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hackyhacky

4,785 karma · joined July 7, 2014

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hackyhacky··on OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI
Yes, LLMs emit tokens. And human brains emit nerve impulses. Both devices are "trained" on corpora of data.

That has nothing to do with the question of whether the mechanism that generates those signals is complex enough to say that it's "creative."

hackyhacky··on OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI
> The first ~half of the difference is humans have a deep world model about the planet which surrounds any sensor and human sensations are pre-processed and filtered by a highly evolved bio-chemical substrate before ever reaching the higher-order cognitive processes which assign words, meaning and qualia to them.

Great, but we also build robots with world models and sensory pre-processing. So nothing you've described is unique to humans.

> I never mentioned creativity, nor would I in relation to LLMs

The topic of this thread is whether LLMs are capable of genuinely contributing "new" ideas. So if that's not the point you're trying to make, I'm not sure of the purpose of your comment.

> But neither POV seems interested in anything more than drive-by hot takes, debating over-simplistic strawmen or trading 'gotcha' hypotheticals.

I think you've oversimplfying the discussion here.

In my view, at least, both "LLMs are nothing more than stochastic parrots" and "LLMs can be as intelligent, creative, innovative (etc) as any human or all humans combined." are simultaneously true, for the simple reason that humans are stochastic parrots. Our brains learn patterns and respond to stimuli.

hackyhacky··on OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI
> Complexity != breadth.

Okay but how is that relevant for measuring whether an llm is capable of creating original thoughts? Why do you think that complexity, as you say, is a more relevant Factor than simply the number of weights?

hackyhacky··on OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI
» an LLM it's still predicting tokens

That's a rather dismissive way of putting it. Moreover it's confusing the output format with the complexity of the output. I could just as easily say that no matter what the human brain does it's just generating stimulus to motor neurons. Such a simplification is just as wrong as saying that it's just as misleading is saying that an llm is just a token generator. What makes an llm able or unable to be complex is the process that creates those tokens

hackyhacky··on OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI
Oh absolutely. The legal situation is completely clear. AIs simply don't have rights or responsibilities. And the law as it applies to humans is premised on the assumption of free will: that a person can choose to obey the law or not, and bear the responsibility of the consequences.

But that interpretation of Free Will is a legal fiction. Because of course what people do is determined by their upbringing and their opportunities and the environment that they have. In fact, that's an argument of a lot of legal reform movements that seek to move responsibility from the individual. The goal of the law is to assign responsibility and create a set of incentives which will hopefully result in orderly society.

But in the AI debate, we're not just creating incentives for an orderly Society, we're talking about the nature of creativity and the impetus to act. And by that measure I don't think there is a significant difference between AIs and human beings.

hackyhacky··on OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI
I don't think Free Will is the issue here. My argument is that humans require input to act. We can't test that theory, because there is never been a human being who did not receive input. Everything that we experience from birth through childhood into adulthood is our input and forms our choices about what to do. That includes what the study, who to love, what our hobbies are, what kind of work we pursue.
hackyhacky··on OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI
> It's meant to assign agency and accountability where it actually lies instead of mystifying it with anthropomorphic language.

Yesterday, my boss told me to fix a bug in our product. Then, I fixed it. Today my boss is taking credit, saying that he fixed it. I guess he's right, since he told me to do it.

hackyhacky··on OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI
You are describing the " unmoved mover", an argument for the existence of God

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

hackyhacky··on AI is now capable of developing its own inference hardware
> They can't confirm ground truth about physical reality.

That's true. Of course we can hook an llm up to Motors and sensors. That's a robot. Or a self-driving car. So would you say that those devices can confirm the ground truth about physical reality, and therefore are capable of creativity?

hackyhacky··on OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI
> the human brain is a lot more complex with a lot more sensory inputs

How are you measuring complexity here? How are you measuring inputs? Your average llm is trained on a corpus that vastly exceeds the amount of data I could read in my lifetime.

hackyhacky··on OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI
> It cant "invent new things"

I've heard that before but it just doesn't make sense in context of what I've seen llms do. If I ask an llm to write a poem about magnetic resonance and vampire rabbits it can do that it created a new thing. I can ask it to build a website for managing rabbit breeding that's also a new thing.

Another way of looking at it is that human beings, just like llms, can produce output based on their inputs. Most literature is inspired by other literature. Most music is inspired by other music. Most software is inspired by other software.

So I think we need to work on defining " new things" before we can definitely exclude them from llm's capabilities

hackyhacky··on Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'
> Not mass surveillance by a private corporation.

When that corporation is performing contracted work for the government, they act as the government's agent, making them subject to the same restrictions regarding civil rights as the government itself.

hackyhacky··on Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'
I agree that it's not clear that this breaks federal law. But I do think it's clear that this should break federal law.

