If more than 0.05% of the rationalist and AI safety community were Zizians this argument might be worth considering for like ten seconds before dismissing it.
Every major political party has violent off-shoots, as does every major religion. If we're writing off rationalists because of a half-dozen people, we're writing off the vast majority of the world for participating in even worse guilt-by-association.
I watched the linear regression video. I can see the value behind the idea, but there's a number of flaws that make the videos difficult to watch compared to something like a 3blue1brown video. The flat voice and even word spacing lull you into zoning out, right until a mispronunciation jolts you back.
The idea of using LLMs to write out a script and storyboard for the video is interesting, but I think it needs intermediary work to better instruct the speech and graphics on how to perform.
"In early October, Renaud discovered that Social Security numbers for teachers, administrators and counselors were visible in the HTML code of a publicly accessible site operated by the state education department..."
"Yet despite the fact that officials within the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education initially wanted to thank Renaud for uncovering the flaw... [Governer] Parson labeled the reporter a hacker and called for criminal prosecution."
For a current-day LLM, deviation could be measured as the number of tokens since the agent touched on the prompted topic. A specific <<refocus>> token could even be trained so that a harness or other tooling could direct the LLM back towards the prompted topic if needed.
Or something roughly like that. Generally speaking the goal would be for the LLM to bring the topic back on its own while incorporating the tangent, but a hardcoded, "Let's get back on track" button would probably be needed
You’re arguing via reductionism, and failing to explain the outcomes and emergent properties of the “stupid” system. Humans are made of atoms that are quite literally stupid, so by all means, explain our intelligence and why it’s different than LLMs. (I’m not claiming LLMs are intelligent, BTW, I just don’t think your claim helps nor believe that you can fix it.)
Seriously? Supid is literally incapable of learning. That is the underlying model. It does not change, therefore it does not learn. LLM models are quite literally stupid. No one gets a new model no matter how much they yell at it in the context.
It’s as if you didn’t read or respond to my comment. LLM models are capable of learning… it’s called training. Models do change during training. You seem to be fixated on today’s inference, perhaps?
An LLM has a fixed number of ways it can express itself. we can give it an array of 14 billion options but it still has to chose one to output. Humans have no such limitation.
An LLM does not persist in consciousness from one token to the next. Each generation, happening hundreds of times a second, will be initialized, generate an output, and terminate. Humans are not stateless like an LLM.
You're conflating a singular model with a much larger system, but I want to address some of your points anyway.
> An LLM has a fixed number of ways it can express itself
While deterministic, there is not a fixed number of ways it can express itself, given that we can use settings like temperature to inject randomness into the output.
> An LLM does not persist in consciousness from one token to the next
While a model alone does not update itself to persist some form of history, there are a number of ways to overcome this, e.g. episodic memory, fine-tuning, and other self-improvement systems exist, which can indeed carry forward what you've called "consciousness".
> Humans are not stateless like an LLM.
A single LLM might be stateless, but an agentic system that relies on LLMs is very often not.
> While deterministic, there is not a fixed number of ways it can express itself, given that we can use settings like temperature to inject randomness into the output.
You're missing the point, which is that no matter the process involved. The LLM can only ever output one of the tokens in its token vector. It can't invent a new symbol or character. It can't leave and go build a church. It has to output a little piece of data for you.
You're moving the goalpost. If the definition of intelligence is based on ability to "go build a church", then we've ruled out the vast majority of the animal kingdom from being labeled "intelligent". If you cannot be consistent in your definition of "intelligence", then you cannot have a reliable litmus test for it.
I wasn't trying to make a reliable litmus test for it.
Either way, if you consider animals, LLMs are even more poorly positioned. They can do exactly none of the things my cat can do. An LLM can string together words, but if my cat is intelligent, it's clear that stringing together words is not synonymous with intelligence, since my cat can't do that.
Animals do in fact "string words together", e.g. parrots. You're also misidentifying what "language" is. Language in this context is not just the ability to string word together. Consider a musician, when they learn to play an instrument, they are learning the language of that instrument. Notes are tokens, ensembles are sentences and paragraphs. I'm afraid you're experiencing conformational bias, because every piece of evidence presented to you has been dismissed with things like "stringing together words is not synonymous with intelligence, since my cat can't do that".
Raines Law in that late 1800s put restrictions on the sale of alcohol in NY on Sundays. Bartenders used a loophole of the drinks being served with a meal to get around it.
They would make a single sandwich, "serve" it to the patron along with their drink, then immediately take back the sandwich to "serve" it to the next person wanting a drink
You're browsing for whatever piques your interest, and the library wants to curate the collection based on what people are interested in. The books that collect interest get placed on the shelves and the ones that don't get archived. If it's in the archive it probably wouldn't have interested you.
You say that but the author mentioned On Grammatology getting purged. That's a pretty important and influential book. It's a very difficult read which probably contributes to it not being checked out very often and it should definitely stay there.
