[HN Gopher] A Philosophical Introduction to Language Models
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A Philosophical Introduction to Language Models
Author : sebg
Score : 39 points
Date : 2024-01-11 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| gumballindie wrote:
| The main philosophical question in my mind is when did we allow
| people redefine reality and when did the post truth society
| become the norm. There should be no debate over sentient
| software, yet here we are. This is the result of taking people
| seriously when we shouldn't.
| boredemployee wrote:
| Sorry if I'm straying from the topic, and I understand that we
| are technological beings and want to develop more and more.
|
| But I keep thinking about how much we've lost control in all
| this. The fact that we need to spend rivers of money on energy
| and GPUs for LLMs, to automate our super boring daily tasks
| (which didn't even need to exist in the first place) says a lot
| about our dysfunctionality. I would trade all this
| paraphernalia we created for the freedom to have my small farm,
| grow my own food, and be happy with my family and friends, too
| bad that this is a very, very distant dream.
| johngossman wrote:
| First, you can do this (if you have the appropriate skills).
| I know people who grew up off the grid, cabins built by the
| family, well water, outhouses, no electricity. There are
| whole Amish communities and communes if you want to still be
| around people. However, a lot of this nostalgia for a pre-
| technological time ignores the realities of a world without
| antibiotics, painkillers, modern dentistry, indoor plumbing,
| hot showers. It ignores infant mortality and women regularly
| dying in childbirth. In the modern world you can still choose
| to live off the grid while taking advantage of most of these
| things, but not if everyone does.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > for the freedom to have my small farm, grow my own food,
| and be happy with my family and friends, too bad that this is
| a very, very distant dream
|
| Every now and then I bump into people on HN that have seen
| the light.
|
| Well let me tell you it's all doable. The tiny bubble of
| people that live in a non existant alternative reality is
| just that, a tiny bubble.
|
| I managed to escape all this nonesense, first mentally, then
| financially, and buy a little house where I can grow my own
| food - for hobby, I have plant pots in my house growing
| tomatoes and spring onions, doesn't work but I am learning -
| and be happy with family and friends.
|
| Naturally I have a very nice tech room with all the cool
| stuff. I am not rich, but I am free. Fun thing is you don't
| need to completely erase the paraphernalia. The two things
| are not mutually exclusive. All you need to do is have a
| clear mental separation of the two (tech bubble and reality)
| and compartmentalize the sane from the insane - an easy thing
| to achieve when you surround yourself with down to earth
| people that don't run around scared of an LLM and don't
| regurgitate what a marketing campaign programmed them to do.
| Those people are the matrix drones that don't want to be
| saved, and in their mind it's all or nothing - hermit or tech
| slave. Most normal people are watching in awe how the tech
| industry turns itself into the subject of ridicule.
|
| To be fair if you live in the US it's probably easier to
| achieve what you want. For the money I paid for a little box
| in the UK i'd have been able to buy a mansion there.
| jonmc12 wrote:
| The Enlightenment produced free speech and reasoning. Nietzsche
| said, "god is dead," but a lot of people said it before and
| after - because reasoning could not fill in the gap of a shared
| reality. Harari's Sapiens gives a good history; Hoffman's claim
| that "natural selection does not favor veridical perception"
| says you're pretty confused about what is actually going on wrt
| "truth"; Seth's "Being You" might help to understand what
| conscious beings are actually trying to do in relation "truth"
| and survival.
| gumballindie wrote:
| "So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so
| incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship."
| said Dostoevsky. In this case, it would appear that some
| people desperatly want to worship software, and are
| assaulting society with their new religion. Let's stop at
| Nietzsche. Everything else is a waste of electrons.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| > There should be no debate over sentient software
|
| I honestly don't know if you are implying its obvious software
| _can't_ be sentient, or its obvious software _can_ be sentient.
| The fact that I can't tell which you mean proves that there is
| and should continue to be a debate over sentient machines.
| visarga wrote:
| This is the "Anti Stochastic Parrot" paper. I am happy to finally
| read a philosophical paper on LLMs.
|
| I just have a small quip.
|
| > While LLMs show promise in various forms of task
| generalization, their participation in the ratcheting process of
| cultural learning thus appears contingent on further advancements
| in these areas, which might lie beyond the reach of current
| architectures.
|
| I don't think cultural transmission with LLMs is that incipient.
|
| Evolution through Large Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08896
|
| We have seen papers where LLMs are used as "search heads" or
| "mutation operators" in evolutionary methods. They can rely on
| their language proficiency to explore the most promising leads,
| spanning a vast combinatorial space.
|
| And another example of "cultural transmission": GPT-4 has its
| paws all over Mistral and LLaMA finetunes. Plenty of cultural
| transmission between big and small LLMs. Not to mention Phi, a
| model trained purely on synthetic GPT-4 data. Synthetic data has
| been estimated to be 5x more efficient than human data, you can
| make a model 1/5 size with similar performance.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| > Synthetic data has been estimated to be 5x more efficient
| than human data, you can make a model 1/5 size with similar
| performance.
|
| Interesting. Can you cite anything to back up that claim?
| visarga wrote:
| Yes.
|
| > We follow the "Textbooks Are All You Need" approach,
| focusing this time on common sense reasoning in natural
| language, and create a new 1.3 billion parameter model named
| phi-1.5, with performance on natural language tasks
| comparable to models 5x larger, and surpassing most non-
| frontier LLMs on more complex reasoning tasks such as grade-
| school mathematics and basic coding.
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.05463.pdf
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Thanks!
| ignoramous wrote:
| See also Self-Play Fine-Tuning (SPIN)
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01335 that (per authors) tunes as
| well as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO).
| lsy wrote:
| I was interested to see a paper from a philosophical perspective
| but it seems this one fails to grapple with some of the more
| foundational critiques, primarily around reference where it
| claims that externalism militates for a view where reference is
| purely situated. I read the cited paper (Mandelkern & Linzen) and
| the arguments seem very weak to me that an intelligent agent
| "refers" in the absence of any grounding whatsoever beyond
| relative semantics between text. What it seems to argue is that
| because we sometimes are able to refer without absolute grounding
| (due to lack of direct experience of the referent), then
| reference overall does not require the referrer to have any
| world-grounding whatsoever. To me that's a leap. I would like to
| see more working against phenomenology here, especially Brian
| Cantwell Smith's so-far-unanswered critique of machine learning
| as intelligence.
|
| One of their other arguments, which is under the umbrella of the
| "re-description fallacy" hinges on the observation that
| describing (e.g.) a piano as "hammers hitting strings" doesn't
| preclude it from more complex behavior like harmony, and so a
| simple description of LLMs as autocomplete etc doesn't preclude
| more advanced understanding. While it's true that any complex
| process can be inappropriately dismissed by simplifying its
| description, I think this too-neatly sidesteps more complex
| critiques which advance from simple descriptions of LLM behavior
| _as contrasted_ with complex behavior from sentient intelligence
| that cannot be implemented by those simple mechanisms.
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