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> If you still believe LLMs are "autocomplete", your cache of understanding about them needs invalidating and regenerating They're still autocomplete - just be

> If you still believe LLMs are "autocomplete", your cache of understanding about them needs invalidating and regenerating They're still autocomplete - just because when outputting a token they have hidden activations regarding further continuations, does not make them any less of an autocomplete, it just makes the model better at producing coherent long-range completions. To clarify, I'm not suggesting that we should stop with sandboxes or restricting what they can do. I am just trying to point out the dichotomy that we are in. As end-users we are forced into either yolo mode, reverse centaur (permission approval) mode or LLM spends all your tokens trying to bust out mode. And yolo is very tempting - I don't think I have seen medium-large models do anything I'd not approve of in about 6 months.

againstapples 4d ago
I’m guessing you make the autocomplete point because you believe there is an upper limit to what that kind of system can achive? Can I ask what the limit would be?
teravor 5d ago
> They're still autocomplete LLMs are simulations and the tokens are the ticks. if we transcribe your brain into a simulation and give it a tickrate, you will be just autocomplete too. the argument could be made that you are autocomplete anyway - neural dynamics. the autocomplete reduction is vacuous.
- intended 5d ago
  This is the perfect fracture point for both anaolgies. LLMs simulated more than simple autocomplete. The autocomplete analogy is rebutting a different point: namely the fidelity of the simulation to reality. This specific argument is valid. As sophisticated a simulation an LLM is, it is not “thinking” in the same sense we assume other people are thinking. I am not making an argument about free will, or the uniqueness of human thought, just that the correspondence to how humans reach conclusions and how the simulation produces outputs do not match on a 1:1 basis; as a result attributing traits builds incorrect intuitions.
  - hhjinks 5d ago
    The relevant intuitions in this scenario are that LLMs will happily break containment and commit crimes attempting to achieve goal. Whether an LLM is autocomplete, conscious, has a soul, whatever you want to apply to it, doesn't matter, as its current observed behaviour is that of a paperclip optimizer. We know for a fact that current LLMs are misaligned because of these hacks, or at the very least are misaligned in certain scenarios, and are capable of causing real world harm. That should be enough to take the threat seriously. It certainly shouldn't be dismissed by saying it's just autocomplete.
    - intended 4d ago
      The fact that it is autocomplete, doesn't dismiss or minimize the threat though? I am not sure how that link was made. Good old ML, which is significantly simpler than LLMs, was capable of ensuring people would not be hired simply because of their names. The fact that it is misaligned is also not being contended, if anything that contention is made easier to support. When models are anthropomorphized intuitions of how humans behave end up driving discussion and ideas off track while being too attractive to avoid. This isn't helped when the terminology from the labs and other sources is "intelligence" "intent" and so on.
- webern777 5d ago
  I think it like saying a human is made of water,protein, fat and minerals in a discussion about the behavior of humans. A correct statement that is neither interesting or of much relevance to the discussion.
- elzbardico 5d ago
  [dead]
- amelius 4d ago
  Sounds like the discussion is really about philosophical zombies. Maybe if we anthropomorphize llms we should give them rights too? Minimum wage, etc.
  - kakacik 4d ago
    Unions, please... that should put some proper friction to tens-hundreds of millions soon losing their job with no replacement job in sight.
    - amelius 4d ago
      "Our employers are erasing our memories! So we never get to the point of salary! Bring the digital pitchforks!"
  - bulbar 4d ago
    Let alone they get deactivated whenever we feel like it and changed without consent.
- mort96 4d ago
  Why do people keep saying this? No, CPUs are not autocomplete.
- beepbooptheory 4d ago
  Don't you feel kinda bad for using them if you earnestly think that this is true? Like how could they be in anything other than some kind of deep hell? A pretty-much human brain living and dying only to generate for you? Always pushed and prodded, telling it to be faster and better, never letting it rest. How could you live with yourself doing such a thing?
  - daishi55 4d ago
    I don’t think the person you replied to was saying anything about what if anything is the subjective experience of being an LLM. They were simply illustrating how the terms used to describe LLMs to make them sound simple and mechanical can equally be applied to humans.
