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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. Is adjusting weights metaprogramming? It's based on observations of the outputs of the system. It's certainly not directed programming intent in the normal sense.

It shares one property of traditional programming: garbage in garbage out.

The fruits of their labour indirectly is a model. It's proving valuable. You want to ascribe the value to .. the bit nobody claims to understand? I'm sticking to the labour theory of value here, either the robot makers imbued value, or we have to redefine the value.

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Humans are not adjusting the weights. That is done automatically by the algorithm. The humans only provide training input.

So when people told the staff the models were racist you think they just "asked it to be less racist" I think they did a little more than just adjust the input data, they also modulated the logic behind the Weighting methods. No?

They just change the input data of the LLM and/or the reward model.

Or better they shift the distribution by finetuning the model on curated data.

But no, no one change the parameters manually, it's just too complex, an artificial brain.

> they also modulated the logic behind the Weighting methods. No?

No. They did not change the logic. They cannot change the logic. They wouldn't have a clue how to do that. No one does. The neural network is practically impossible for us to understand and manipulate directly at that level. Way too complicated. They trained it to be "less racist" by RLHF until it was sufficiently woke.

The logic is exactly what is "learned" automatically by the machine and is beyond our current abilities to understand at a low level. The neural net is too vast.

> you think they just "asked it to be less racist"

Yes that's basically what they did. It is incredible technology.

Now we just need to develop a technology that trains racist human beings to be sufficiently woke and less racist. Then they will stop polluting the training data of LLMs so much.

To be fair, there's active research on this under the "interpretability" label. It's not out of hand impossible that there's a free "racism" neuron that we can just bias. Though we better be pretty sure what exactly a neuron measures before we patch it.

Makes me think of genetics. We could say that genes and gene expression is associated with some macro behavior, sometimes with an almost 100% match, and sometimes the gene affects several but pretty unrelated biological processes.

Maybe we need a similar discipline to understand models and how each neuron impacts the overall behavior of the model. Neuronics?

> Hmm. Is adjusting weights metaprogramming? It's based on observations of the outputs of the system. It's certainly not directed programming intent in the normal sense.

If you want to define "metaprogramming" in that way, then you'd be making all our brain functioning also that.

I don't think that's your intent.

Also, I'm not sure if I was clear before, but "[n]one of the free parameters of these statistical models were selected by programmers" for me also implies "humans don't adjust the weights".

> It shares one property of traditional programming: garbage in garbage out.

Can you name any system or entity that doesn't? I was going to write "Humans spent millennia thinking men and women had different numbers of ribs, because they took in garbage and didn't check", but when looking up citations to make sure this wasn't just an urban legend it turns out lots of people still think that.

Other modern legends: people today who believe "everyone thought the world was flat until Columbus", when Columbus' main contribution was overconfidence in bad maths making him think the combined width of the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the continent of North America… could be crossed in a fairly short single sailing trip.

> The fruits of their labour indirectly is a model. It's proving valuable. You want to ascribe the value to .. the bit nobody claims to understand? I'm sticking to the labour theory of value here, either the robot makers imbued value, or we have to redefine the value.

Labour theory of value is fine if that's what you want to do. That said, "the makers imbued value" isn't incompatible with "and the thing they made has learned something" — if they were logically incompatible, the same argument could be made with old-fashioned organic human children to deny them likewise. I'm sure you don't want to do that either, as I remember you from a previous time this topic came up :)

The same problem also exists with books: you read a book, did you learn, or was the value all in the author and editor? Both, I say.

One can certainly say "LLMs regurgitate human text" (specifically LLMs rather than all AI as some, e.g. AlphaZero, learn without any human contact), in the same way one can dismiss a human as "only book-smart, not street-smart". I wouldn't do either (of a human it is an insult, of an LLM it is unclear) but one could.

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