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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The full scene if anyone’s interested.

    Carl Weathers is an interesting contrast to Arnold. Arnold got his muscles by focusing on how he looked, on bodybuilding. Weathers developed his physique training for professional gridiron football. He played college football, then in the NFL (coached by John Madden) and CFL. Arnold used his unique physique as a way to get into movies without ever training as an actor. Weathers was studying theatre arts while playing college football, and finally finished the degree in 1974 just after retiring from pro football. He went on to get a master of theatre arts later.

    Both of them pivoted extremely successfully to comedy later in their careers, with Weathers doing Happy Gilmore and Arrested Development, and Arnold doing his whole variety of comedy movies.

    Also, good to know that Weathers loved this scene:

    “Predator, the handshake. That’s iconic,” says Weathers, grinning from ear to ear. “The director shot that scene beautifully. And it’s a great movie. You put that movie in the theater today and it works just as well as it did back in 1987.”

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/baby-carl-weathers-has-a-stew-going


  • Another similar “shortcut” I’ve heard about was that a system that analyzed job performance determined that the two key factors were being named “Jared” and playing lacrosse in high school.

    And, these are the easy-to-figure-out ones we know about.

    If the bias is more complicated, it might never be spotted.















  • I mean alledgedly ChatGPT passed the “bar-exam” in 2023. Which I find ridiculous considering my experiences with ChatGPT and the accuracy and usefulness I get out of it which isn’t that great at all

    Exactly. If it passed the bar exam it’s because the correct solutions to the bar exam were in the training data.

    The other side can immediately tell that somebody has made an imitation without understanding the concept.

    No, they can’t. Just like people today think ChatGPT is intelligent despite it just being a fancy autocomplete. When it gets something obviously wrong they say those are “hallucinations”, but they don’t say they’re “hallucinations” when it happens to get things right, even though the process that produced those answers is identical. It’s just generating tokens that have a high likelihood of being the next word.

    People are also fooled by parrots all the time. That doesn’t mean a parrot understands what it’s saying, it just means that people are prone to believe something is intelligent even if there’s nothing there.

    ChatGPT refuses to tell illegal things, NSFW things, also medical advice and a bunch of other things

    Sure, in theory. In practice people keep getting a way around those blocks. The reason it’s so easy to bypass them is that ChatGPT has no understanding of anything. That means it can’t be taught concepts, it has to be taught specific rules, and people can always find a loophole to exploit. Yes, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars on contractors in low-wage countries they think they’re getting better at blocking those off, but people keep finding new ways of exploiting a vulnerability.


  • Yeah, that’s basically the idea I was expressing.

    Except, the original idea is about “Understanding Chinese”, which is a bit vague. You could argue that right now the best translation programs “understand chinese”, at least enough to translate between Chinese and English. That is, they understand the rules of Chinese when it comes to subjects, verbs, objects, adverbs, adjectives, etc.

    The question is now whether they understand the concepts they’re translating.

    Like, imagine the Chinese government wanted to modify the program so that it was forbidden to talk about subjects that the Chinese government considered off-limits. I don’t think any current LLM could do that, because doing that requires understanding concepts. Sure, you could ban key words, but as attempts at Chinese censorship have shown over the years, people work around word bans all the time.

    That doesn’t mean that some future system won’t be able to understand concepts. It may have an LLM grafted onto it as a way to communicate with people. But, the LLM isn’t the part of the system that thinks about concepts. It’s the part of the system that generates plausible language. The concept-thinking part would be the part that did some prompt-engineering for the LLM so that the text the LLM generated matched the ideas it was trying to express.


  • The “learning” in a LLM is statistical information on sequences of words. There’s no learning of concepts or generalization.

    And what do you think language and words are for? To transport information.

    Yes, and humans used words for that and wrote it all down. Then a LLM came along, was force-fed all those words, and was able to imitate that by using big enough data sets. It’s like a parrot imitating the sound of someone’s voice. It can do it convincingly, but it has no concept of the content it’s using.

    How do you learn as a human when not from words?

    The words are merely the context for the learning for a human. If someone says “Don’t touch the stove, it’s hot” the important context is the stove, the pain of touching it, etc. If you feed an LLM 1000 scenarios involving the phrase “Don’t touch the stove, it’s hot”, it may be able to create unique dialogues containing those words, but it doesn’t actually understand pain or heat.

    We record knowledge in books, can talk about abstract concepts

    Yes, and those books are only useful for someone who has a lifetime of experience to be able to understand the concepts in the books. An LLM has no context, it can merely generate plausible books.

    Think of it this way. Say there’s a culture where instead of the written word, people wrote down history by weaving fabrics. When there was a death they’d make a certain pattern, when there was a war they’d use another pattern. A new birth would be shown with yet another pattern. A good harvest is yet another one, and so-on.

    Thousands of rugs from that culture are shipped to some guy in Europe, and he spends years studying them. He sees that pattern X often follows pattern Y, and that pattern Z only ever seems to appear following patterns R, S and T. After a while, he makes a fabric, and it’s shipped back to the people who originally made the weaves. They read a story of a great battle followed by lots of deaths, but surprisingly there followed great new births and years of great harvests. They figure that this stranger must understand how their system of recording events works. In reality, all it was was an imitation of the art he saw with no understanding of the meaning at all.

    That’s what’s happening with LLMs, but some people are dumb enough to believe there’s intention hidden in there.


  • That is to force it to form models about concepts.

    It can’t make models about concepts. It can only make models about what words tend to follow other words. It has no understanding of the underlying concepts.

    You can see that by asking them to apply their knowledge to something they haven’t seen before

    That can’t happen because they don’t have knowledge, they only have sequences of words.

    For example a cat is closer related to a dog than to a tractor.

    The only way ML models “understand” that is in terms of words or pixels. When they’re generating text related to cats, the words they’re generating are closer to the words related to dogs than the words related to tractors. When dealing with images, it’s the same basic idea. But, there’s no understanding there. They don’t get that cats and dogs are related.

    This is fundamentally different from how human minds work, where a baby learns that cats and dogs are similar before ever having a name for either of them.


  • Yeah. This is related to supernatural beliefs. If the grass moves it might just be a gust of wind, or it might be a snake. Even if snakes are rare, it’s better to be safe than sorry. But, that eventually leads to assuming that the drought is the result of an angry god, and not just some random natural phenomenon.

    So, brains are hard-wired to look for causes, even inventing supernatural causes, because it helps avoid snakes.