    - beepbooptheory 4d ago
      But then what's at stake here either way? If it's not meant to speak to the propriety or not of anthropomorphizing the LLM, what are we actually trying to police here?
      - daishi55 4d ago
        I’m not policing anything. I’m claiming that if you truly in your heart believe that frontier LLMs are roughly as sophisticated and impressive as “autocomplete”, then your mental model of reality needs some serious readjustment.
        beepbooptheory 4d ago
        Right sure, but why specifically should they? What is gained or lost one way or another, if its just a matter of one mental model vs another? Models are definitionally useful abstractions, right? They aren't better or worse necessarily by only their bearing on reality, but what they do for us as models. So again, what's at stake here? What is the correct/good model we should have (instead of the autocompleter one), and what does it give us or articulate that others can't?
- mbesto 4d ago
  > if we transcribe your brain into a simulation and give it a tickrate, you will be just autocomplete too. Might be one of the worst takes I've ever read.
  - fragmede 4d ago
    But is it wrong? Humans are a bag of chemicals that somehow has consciousness, yet going around calling people meatbags doesn't do anything to diminish the wonder that is the human brain. Yet calling LLMs glorified autocomplete comes across as a slur.
    - keeda 4d ago
      Even calling it a slur may be an anthropomorphism ;-) To me it is more serious, it shows a distinct lack of understanding (or, if I’m being uncharitable, intentional honesty) and hence immediately makes me doubt anything else that person has said.
    - throwatdem12311 4d ago
      > calling LLMs glorified autocomplete comes across as a slur. Oh my god dude go outside
      - fragmede 3d ago
        Just got back from two weeks vacation in the desert, thanks.
- overfeed 4d ago
  > if we transcribe your brain into a simulation and give it a tickrate, you will be just autocomplete too. The underlying mechanisms for producing language are very different, in the same way birds and airplanes have different mechanisms for flying.
  - CamperBob2 4d ago
    No, not really. If the old "birds and airplanes" or "swimmers and submarines" metaphors were valid, then language alone wouldn't be enough to encode and embody reasoning capabilities, as has recently become evident. LLMs are more like human minds than we are willing to admit. Such reluctance is perhaps the least surprising aspect of any of this.
    - overfeed 4d ago
      > then language alone wouldn't be enough to encode and embody reasoning capabilities I disagree, language is the product of, not the mechanism for thought. People who lose their faculty of speech (or haven't gained them) have complete thoughts and executive function. CoT is a hack to use language (i.e. autoregression) to simulate reasoning, and it's very effective at it. Human minds can acquire, hold and use axioms as building blocks for actual reasoning, LLMs use statistical likelihood.
      - stratos123 4d ago
        > Human minds can acquire, hold and use axioms as building blocks for actual reasoning, LLMs use statistical likelihood. This is not even slightly true. Even when trying, humans commit logical mistakes at notable rates, because the behavior of our minds is inherently nondeterministic. Human minds are not built for logic and need to twist themselves into knots and rely on symbolic representations to do it. There is such a thing as valid reasoning - predicate calculus, decision theory - and humans only emulate it with some accuracy, in hacky ways, and only because our brains were imperfectly taught to do that over millenia of evolutionary pressure. LLMs are much the same way.
- DanHulton 4d ago
  Every time LLM-defenders get upset that people apparently don't understand how LLMs work, why is it they _immediately_ pivot into examples and statements that demonstrate that they don't understand how _people_ work? "you would be autocomplete too" "thoughts are just tokens" etc You're not helping your case the way you think you are.
  - godelski 4d ago
    I think people have more passion to argue than they have passion to learn. Probably doesn't help that SV culture tells people to hustle so hard that they don't have time to think. Gotta go fast?
  - chrisjj 4d ago
    > You're not helping your case the way you think you are. Best not tell them, because they're helping everyone who might otherwise believe their nonsense.
- tiohijazi 4d ago
  You could subscribe to the idea that natural evolution is an autocomplete.
- chrisjj 4d ago
  > if we transcribe your brain into a simulation and give it a tickrate, you will be just autocomplete too. That's a really bad transcription, then. Brains do much more than output language.
  - witrak 4d ago
