Despite all my rage I’m still a rat refreshing this page.

I use arch btw

Credibly accused of being a fascist, liberal, commie, anarchist, child, boomer, pointlessly pedantic, a Russian psychological warfare operative, and db0’s sockpuppet.

Pronouns are she/her.

Vegan for the iron deficiency.

  • 6 Posts
  • 363 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle










  • The algorithm assigns weights to nodes in a neural network. These weights are derived by statistical association of tokens in the training data after they have been cleaned.

    That is so enormously far from how we think humans learn (you don’t teach a kid to understand theory of mind by plopping them in front of the Gutenberg project and saying good luck, and yet they learn to explain theory of mind problems all the same) that it is just comically farcial to assume something similar is happening underneath.

    It is very interesting that llms are able to appear to be conversational but claiming they have some sort of mind with an understanding of maths is as ridiculous as suggesting a chess bot understands the Pauli exclusion principle because it never moves two pieces into the same physical space.



  • You’re arguing against a position I didn’t put forward. Also

    Seems like a pointless distinction, you were told it so you believe it to be the case? Why can’t we say the LLM outputs what it believes is the correct answer? You’re both just making some statement based on your prior experiences which may or may not be true

    This is what excessive reduction does to a mfer. That is just such a hysterically absurd take.




  • Yeah this is the exact criticism. They recombine language pieces without really doing language. The end result looks like language, but it lacks any of the important characteristics of language such as meaning and intention.

    If I say “Two plus two is four” I am communicating my belief about mathematics.

    If an llm emits “two plus two is four” it is outputting a stochastically selected series of tokens linked by probabilities derived from training data. If the statement is true or false then that is accidental.

    Hence, stochastic parrot.