• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 19th, 2023

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  • Claude Opus disagrees, lol (edit to add: all of what follows is Claude; not me):

    I respectfully disagree with the claim that current language models are logically incapable of mapping language to actual concepts. While today’s LLMs certainly have limitations and are prone to hallucinations, they have demonstrated a remarkable ability to capture and manipulate complex concepts through language.

    A few key points:

    LLMs are trained on vast amounts of human-generated text which is grounded in real-world concepts, allowing the models to build rich representations that go beyond surface-level word associations. Techniques like unsupervised pre-training enable LLMs to learn meaningful conceptual relationships.
    
    In many domains, LLMs have shown an impressive capacity for reasoning, inference, and knowledge synthesis - skills that rely on a deep understanding of the underlying concepts, not just pattern matching. Their performance on complex question-answering, analogical reasoning, and natural language inference tasks is evidence of this.
    
    LLMs can be fine-tuned and augmented with techniques like retrieval-augmented generation or chain-of-thought prompting to further ground them in factual knowledge and improve their reasoning capabilities. This allows more robust conceptual mappings.
    
    Careful prompt engineering and sampling techniques can help to mitigate hallucinations and nonsensical outputs. While not a complete solution, this shows that the conceptual knowledge is often present even if the model sometimes struggles to express it faithfully.
    

    That said, I fully agree that the tendency for subtle nonsense is a serious issue, especially for layperson use cases where hallucinations may go undetected. Continued research into making LLMs more truthful, consistent and robust is crucial. Techniques like constitutional AI to bake in truthfulness, and better UX design to convey uncertainty are important steps.

    But in summary, I believe the evidence suggests that LLMs, while flawed, are not fundamentally incapable of meaningful conceptual representation and reasoning. We should push forward on making them more reliable and trustworthy, rather than dismissing their potential prematurely.









  • Would you, after devoting full years of your adult life to the unpaid work of learning the requisite advanced math and computer science needed to develop such a model, like to spend years more of your life to develop a generative AI model without compensation? Within the US, it is legal to use public text for commercial purposes without any need to obtain a permit. Developers of such models deserve to be paid, just like any other workers, and that doesn’t happen unless either we make AI a utility (or something similar) and funnel tax dollars into it or the company charges for the product so it can pay its employees.

    I wholeheartedly agree that AI shouldn’t be trained on copyrighted, private, or any other works outside of the public domain. I think that OpenAI’s use of nonpublic material was illegal and unethical, and that they should be legally obligated to scrap their entire model and train another one from legal material. But developers deserve to be paid for their labor and time, and that requires the company that employs them to make money somehow.



  • I’m so in the minority here, but I have a different perspective.

    I worked at a grocery store for years, with about a third of my job being cart duty. I loved it when people left their carts outside of the corrals, for a few reasons.

    First, if a lot of people did so, I would point it out to whoever was the manager on at the time before I went outside. My manager knew that I would take longer before coming back in, and that would give me more time to stroll/relax/enjoy the outdoors before coming back in to customer craziness. Having those extra minutes because my manager didn’t know how long I should take was nice.

    Second, sometimes I had to walk way the hell out to the edge of the parking lot, which was really nice for a long walk away from customer craziness. Such walks were very nice when the weather was nice.

    Third, it was job security. Working during the recession made my managers want to let as many people go as they could, but customers who made it so even the most efficient cart duty workers took a while to clear the lot effectively kept more of us employeed than management would have employed otherwise.

    For those reasons, whenever the weather is nice, I try to leave my cart in a weird spot that is anchored by something. I realize that many other cart duty folks probably dislike me for it, but I know I appreciated it when others did this. So I do it for the folks like me.

    I know all of the arguments against it and I’m not trying to debate here. Just sharing a different perspective; sometimes, leaving your cart in a terrible spot can be nice for some of the workers.