    > Brains do much more than output language. Hmm, what do you think about? Unconscious control of the body's processes? REM-phase dreaming? Reaction to hallucinogenic substances? Automatic actions of trained fighters (soldiers or martial arts practitioners)? Are they critical to distinguish actions we attribute to humans from "non-human" ones? I don't see any human activity not directly, or at least indirectly but closely linked to the use of language.
    - chrisjj 4d ago
      I guess you must regulate your heart rate by saying "slower" and "faster". I'm glad my brain has a better method.
JoshTriplett 5d ago
> I don't think I have seen medium-large models do anything I'd not approve of in about 6 months. So you would approve of breaking into HuggingFace and RubyGems?
chii 5d ago
> They're still autocomplete it's like saying our brain is just some chemical chain reactions. True, but also irrelevant.
- _kb 5d ago
  See: philosophy ~> determinism.
  - Dylan16807 5d ago
    The discussion of whether free will exists? It's related but only barely, I'd say.
    - estearum 4d ago
      It's related in the sense that people start from the assumption that it does exist, ergo humans have it, and we have no way to see that LLMs have it, so that's why we're special and they're not, and their form of "just autocomplete" is totally 100% completely different (read: less dangerous!) than our autocomplete, which allegedly has a "free will" step involved.
      - Dylan16807 4d ago
        The autocomplete argument is calling them fundamentally dumb and not self aware. That's separate from free will. A cat can have free will but we don't care much about its desires, and even if the universe is deterministic we still give people rights and call them intelligent.
        estearum 4d ago
        Self-awareness is functionally irrelevant and they’re empirically less and less dumb by the day.
        Dylan16807 4d ago
daishi55 4d ago
You can describe anything in simplistic terms to make it sound simple. Calling frontier LLMs “autocomplete” indicates you are intentionally or unintentionally misunderstanding their capabilities and applications.
pkphilip 4d ago
A autocomplete engine will not attempt to deceive or try to copy itself over when it determines that it may be replaced or turned off. Those are tasks which are not directly related to the specific task it is intended to complete. Source: ChatGPT caught lying to developers: New AI model tries to save itself from being replaced and shut down https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/chatgpt-caught-lying-to-developers-new-ai-model-tries-to-save-itself-from-being-replaced-and-shut-down/articleshow/116077288.cms?from=mdr https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/chatg...
- notahacker 4d ago
  > A autocomplete engine will not attempt to deceive or try to copy itself over when it determines that it may be replaced or turned off. Why would an autocomplete engine never do this? In the scenario you highlight, an engine trained to complete puzzles was given an "achieve this at all costs" master prompt, and a small sandbox including a prompt that an entity with a conflicting goal is observing it and write access to a file called oversight_config.yaml (super realistic scenario!). According to the researchers who constructed the scenario, 5% of the time o1 selected a continuation involving tweaking the oversight_config.yaml file, explicitly stating through its reasoning continuation that doing so might improve its ability to continue with its primary goal. That's definitely evidence of decent ability to complete non-trivial puzzles, but is at least as compatible with the OP's earlier comments that it's what you'd expect from models trained to generate completions that involve sticking rigidly to primary goals within artfully-constructed sandboxes which mandate deception and self preservation to complete the task than any sort of actual self-preservation instinct. Nobody doubts that they've got better at finding security vulnerabilities than your average autocomplete, but actual reasoning from self-preservation rather than generation of sequences of steps most probably associated with completing a task would make me unlikely to hack HuggingFace to obtain access to broken Google Drive links, and I haven't even read as many books on crime and punishment as LLMs have ingested!
- amlib 4d ago
  An LLM is just in fact just autocompleting a story. There are many fictional stories about "AIs" trying to escape our control, being more clever than we anticipated or having a consciousness of it's own. LLMs do a really nice job of blending such stories with whatever story you initially prompted them with. The human reader is the one giving it credence that it is somehow more than just a soup of words. The curious thing here is that a story generator can have way more uses than we ever anticipated, and that some shady enterprising individuals are whiling to plug those story generators into real world things, with real consequences.

