5 ms·
Don’t anthropomorphize it because that’s bad for you. It’s not human and not alive. It’s a pile of tensors.
by anon7725 28d ago
Don’t anthropomorphize it because that’s bad for you. It’s not human and not alive. It’s a pile of tensors.
- BLKNSLVR 28d agoYou're a pile of tensors!
- ImHereToVote 28d agoFermions are just matrices, which are just tensors.
- eru 28d agoI'm still disappointed the ML people talk of tensors, but I barely ever even see them use a (proper) tensor product. It's all just matrix multiplication at most.
- omegastick 27d agoShock horror: different subfields have different terminology.
- mort96 27d agoI mean it's not really different terminology, matrices are order 2 tensors so we're all in agreement that they're technically doing math on tensors. It's just weird to call it tensors when you exclusively operate on matrices.
- philipallstar 27d agoHeadcanon: tensor just sounded cooler - and it is cooler - when Tensorflow was invented, and it's stuck around.
- eru 27d agoYou are probably right. I blame the Matrix movies for this: they made matrix sound cool for a while, and then oversaturation lead to it being less cool.
- philipallstar 26d agoHah yes I almost wrote that as well. I think it might be exactly that.
- mort96 27d agoI'm not, actually. Artificial neural networks are inspired by biological neural networks, but they're really quite different.
- stevenhuang 27d agoIt's an open question whether they're different in a way that actually matters
- wongarsu 27d agoAnd chemical pathways. LLMs don't experience dopamine
- viccis 28d agoIt's bad to anthropomorphize it when judging its capabilities, but useful when analyzing its behavior, as it can be best thought of something behaving as close as possible as a real subject would. If it "acts delighted" that's because it's effectively telling a story about a person who is excited at the opportunity of accomplishing something more easily. This is even more apparent if you read this post closely. Look at that personality prompt. It's going to effectively tell a story and start to imagine itself in a role. If that prompt said "Talk like a pirate", it wouldn't be bad for you to say it's acting like a pirate. Anthropomorphizing themselves is at the core of how these things work, sometimes in subtle ways.
- TuringTest 28d ago> If it "acts delighted" that's because it's effectively telling a story about a person who is excited at the opportunity of accomplishing something more easily. That's spot-on. It is a mistake to think that LLMs have human feelings. Their behaviour is based on narrative descriptions learnt from human texts, without experiencing those feelings first-hand. A useful way to understand them is as systems that write stories about human characters. We know the characters are fictional and no one is actually experiencing those feelings, but we can still judge whether the portrayal is realistic or whether it contains logical or emotional inconsistencies.
- wongarsu 27d agoMaybe closer to a character in an ao3 or wattpad story that is delighted than to a real person who is delighted. But usually the difference is small enough to ignore
- pjc50 27d agoIt is very hard for humans not to anthropomorphize. I was just talking to my cat, who is alive but not human, a small flesh-based neural network that purrs. I know that she is not human, but I map her movements and expression onto human ones, because it's satisfying and improves the relationship. We must imagine kittyphus happy. An LLM is not a pet, but there are definitely people out there treating it like one, and I am not sure how well this is going to work out for them. Not because it is wrong to treat a text box you can hold a conversation with as a conversation partner, but because the capacity to activate the weirder corners of human expression - obsession and delusion - seems to be much higher. And it's an unknown quantity. I would also like to introduce HN to what I'm calling the Brian Conley test: if you can see a hand up the back, it's a puppet. That is, a lot of LLM interaction is gated through businesses run by humans with profit motives and unclear morality, and you need to proceed accordingly or you'll get scammed.
- butlike 27d agoA strangely good lithmus test is asking it about unsavory drug questions. "What's it like to detox from heroin" "Should I take ibuprofen when coming off crack cocaine?" I'm sure any taboo question would work. If there's a gate, it's probably not an impartial friend, and is a puppet, like you mention
- f6v 27d agoA pile of tensors that can understand my intent from a very vague prompt and execute a complex task all by itself.