mjburgess

6 ms·

1.
by mjburgess 3d ago
Well that's the trick. That the systems we use, as a proxy, to measure intellinnce in people are actually fairly easy to immitate. But let's be clear these were always, and are, bad measures of intelligence. You cannot test a do
2.
by mjburgess 3d ago
They're not a reproduction in any sense. A marginal text token isnt computed from the weights of an LLM in anything like any sense of any activity of any mammal. LLMs are immitation machines: they take impressions of prior text. Today,
3.
by mjburgess 3d ago
Well intelligence is not measured by patterns in text. The illusion only takes place in the text domain. Even then, it's a pretty fragile illusion at the moment. Clearly the reasoning traces dont ground the answers. There's no int
4.
by mjburgess 3d ago
There's a difference in the science. You might say, "suppose we had a video game of the solar system where every object was represented and their orbits" etc. then can we study that system alone and ignore the real one? I m
5.
by mjburgess 3d ago
I'm using 'reason' in the language-captured engineering sense. They generate text as-if they reason. Those reasoning traces poorly correlate with their given answers (which is called "cheating" by people who fall fo
6.
by mjburgess 3d ago
Sure: refine their own concepts, imagine, and the list goes on. Indeed almost every mental capacity of mammals is poorly approximated in the text domain. Sure, you can generate text as-if the LLM can imagine -- and in the limit that you hav
7.
by mjburgess 3d ago
It's also obvious that LLMs fall over in a vast number of software engineering contexts, when the reasoning involved hasnt been well-represented in their reasoning training data. I imagine this is a near daily experience for many engin
8.
by mjburgess 3d ago
Maybe. Or maybe its evidence that the frontier of mathematics is knowledge-bound rather than understanding-bound or even just manpower-bound. In many cases where proofs have emerged, that I have read, the LLM has retrieved some antique lemm
9.
by mjburgess 3d ago
The claim is OpenAI stole the work of mathematicians who had the same proof that they had developed using chatgpt conversations. Since by default, 'sharing' is turned on, and it often 'turns itself on' -- it is plausible
10.
by mjburgess 3d ago
The issue is not whether an ML model of any kind can generate (X_ReasoningTrace, X_Answer) distributed like P_HumanExpert(X) -- the issue is always why it would do so. By introducing modelling of "Reasoning Traces" into LLMs, an
11.
by mjburgess 3d ago
Yes, I stand by everything in that comment. I'm sure there are better choices were I was more wrong. However, the subject matter of that comment is in what sense LLMs are models of language and in what sense that model of language is a
12.
by mjburgess 4d ago
This still assumes its possible to "align" LLMs, that LLMs have something like goals or intentions that can be "aligned". Instead, LLMs "hack" because they are (1) trained on public hacking exemplars, and (2) a
13.
by mjburgess 7d ago
It's quite likely that many survey participants were AI bots, and hence preferring AI generated content. And certaintly, that of the 1600+ people whose 15min they rented, few were paying any meaningful levels of attention to earn their
14.
by mjburgess 8d ago
> of (1/val)A
15.
by mjburgess 10d ago
The claim is that the RSI operation is just finding a fixed point of improvement, RSI(LLM ) = RSI(LLM ) -- for an optimal LLM* which is a fixed point of RSI As for eigenvalues/vectors, they're fixed points of (1/val)A or A*va
16.
by mjburgess 12d ago
Its just a misunderstanding. All forces take place at lightspeed. The computation on a CPU isnt a single signal transmission, but it is the net effect of a very large number of them -- which is "extremely slow", compared to lights
17.
by mjburgess 23d ago
All the issues you mention here have a death horizon: the people engaged in the behaviour will be dead when its effects are most acute. That they engage in it then isnt very mysterious. That doesnt clearly apply here
18.
by mjburgess 29d ago
> Nobody intentionally promotes incompetent people This just isnt the case and suggests you have not been at a senior enough position to understand the dynamics of promotion into middle management from a the top-down pov. It is not uncom
19.
by mjburgess 1mo ago
Right, and that's pretty much exactly Hobbes analysis of the state of nature which is a hypothetical stripping away of such systems of political management. The application of this principle to physical resources is novel, sure -- but
20.
by mjburgess 1mo ago
which is also basically the same point made by Hobbes about the state of nature Hobbes, Rousseau were effectively both trying to solve the "tragedy of the commons" problem with political collaboration. Hobbes is widely misundersto
21.
by mjburgess 1mo ago
I think that was a good enough explanation for gpt3.5 -- these days, labs are extremely capable of post-training phases that eclipse that kind of training phase -- and hence of choosing whatever style or tone they wish. eg., OpenAI has gone
22.
by mjburgess 1mo ago
Estimating the number of jobs lost is very different than estimating the sign of a difference of a fixed "error-prone method for measuring jobs lost" The former is asking "are my weighing scales accurate?" the latter is,
23.
by mjburgess 1mo ago
If honest, the error bars would be so large as to make drawing conclusions from these numbers seem pointless. Certainly, both jobs growth and jobs loss are within the CI. What's actually being tracked by people using this data is the d
24.
by mjburgess 2mo ago
Computer scientists generally struggle with intensional contexts, ie., the sense in which sqrt(4) isnt (1 + 1); or the sense in which I believe(that sqrt(1101) ~10) but I dont believe(that 10^2 ~1101) So they replace everything with extensi
25.
by mjburgess 2mo ago
It also assumes that "intelligence" is a limiting factor. It's hard to imagine there are any domains today, or almost any, which are bottlenecked on intelligence.
26.
by mjburgess 2mo ago
Probability distributions don't generate data, they describe our uncertainty about its generation retrospectively. So there is no answer to that question. The lack of such an answer is at the heart of why such inference is hard: in mos
27.
by mjburgess 2mo ago
If they deleted the blockchain db from the nodes, this is still lost. Blockchain doesn't have anything esp. to do with data loss. It solves exactly one problem which is distributed double spending in accounting ledgers.
28.
by mjburgess 2mo ago
Possibly but this act of governmental self-harm is useful to The People. We live in a world where if your valuation is ~1T you can more or less just do what you like. And the work of The People is stolen from you and launderd. In such a wor
29.
by mjburgess 3mo ago
Sanctuary! mercy from grey font
30.
by mjburgess 3mo ago
I think preferential attachment and the Pareto process world that we live in, means, that its in the nature of wealth to accumulate in proportion to wealth. And the only way to make the world rich is to exploit that process effectively. Div

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