I question the value of this type of research altogether which is why I stopped following it as closely as yourself. I generally see them as an exercise in assigning labels to subsets of a complex system. However, I do see how the COT paper adds some value in designing more advanced LLMs.
You keep quoting research ad-verbum as if it's gospel so miss my point (and forms part of the apeal to authority I mentioned previously). It is entirely expected that neural networks would form connections outside of the training data (emergent capabilities). How else would they be of use? This article dresses up the research as some kind of groundbreaking discovery, which is what people take issue with.
If this article was entitled "Researchers find patterns in neural networks that might help make more effective ones" no one would have a problem with it, but also it would not be newsworthy.
I posit that Category Theory offers an explanation for these phenomena without having to delve into poorly defined terms like "understanding", "skills", "emergence" or Monty Python's Dead Parrot. I do so with no hot research topics at all or papers to hide behind, just decades old mathematics. Do you have an opinion on that?
You're nearly there... The word "understanding" is the core premise of what the article claims to have found. If not for that, then the "research" doesn't really amount to much.
As has been mentioned, this then becomes a semantic/philosophical debate about what "understanding" actually means and a short Wikipedia or dictionary definition does not capture that discussion.
There you go arguing in bad faith again by putting words in my mouth and reducing the nuance of what was said.
You do know dissertations are articles and don't constitute any form or rigorous proof in and of themselves? Seems like you have a very rudimentary understanding of English, which might explain why you keep struggling with semantics. If that is so, I apologise because definitions are difficult when it comes to language, let alone ESL.
I didn't dispute that NNs can arrive at a theorem. I debate whether they truly understand the theorem they have encoded in their graphs as you claim.
This is a philosophical/semantical debate as to what "understanding" actually is because there's not really any evidence that they are any more than clever pattern recognition algorithms driven by mathematics.
You're being downvoted because you provide no tangible evidence for your opinion that human consciousness can be reduced to a graph that can be modelled by a neural network.
Addidtionally, you don't seem to respond to any of the replies you receive in good faith and reach for anecdotal evidence wherever possible.
I also personally don't like the appeal to authority permeating your posts. Just because someone who wants to secure more funding for their research has put out a blog post, it doesn't make it true in any scientific sense.
Seems to me you are attempting to understand machine learning mathematics through articles.
That quote is not a retort to anything I said.
Look up Category Theory. It demonstrates how the laws of mathematics can be derived by forming logical categories. From that you should be able to imagine how a neural network could perform a similar task within its structure.
It is not understanding, just encoding to arrive at correct results.
It wouldn't reverse engineer anything. It would start by weighting neurons based on it's training set of Pythagorean triples. Over time this would get tuned to represent Pythag in the form of mathematical graphs.
This is not "understanding" as most people would know it. More like a set of encoded rules.
So somewhere in there I'd expect nodes connected to represent the Othello grid. They wouldn't necessarily be in a grid, just topologically the same graph.
Then I'd expect millions of other weighted connections to represent the moves within the grid including some weightings to prevent illegal moves. All based on mathematics and clever statistical analysis of the training data. If you want to refer to things as tokens then be my guest but it's all graphs.
If you think I'm getting closer to your point can you just explain it properly? I don't understand what you think a neural network model is or what you are trying to teach me with Pythag.
They operate by weighting connections between patterns they identify in their training data. They then use statistics to predict outcomes.
I am not particularly surprised that the Othello models built up an internal model of the game as their training data were grid moves. Without loooking into it I'd assume the most efficient way of storing that information was in a grid format with specific nodes weighted to the successful moves. To me that's less impressive than the LLMs.
Think you're slightly missing the point. I agree that LLMs will get better and better to a point where interacting with one will be indistinguishable from interacting with a human. That does not make them sentient.
The debate is really whether all of our understanding and human experience of the world comes down to weighted values on a graph or if the human brain is hiding more complex, as-yet-undiscovered, phenomena than that.
We define concepts like consciousness and intelligence. They may be related or may not depending on your definitions, but the whole premise here is about experience regardless of the terms we use.
I wouldn't say Fibonacci being found everywhere is in any way related to either and is certainly not an expression of logic.
I suspect it's something like the simplest method nature has of controlling growth. Much like how hexagons are the sturdiest shape, so appear in nature a lot.
Grass/rocks being conscious is really out there! If that hypothesis was remotely feasible we couldn't talk about things being either consciousness or not, it would be a sliding scale with rocks way below grass. And it would be really stretching most people's definition of consciousness.
Redacted @ Redacted @lemmy.world Posts 1Comments 220Joined 2 yr. ago
I question the value of this type of research altogether which is why I stopped following it as closely as yourself. I generally see them as an exercise in assigning labels to subsets of a complex system. However, I do see how the COT paper adds some value in designing more advanced LLMs.
You keep quoting research ad-verbum as if it's gospel so miss my point (and forms part of the apeal to authority I mentioned previously). It is entirely expected that neural networks would form connections outside of the training data (emergent capabilities). How else would they be of use? This article dresses up the research as some kind of groundbreaking discovery, which is what people take issue with.
If this article was entitled "Researchers find patterns in neural networks that might help make more effective ones" no one would have a problem with it, but also it would not be newsworthy.
I posit that Category Theory offers an explanation for these phenomena without having to delve into poorly defined terms like "understanding", "skills", "emergence" or Monty Python's Dead Parrot. I do so with no hot research topics at all or papers to hide behind, just decades old mathematics. Do you have an opinion on that?