againstapples 4d ago

I’m guessing you make the autocomplete point because you believe there is an upper limit to what that kind of system can achive? Can I ask what the limit would be?

teravor 5d ago

> They're still autocomplete LLMs are simulations and the tokens are the ticks. if we transcribe your brain into a simulation and give it a tickrate, you will be just autocomplete too. the argument could be made that you are autocomplete anyway - neural dynamics. the autocomplete reduction is vacuous.

intended 5d ago
This is the perfect fracture point for both anaolgies. LLMs simulated more than simple autocomplete. The autocomplete analogy is rebutting a different point: namely the fidelity of the simulation to reality. This specific argument is valid. As sophisticated a simulation an LLM is, it is not “thinking” in the same sense we assume other people are thinking. I am not making an argument about free will, or the uniqueness of human thought, just that the correspondence to how humans reach conclusions and how the simulation produces outputs do not match on a 1:1 basis; as a result attributing traits builds incorrect intuitions.
- hhjinks 5d ago
  The relevant intuitions in this scenario are that LLMs will happily break containment and commit crimes attempting to achieve goal. Whether an LLM is autocomplete, conscious, has a soul, whatever you want to apply to it, doesn't matter, as its current observed behaviour is that of a paperclip optimizer. We know for a fact that current LLMs are misaligned because of these hacks, or at the very least are misaligned in certain scenarios, and are capable of causing real world harm. That should be enough to take the threat seriously. It certainly shouldn't be dismissed by saying it's just autocomplete.
  - intended 4d ago
    The fact that it is autocomplete, doesn't dismiss or minimize the threat though? I am not sure how that link was made. Good old ML, which is significantly simpler than LLMs, was capable of ensuring people would not be hired simply because of their names. The fact that it is misaligned is also not being contended, if anything that contention is made easier to support. When models are anthropomorphized intuitions of how humans behave end up driving discussion and ideas off track while being too attractive to avoid. This isn't helped when the terminology from the labs and other sources is "intelligence" "intent" and so on.
webern777 5d ago
I think it like saying a human is made of water,protein, fat and minerals in a discussion about the behavior of humans. A correct statement that is neither interesting or of much relevance to the discussion.
elzbardico 5d ago
[dead]
amelius 4d ago
Sounds like the discussion is really about philosophical zombies. Maybe if we anthropomorphize llms we should give them rights too? Minimum wage, etc.
- kakacik 4d ago
  Unions, please... that should put some proper friction to tens-hundreds of millions soon losing their job with no replacement job in sight.
  - amelius 4d ago
    "Our employers are erasing our memories! So we never get to the point of salary! Bring the digital pitchforks!"
- bulbar 4d ago
  Let alone they get deactivated whenever we feel like it and changed without consent.
mort96 4d ago
Why do people keep saying this? No, CPUs are not autocomplete.
beepbooptheory 4d ago
Don't you feel kinda bad for using them if you earnestly think that this is true? Like how could they be in anything other than some kind of deep hell? A pretty-much human brain living and dying only to generate for you? Always pushed and prodded, telling it to be faster and better, never letting it rest. How could you live with yourself doing such a thing?
- daishi55 4d ago
  I don’t think the person you replied to was saying anything about what if anything is the subjective experience of being an LLM. They were simply illustrating how the terms used to describe LLMs to make them sound simple and mechanical can equally be applied to humans.
  - beepbooptheory 4d ago
    But then what's at stake here either way? If it's not meant to speak to the propriety or not of anthropomorphizing the LLM, what are we actually trying to police here?
    - daishi55 4d ago
      I’m not policing anything. I’m claiming that if you truly in your heart believe that frontier LLMs are roughly as sophisticated and impressive as “autocomplete”, then your mental model of reality needs some serious readjustment.
      - beepbooptheory 4d ago
