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Comments (151)

• sumitkumar
  The weights start with a random manifold. The training takes data and shapes the manifold, weight by weight, in many cycles. Once the training is the done manifold is fixed.When a new inference has to be done the query(q) is projected in the manifold space. This projection is dropped on the manifold and the gravity of the manifold gives an answer of q+1 length. Which(qw+i) is dropped qw+n times to output a final response of n length.The gravity is created by repeated multiplication(of the weights/input) to find out how the projected embeddings should fall according to the manifold in the GPU.
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  Planktonne
  The original story is an original work made by a human consciousness exploring how it might be different from other forms of consciousness.This one is a pastiche made by a human consciousness borrowing extremely heavily from another human consciousness justifying why something else might be another form of consciousness.That rather undercuts the point; if this was generated by an LLM unprompted, it would be different, but it isn't. You could perform exactly the same rhetorical trick with a toaster or anything else.
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  kami23
  This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it.I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness.For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigger its internal state of certain phenomena, and that sent me down a rabbit hole that I'm still exploring.This story resonated with a lot of questions that can come out of figuring a good solid answer to the what is consciousness question. The one I triggered for me is: Is our perception of time just a slow thread in the giant GPU we are running the universe on? Or more generally, what is time? That's a fun YouTube rabbit hole if you ever need one.
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  noosphr
  It's not often I see something that's fractally wrong but here we are.There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer.There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177The point of the original short story is that the computational substrate doesn't matter when you have Turing completeness. This one seems to think that you don't need structure and interpretability just because you change substrates.
• spacebacon
  They are semiotic infrastructure frozen in a state. We shouldn't keep pretending this is cognitive and using cognitive terms to frame. It’s incredibly stupid. Sorry to inform all of us computer scientist that semiotics has your milk.
• eclipticplane
  The short film version of the original is great, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHgIt stars Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey!
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  samrus
  I have to agree. It is messed up that transformers can just talk, and it been pretty normalized. We are only talking about the impact they will have and whether they can do what people say they can, but we arent talking about how crazy it is that they can talk
• unglaublich
  Linear algebra can indeed not do it. You need non-linearity to get the expressivity that we see in LLMs.
• bronlund
  This is funny! Not only is it a nod to Terry Bisson, but it even gives his text a new dimension. Well done :)
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  voidUpdate
  Hey, it's not just weights! It's biases too!
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  dsign
  Oh, this was a fun read and one that kids should have in school before they turn ten.Because we are not taking things seriously. If ClosedAI or DeepDisTrust or Posthropic come up with something that quacks like a sentient being, our built-in innate reaction is going to be to scorn it, dismiss it and end the conversation. The alternative, to even consider that we fungible creatures who live in apple-eating-sin that got us expelled from Eden can create alien souls, souls that are at the very least our equals, would be teleological Armageddon. It would force us to acknowledge the mutable nature of souls and the malleability of being. We would have to stop believing that the nature of disease and death is more divine than ourselves.
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  zkmon
  They are made out of data bits (memory) and switching bits (transistors/compute). Bits are made out of electric voltage and no voltage. Voltage is made out of flow of positive electric charges. Charges are made out of quarks ...
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  luca-ctx
  Truly fantastic bridge from the original, this deserves an award
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  topce
  Programers get replace by huge matrix multiplications ;-)
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  gobdovan
  You can take the weights and model description, write them down on a notebook, then, by hand, compute the next token. Try to do the same with meat.
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  ProllyInfamous
  Imagine writing something so incredibly brilliant (rather: adapting from the original) that it's entirely unlikely that you'll ever write something so incredible ever again.But congrats: this is absolutely & incredibly brilliant.Can't wait for the Jon Benjamin voiceover.
• anon
  undefined
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  satvikpendem
  Great concept. It would've been even more amusing if the entire thing were generated with AI instead, ironically.
• pstuart
  I couldn't help but grin like a fool reading this. Not only is it an artful parody but these thoughts have been thought.
• nikanj
  Really good read, thanks!
• turtleyacht
  Numbers that dream.
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  oofbey
  I love this. For anybody not getting the joke, it’s riffing on the classic 1990s essay “They’re made out of meat.”https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
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  CSSer
  It works until they get to the sentience part. Neat idea!
• fullstackchris
  The prose in the post is what I've been shouting from a rooftop since the LLM hype started.Just tokens produced by weights.Useful, but never forget that ground truth!
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  dvh
  Will they have their own Jesus?
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  Waterluvian
  It must have been kind of incredible early on to be exploring this tech and you’re suddenly getting what look like sentences.
• photochemsyn
  No mention of ‘static’ vs. ‘dynamic’ is a bit disappointing in reference to the weights. Because you could argue that every neuron in your nervous system can be modeled as a collection of weights, firing likelihoods, receptor sensitivities, current dynamic state of that neuron - but LLMs are static collections of weights at inference time, with the dynamic adjustment of weights takes place at training time. So, just a ROM construct, like something out of Neuromancer, just trained on all written knowledge, not just one person’s total lived experience.The above take fails in the real world because neuronal cells don’t exist in a vacuum; they are products of cellular development from a zygotic union of haploid contributors of sequential genetic information optimized for survival in an oxygen-rich biosphere powered largely by our local star that supports mammalian life (and microbial, plant, avian, etc.). Real AI would thus be AL - artificial life - as much as artificial intelligence. I don’t think you can have the one without the other, which upsets the simulationists who think an agent in the Matrix would be intelligent.What either interpretation implies is that any real ‘artificial’ intelligence would be no more artificial than you or I, but it would have to dynamically update its weights at the same speed a human nervous system could (think how quickly we learn not to poke a cactus). For it to be at all trustworthy, then like a human, it would have to undergo a socialization process, one of the results of which is the development of a sense of embarrassment when it breaks acceptable social norms.Hmm, this reminds me of the recent statement of the Pope about AI, of which I immediately thought, “Wait a second, aren’t there a fair number of people like this? The narcissistic sociopath profile, I think it’s called, a bit unfair to assume any real AI would turn out this way, isn’t it?”Pope: “ Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”