs, but unlike a human there isn't a clear distinction in an LLM's internal state based on whether its statements are true or not. The output's truthfulness is incidental to its mode of operation, which is always the same, and certainly not itself truthful.

In the context of the comment chain I replied to, and the behaviour in question, any statement by an LLM pretending to be be capable of self-awareness/metacognition is also necessarily a lie. "I should be more careful", "I sincerely apologize", "I realize", "Thank you for bringing this to my attention", etc.

The problem is the anthropomorphization. Since it pretends to be like a person, if you ascribe intention to it then I think it is most accurately described as always lying. If you don't ascribe intention to it, then it's just a messy PRNG that aligns with reality an impressive amount of the time, and words like "lying" have no meaning. But again, it's presented and marketed as if it's a trustworthy sapient intelligence.

Re:Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone by mdp2021 on Friday September 06, 2024 @11:25AM (#41467027)
I am not sure that lying is structural to the whole system though: it seems that some parts may encode a world model, and that «the sensory, object permanence, and memory faculties» may not be crucial - surely we need a system that encodes a world model and that refines it, that reasons on it and assesses its details to develop it (I have been insisting on this for the past years also as the "look, there's something wrong here" reaction).

Some parts seemingly stopped at "output something plausible", but it does not seem theoretically impossible to direct the output towards "adhere to the truth", if a world model is there.

We would still need to implement the "reason on your world model and refine it" part, for the purpose of AGI - meanwhile, fixing the "impersonation" fumble ("probabilistic calculus say your interlocutor should offer stochastic condolences") would be a decent move. After a while with present chatbots it seems clear that "this is writing a fiction, not answering questions".