I don’t agree with this. The things people care about with code quality if you really think about it actually match up surprisingly well with the metric which models are trained to emulate in pre training, namely compression and modularity. Those two ideas actually seem to be universal to intelligent systems. Writing verbose highly coupled code is I think provably stupid, though I don’t know that I could formalize it.
Sure, but unless you’ve got some exceptionally deep pockets, congress has seemingly no interest in turning the fact that it’s ethically bankrupt into any practical recourse.
Ai companies got where they are by stealing all of the intellectual property from human history. It seems entirely likely that their goal is to purloin everything produced going forward as well.
Hf’s python / transformers is a hot mess. It conflates so many different ideas into huge monoliths that it’s barely usable for anything other than the small snippets listed for trying out models.
They need to take a machete to all the cross coupling they’ve metastasized.
That's a great question. I learned it on HN. Some searching around suggests it originated as an empirical observation in the local LLM space around 2023-2024
It's obviously just a rough approximation. Actual scaling laws suggested in published papers are a lot more complex, and even then you run into issues (architecture changes, effects like better training, putting intelligence on a one-dimensional axis is stupid in the first place, etc). But as an approximation it holds up pretty well for normal-ish ratios between active and total parameters
What a disgusting mess. Hopefully at some point people will be willing to listen to arguments in the vein of: “we spent $x dollars writing y loc that was then reviewed using z hours that did nothing, added no revenue and we then spent w additional budget removing it”
I would argue, that the null hypothesis is that it is not, and that anyone claiming that there is a mote of consciousness are the ones with the burden of proof.
The null hypothesis is that we don't know jack shit about consciousness. Any claim of certainty seems extraordinary to me and I want to hear the evidence.
We know quite a lot about consciousness. You may not, but we know enough to know the informational dynamics in a brain are vastly different from an LLMs.
Exactly what kind of certainty are you looking for? Happy to provide it at a molecular, cellular, tissue or whole brain level.
Let me address the p-zombie first: it's a biological impossibly. Saying a p-zombie can be conceived of that has no inner feeling is like saying I can conceive of a philosophical star that radiates dark. Very nice that you can do that, but it's physically meaningless.
Why does biology preclude a philosophical zombie? Because every year we find new evidence of how utterly interdependent brain processes are and how tied to the experiential history of an organism.
We have mapped out the initial engrams that form in response to a new salient memory, and seen that 1. Time of day, 2. Physical location 3. Internal state all unique to the organism drive it's specific response, the specific way it saves the memory, etc.
That is, the organisms path history, it's interactions with the environment over space and time, shape it specifically based on the spaces and times IT experienced.
Take circadian rhythms, the internal timekeeping system all animals have. You feel it go haywire when you have jetlag. That is quite literally a history dependent response from your circadian clock to unexpected light.
Your p-zombie, if you specify it to have exactly your rhythms, will then need to have identical molecules being produced at identical times in every single cell, because that is how circadian rhythms are instantiated in all life, it's in each cell, and these cells can be synchronized, or, due to events like long distance travel or shift work, desynchronize. When desynchronized, you feel it, you feel different parts of your body adjusting, your meals shift, your taste and mood for food shifts...
Now, to put this in perfective, a human has about 36 trillion of their own cells, and an equal quantity of single cells symbiotes and commensal organisms, which give off all kinds of chemicals that shape, among other things, the circadian rhythms we talked about.
Now can you tell me: does the p zombie have not judt an identical compliment of 70 trillion odd cells, and they will all be in the same phase all the time as the cells in the non-zombie conscious person?
If so... How is this masterful phase synchrony across space achieved? What physical process allows for this?
If you cannot conceive of a way to do this synchrony (and you won't, basic physics forbids it), I think the sensible conclusion is to stop worrying about the philosophical zombies, and start looking at what information we have about actual humans and animals.
I brought up clocks to make a point, but actually, the evidence is building the biological clock is foundational for consciousness:
Yes we can say it has conscious experience. The content and depth of it, we cannot yet fully grok, and of course, what it feels like from inside the ant is something we never will know.
Nope. It’s got a genuine off state, when it’s out of a cell, where it lacks agency. It’s dormant and can be taken up by a cell only by chance, not through its own active efforts. It bears none of the descriptive hallmarks of consciousness, nor is there any internal physical dynamic inherent to a virus. By definition it needs a host to start having a dynamic, and ant that point, it anctivates its drive, which is singular: reproduction and transmission, which it must balance.
And this is where you see viruses show the beginning of agency, in the making of this choice. They do show some signs of sensing their environment , even communicating with each other, through a process called quorum sensing, to decide if they should follow a lysogeny (integrate and stay quiet) or lysis (rapidly replicate and destroy the cell).
Note, this requires a host, so in so far as we can talk of a viral consciousness, it’s restricted to finding a suitable host.
There’s also recent work on viruses upon host entry showing some sensing. Usually a single molecule for which they already have a receptor. So you can begin to see the thin levels of awareness a virus has. But it still can’t do anything on its own beyond deciding to not infect.
I’d argue viruses are right at the edge of consciousness, just as they are right at the edge of life. They can hijack life and demonstrate much more life like properties, including a proto consciousness.
But they have no internal clock. They are always sensing the environment through multiple rich channels, nor do they have an active biochemistry they need to maintain when they’re dormant.
Consciousness adjacent? Consciousness-compatible? Both seem to fit viruses. And also LLMs, funnily enough.
Would you want evidence that your your bicycle is not conscious? It can sense your inputs. It responds to the environment. The gears do multiplication (reasoning!).
To make the claim that an object is not conscious you need to both define what consciousness even is, then you need to make a machine capable of measuring it.
If you have done neither or those things then any claim you have about a bicycle's consciousness is just baseless speculation.
Regardless -- if we don't know jack shit about consciousness (your words), then any claims of LLMs being conscious are by definition untestable, pure speculation and based on no evidence at all.
People keep saying this, but it's not true. We know a lot about consciousness. There's a lot we don't know about it, of course, but "jack shit" is wildly incorrect.
> I want to hear the evidence.
If you believe LLMs are conscious, then the onus is on you to provide evidence of such.
the onus is on whoever is making a positive claim.
If you are stating "LLMs are not conscious" you need to provide evidence, just like how if you are stating "LLMs are conscious" you need to provide evidence.
Presumably the intended outcome would be that sites would be pressured into not being malignant actors with regards to user privacy, rather than everyone just ignoring the security notice.
i understand the intention, and i offered my opinion on what the actual outcome would be.
~every piece of data can be used for fingerprinting. settings and preferences, browser, os, etc. fingerprinting is not its own category of data, it's the correlation of regular data.
the "pressure" ends up being: stop receiving any data at all (which would obviously break ~everything), or put up a warning (leading to fatigue).
consider accessibility settings: absolutely required for some people to browse the internet, but also extremely high-value data for fingerprinting a user.
there is no technical method to know whether a site asking about a visitor's accessibility settings is doing it so that they can properly display content or so that they can fingerprint the visitor. (i.e. there is no "evil bit")
I touched on this in my article, once the data has been collected and sent to their servers you have no idea what they do with the information. At least with GDPR it is supposed to be regulated but obviously that is not the case everywhere and websites can still lie.
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