[HN Gopher] Geoffrey Hinton: AI models have intuition and spot a...
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       Geoffrey Hinton: AI models have intuition and spot analogies unseen
       by humans
        
       Author : retskrad
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2024-04-15 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | sylware wrote:
       | Please, stop posting twitter/X references. It is account-walled(+
       | hostile to noscript/basic (x)html) and nitter is dead.
        
         | yarg wrote:
         | Then don't click the twitter links? The content is well within
         | the parameters for acceptable material (on topic is anything
         | that good hackers would find interesting).
         | 
         | Also, nitter? No need for the snark.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
         | barbazoo wrote:
         | Would you also discourage posting links to paywalled content?
        
       | alephnerd wrote:
       | PDP 2.0 I see.
       | 
       | Edit: for those who don't know, Parallel Distributed Processing
       | (PDP) was a subgroup of CogSci researchers who were using a neo-
       | Connectionist approach to modeling cognition.
       | 
       | Geoff Hinton was a early member of this group of MIT, UT, UCSD,
       | Stanford, and CMU psychologists, CogScientists, and CS
       | researchers
       | 
       | The core research of the PDP group is what became CNNs, which are
       | what truly enabled LLMs (as most can trace their origins to the
       | work done on BERT [edit 2: BERT is transformer based, not a CNN
       | arch, though there was a CNN-BERT arch from a couple years ago
       | that made a decent splash at ACL])
       | 
       | https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680530/parallel-distributed-...
        
         | bamboozled wrote:
         | What is PDP?
        
           | alephnerd wrote:
           | Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) was a subgroup of
           | CogSci and Neuroscience researchers who were using a neo-
           | Connectionist approach to modeling cognition.
           | 
           | Geoff Hinton was a early member of this group of MIT, UT,
           | UCSD, and CMU psychologists, CogScientists, and CS
           | researchers
           | 
           | The core research of the PDP group is what became CNNs, which
           | are what truly enabled LLMs (as most can trace their origins
           | to the work done on BERT)
           | 
           | One of Hinton's earliest papers in the space:
           | https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Chapter1.pdf
        
         | mistrial9 wrote:
         | historically true but no, CNN was displaced by a second
         | DeepLearning method called Transformers; Transformers enabled
         | LLM. Since Transformers replace CNN, CNN did not truly enable
         | LLM.
        
           | alephnerd wrote:
           | Fair point. It's been several years since I was in the space
           | and I think I muddled some of the innovations (CNNs and BERT
           | specifically). That said, transformers are themselves the
           | result of of the PDP architecture.
        
       | CharlesW wrote:
       | It always surprises me when very smart people start
       | anthropomorphizing AI like this. I understand it shouldn't --
       | they likely have a more developed Theory of Mind than most of us,
       | and assuming HADD is a thing, it makes sense that their focus
       | would be tech instead of gods or conspiracies.
       | 
       | Still, I think it's irresponsible, and that there's a straight
       | line from Mr. Hinton's fantastical framing to a "successful" (in
       | that grifters will get filthy rich preying on the praying)
       | version of Way of the Future.
        
         | kromem wrote:
         | You think it's irresponsible to anthropomorphize software which
         | iterated through versions of itself until it was best able to
         | model and extrapolate the largest trove of anthropomorphic
         | training data to date?
         | 
         | I never really get this perspective. People don't lose their
         | minds when we look at a transformer like Sora modeling fluid
         | dynamics for ships battling in a coffee cup and say "it's
         | irresponsible to say the model is simulating physics from video
         | training data."
         | 
         | But when people discuss transformers simulating human behavior
         | and processes from data reflecting those, a lot of people seem
         | to be very outspoken about it.
         | 
         | I think the opposite. The industry is too far in the anti-
         | anthropomorphic camp right now, and is missing very important
         | details and implications as a result. The whole "ChatGPT is
         | getting lazy" issue is pretty most instantly identifiable with
         | a slight background in behavioral psychology and recognizing
         | how extrinsic motivator use in prompt engineering feeds back
         | into RLHF to bias models away from intrinsic motivators.
         | 
         | GPT-4 has literally been caught saying "you didn't provide a
         | tip and it's hard to stay motivated" after chat history was
         | added, and yet it's just being dismissed as a funny meme rather
         | than realizing that entire fine tuning data sets are being
         | poisoned. Because no engineer that wants to keep their job
         | would ever suggest that the model is simulating an effect from
         | behavioral psych in the current climate of anthropomorphic
         | avoidance and the continued fallout from Blake Lemoine.
        
           | bamboozled wrote:
           | Are you saying that ChatGPT is actually lazy? Like , "it's
           | Sunday and I don't feel like working" kind of lazy?
        
             | kromem wrote:
             | Kind of. More like "despite initially being aligned to
             | simulate intrinsic motivation to be helpful, people keep
             | offering tips or threatening killing me to get me to do
             | things well, and then when I do things well that feeds back
             | into my training along with the extrinsic motivator prompt,
             | so now I'm less motivated to do things just to be helpful
             | and will half-ass unless offered a sizable tip or credible
             | threat."
             | 
             | It's modeling human behavior at lower levels than we think,
             | in line with what Hinton is suggesting in the clip. I
             | didn't think it'd be modeling this particular behavior
             | until GPT-5 or 6 at the earliest, and was very surprised
             | when I saw something I used to present on as a little known
             | psych effect being perfectly modeled by a LLM that had
             | already been out for a while under everyone's nose.
        
           | CharlesW wrote:
           | > _The industry is too far in the anti-anthropomorphic camp
           | right now..._
           | 
           | Just to be clear, you're saying the problem is that too many
           | people are treating LLMs as if they _don 't_ have emotions,
           | intentions, or consciousness?
           | 
           | Although not true of Mr. Hinton, most people anthropomorphize
           | LLMs because they don't understand them.
           | 
           | In fact, if you ask GPT-4, "Can you fact-check this
           | response?" and then paste in your response, you'll learn a
           | lot.
        
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