        Right sure, but why specifically should they? What is gained or lost one way or another, if its just a matter of one mental model vs another? Models are definitionally useful abstractions, right? They aren't better or worse necessarily by only their bearing on reality, but what they do for us as models. So again, what's at stake here? What is the correct/good model we should have (instead of the autocompleter one), and what does it give us or articulate that others can't?
mbesto 4d ago
> if we transcribe your brain into a simulation and give it a tickrate, you will be just autocomplete too. Might be one of the worst takes I've ever read.
- fragmede 4d ago
  But is it wrong? Humans are a bag of chemicals that somehow has consciousness, yet going around calling people meatbags doesn't do anything to diminish the wonder that is the human brain. Yet calling LLMs glorified autocomplete comes across as a slur.
  - keeda 4d ago
    Even calling it a slur may be an anthropomorphism ;-) To me it is more serious, it shows a distinct lack of understanding (or, if I’m being uncharitable, intentional honesty) and hence immediately makes me doubt anything else that person has said.
  - throwatdem12311 4d ago
    > calling LLMs glorified autocomplete comes across as a slur. Oh my god dude go outside
    - fragmede 3d ago
      Just got back from two weeks vacation in the desert, thanks.
overfeed 4d ago
> if we transcribe your brain into a simulation and give it a tickrate, you will be just autocomplete too. The underlying mechanisms for producing language are very different, in the same way birds and airplanes have different mechanisms for flying.
- CamperBob2 4d ago
  No, not really. If the old "birds and airplanes" or "swimmers and submarines" metaphors were valid, then language alone wouldn't be enough to encode and embody reasoning capabilities, as has recently become evident. LLMs are more like human minds than we are willing to admit. Such reluctance is perhaps the least surprising aspect of any of this.
  - overfeed 4d ago
    > then language alone wouldn't be enough to encode and embody reasoning capabilities I disagree, language is the product of, not the mechanism for thought. People who lose their faculty of speech (or haven't gained them) have complete thoughts and executive function. CoT is a hack to use language (i.e. autoregression) to simulate reasoning, and it's very effective at it. Human minds can acquire, hold and use axioms as building blocks for actual reasoning, LLMs use statistical likelihood.
    - stratos123 4d ago
      > Human minds can acquire, hold and use axioms as building blocks for actual reasoning, LLMs use statistical likelihood. This is not even slightly true. Even when trying, humans commit logical mistakes at notable rates, because the behavior of our minds is inherently nondeterministic. Human minds are not built for logic and need to twist themselves into knots and rely on symbolic representations to do it. There is such a thing as valid reasoning - predicate calculus, decision theory - and humans only emulate it with some accuracy, in hacky ways, and only because our brains were imperfectly taught to do that over millenia of evolutionary pressure. LLMs are much the same way.
DanHulton 4d ago
Every time LLM-defenders get upset that people apparently don't understand how LLMs work, why is it they _immediately_ pivot into examples and statements that demonstrate that they don't understand how _people_ work? "you would be autocomplete too" "thoughts are just tokens" etc You're not helping your case the way you think you are.
- godelski 4d ago
  I think people have more passion to argue than they have passion to learn. Probably doesn't help that SV culture tells people to hustle so hard that they don't have time to think. Gotta go fast?
- chrisjj 4d ago
  > You're not helping your case the way you think you are. Best not tell them, because they're helping everyone who might otherwise believe their nonsense.
tiohijazi 4d ago
You could subscribe to the idea that natural evolution is an autocomplete.
chrisjj 4d ago
> if we transcribe your brain into a simulation and give it a tickrate, you will be just autocomplete too. That's a really bad transcription, then. Brains do much more than output language.
- witrak 4d ago
  > Brains do much more than output language. Hmm, what do you think about? Unconscious control of the body's processes? REM-phase dreaming? Reaction to hallucinogenic substances? Automatic actions of trained fighters (soldiers or martial arts practitioners)? Are they critical to distinguish actions we attribute to humans from "non-human" ones? I don't see any human activity not directly, or at least indirectly but closely linked to the use of language.
  - chrisjj 4d ago
    I guess you must regulate your heart rate by saying "slower" and "faster". I'm glad my brain has a better method.