There's an interesting analogy with copyright issues surrounding AI use. Both copyright laws and surveillance were created to (respectively) creative incentives for authors to create novel works; and to protect citizens for indiscriminate surveillance. The laws made sense given the technology available at the time: it simply wasn't feasible to put a cop on every street corner, or to ingest the ideas of every work ever written.

But the laws have been eclipsed by technology. Technology makes a mockery of existing laws, by clearly violating their intent. Much has been written to the effect of "why bother to create new, free materials on the internet when it will just get scooped up by an LLM with no attribution to me." Similarly, Flock cameras have the effect or violating privacy in the exact same way the original laws sought to prevent.

Unfortunately, laws are slow to change, and monied interests will fight tooth-and-nail to put their profits above the rights of ordinary people. It's going to be a difficult decade or so coming up.

hackyhacky··on Musk, the Movie
https://leasehackr-assets.b-cdn.net/original/3X/a/9/a9a9015c...
hackyhacky··on Musk, the Movie
Musk's plan for the survival of the species, as far as I can tell, is to personally make as many (white) babies as possible. His talk of colonizing Mars is a pipe dream, a lure for gullible investors.
hackyhacky··on Musk, the Movie
https://leasehackr-assets.b-cdn.net/original/3X/a/9/a9a9015c...
hackyhacky··on Musk, the Movie
https://leasehackr-assets.b-cdn.net/original/3X/a/9/a9a9015c...
hackyhacky··on Musk, the Movie
I am sure they do play those statements in the movie itself. The trailer exists to get your attention,not to provide all information.

If you're genuinely curious, and can't wait to watch the film, here's a starting point: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk...

hackyhacky··on As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'
Any system can be disrupted if you throw unlimited VC money at it.
hackyhacky··on As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'
In principle, that's fine, but "disruptive" businesses aren't building a positive long-term model. Rather, they are leveraging investors' money to recklessly demolish established systems and replace them with something worse.
hackyhacky··on As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'
The business plan of any "disruption" is to undercut the legacy competitors, drive them out of business, then jack up the prices. See also: Uber, streaming services.

Enjoy your cheap lawyer tokens while you can.

hackyhacky··on As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'
Yes, lawyers have ethical and legal responsibility for their work. Plus, I'd prefer that my money not go towards the consolidation and monopolization of all intellectual labor in the hands of Sam Altman.
hackyhacky··on As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'
My comment was not intended to express support of using AI instead of lawyers, but rather to express the pointlessness of "disrupting" human lawyers.
hackyhacky··on As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'
> I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.

Because you'd rather pay your $1000 to OpenAI for 5 milliseconds of work, instead of to a human lawyer for 10 seconds of work?

hackyhacky··on Musk, the Movie
No one doubts that the work is difficult. The criticism, as the trailer makes clear in context, is not that the company is not making adequate progress, but rather that the public statements made by Musk about the progress of the company are not honest.
hackyhacky··on Goodbye Google
> Why do people automatically associate intellectual capability with evil?.

No intellectual capability, but non-human, inherently amoral intellectual capability that has already been proven act in hard-to-predict, illegal, and unethical ways. I think that's a very rational thing to be afraid of.

hackyhacky··on Relativistic raytracing
From TFA:

> But wouldn't we want to see the black hole? One could send a ray through every pixel of a screen, and let them go around the black hole and hit its surroundings. And if the rays are sent back in time, it's as if one received the light emitted by the surrounding objects in the past!

hackyhacky··on Relativistic raytracing
This is very interesting, but way above my pay grade. Can someone explain how the resulting image reflects light traveling backwards in time?
hackyhacky··on English: A vs. An
> you can recognize that usage in those phrases, rather than revealing some kind of subtle point about how the is used in nearly-identical contexts, is determined arbitrarily.

I wasn't aware that I was making a "subtle" point. I was joint showing that the use of articles in English is complex and hard-to-predict for non-native speakers, in contradiction to the claim (paraphrased) that "Just use the for things that are definite, duh!" Your observation that article use varies between dialects of the same language strengthens my point, insofar as encountering inconsistent use makes learning the language even harder.

> is determined arbitrarily.

I don't know what you're trying to say here. Languages vary systematically over time. Just because two different dialects, or two different languages, do things in different ways doesn't mean that those changes were arrived at arbitrarily.

hackyhacky··on English: A vs. An
> The hospital example is pretty much the same. Being "in the hospital" is analogous to being "in school",

No. To be "in hospital" or to go "to hospital" means that you are a patient. To be "in the hospital" describes only location.

> Your description is incomplete

Your analysis is fine, but does not contradict my comment and moreover is irrelevant to the present discussion, which pertains to the subtle use of articles in English.

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