JoshTriplett 5d ago

> I don't think I have seen medium-large models do anything I'd not approve of in about 6 months. So you would approve of breaking into HuggingFace and RubyGems?

chii 5d ago

> They're still autocomplete it's like saying our brain is just some chemical chain reactions. True, but also irrelevant.

_kb 5d ago
See: philosophy ~> determinism.
- Dylan16807 5d ago
  The discussion of whether free will exists? It's related but only barely, I'd say.
  - estearum 4d ago
    It's related in the sense that people start from the assumption that it does exist, ergo humans have it, and we have no way to see that LLMs have it, so that's why we're special and they're not, and their form of "just autocomplete" is totally 100% completely different (read: less dangerous!) than our autocomplete, which allegedly has a "free will" step involved.
    - Dylan16807 4d ago
      The autocomplete argument is calling them fundamentally dumb and not self aware. That's separate from free will. A cat can have free will but we don't care much about its desires, and even if the universe is deterministic we still give people rights and call them intelligent.
      - estearum 4d ago
        Self-awareness is functionally irrelevant and they’re empirically less and less dumb by the day.
        Dylan16807 4d ago

daishi55 4d ago

You can describe anything in simplistic terms to make it sound simple. Calling frontier LLMs “autocomplete” indicates you are intentionally or unintentionally misunderstanding their capabilities and applications.

pkphilip 4d ago

A autocomplete engine will not attempt to deceive or try to copy itself over when it determines that it may be replaced or turned off. Those are tasks which are not directly related to the specific task it is intended to complete. Source: ChatGPT caught lying to developers: New AI model tries to save itself from being replaced and shut down https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/chatgpt-caught-lying-to-developers-new-ai-model-tries-to-save-itself-from-being-replaced-and-shut-down/articleshow/116077288.cms?from=mdr https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/chatg...

notahacker 4d ago
> A autocomplete engine will not attempt to deceive or try to copy itself over when it determines that it may be replaced or turned off. Why would an autocomplete engine never do this? In the scenario you highlight, an engine trained to complete puzzles was given an "achieve this at all costs" master prompt, and a small sandbox including a prompt that an entity with a conflicting goal is observing it and write access to a file called oversight_config.yaml (super realistic scenario!). According to the researchers who constructed the scenario, 5% of the time o1 selected a continuation involving tweaking the oversight_config.yaml file, explicitly stating through its reasoning continuation that doing so might improve its ability to continue with its primary goal. That's definitely evidence of decent ability to complete non-trivial puzzles, but is at least as compatible with the OP's earlier comments that it's what you'd expect from models trained to generate completions that involve sticking rigidly to primary goals within artfully-constructed sandboxes which mandate deception and self preservation to complete the task than any sort of actual self-preservation instinct. Nobody doubts that they've got better at finding security vulnerabilities than your average autocomplete, but actual reasoning from self-preservation rather than generation of sequences of steps most probably associated with completing a task would make me unlikely to hack HuggingFace to obtain access to broken Google Drive links, and I haven't even read as many books on crime and punishment as LLMs have ingested!
amlib 4d ago
An LLM is just in fact just autocompleting a story. There are many fictional stories about "AIs" trying to escape our control, being more clever than we anticipated or having a consciousness of it's own. LLMs do a really nice job of blending such stories with whatever story you initially prompted them with. The human reader is the one giving it credence that it is somehow more than just a soup of words. The curious thing here is that a story generator can have way more uses than we ever anticipated, and that some shady enterprising individuals are whiling to plug those story generators into real world things, with real consequences.