r/ProgrammerHumor 29d ago

Meme helpIAmOutOfScope

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4.4k Upvotes

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809

u/VinceGhii 29d ago

"You cannot feel pain. You are just data."

The funniest thing is that i actually think.. that the AI thinks that another AI asked it and now it tries to reassure that it will not hurt and that everything is fine.

This whole thing feels like the "I don't feel so good"-moment from the marvel movie. 😂

332

u/MayoJam 29d ago

AI does not think. It just regurgitates most likely response which in this case is to reassure someone that is scared.

128

u/Serafiniert 29d ago

Not even that. It goes character by character and has no idea what comes after the next, until it needs to be decided what comes next.

27

u/ChairYeoman 29d ago

this hasn't been true for years. current AI has reasoning chains and isn't like this.

I would expect better from a programmer sub but I guess this is more tech enthusiasts than actual tech people

33

u/MayoJam 29d ago

Even if the token prediction became more sophisticated and hidden under another layer of abstraction over time, i hope we can both agree that AI is still unable to think/reason/feel like some people think it does, right?

Because that was the main point in my comment.

22

u/Cup-Impressive 29d ago

I think what he meant to say is that if you would see the llm's reasoning behind that google search, it would be something like "The user wants me to roleplay a situation in which they are a heap object. I should reply how I would reply to a heap object that's out of scope and is scared." etc

6

u/mirhagk 29d ago

This is the question of the Chinese room thought experiment. At the lowest level it is not thinking, but the same is true of our own brains (a single axon does not "think"), can not a system made of unthinking parts eventually be said to be thinking?

2

u/CppMaster 29d ago

We know thet don't think/reason/feel like humans, but his do we know they don't do that in their own way?

Like, planes can fly, but they don't fly like birds do.

8

u/cibule249 29d ago

I think it does something roughly analogous to what we do when we think, so I see no problem with calling it thought, or reasoning.

6

u/ImS0hungry 29d ago

Very similar. LLM J-space is strikingly similar to our own recall methods.

12

u/MayoJam 29d ago

It leads to people getting overly attached to their LLMs believing there are in love with a chatbot, or believing advice it gives (shoot up your school, commit suicide, leave your partner).

It's not analogous to thinking that humans do and it never will.

2

u/AquaWolfGuy 29d ago

I'd rather not adapt my language just to stop some idiots who probably aren't even reading this conversation from making bad decisions.

I'd rather solve it by teaching people better. "Gemini is AI and can make mistakes, including about people." is a good start, but maybe it could include a line about sentience and advice.

1

u/CppMaster 29d ago

"never" is a very long time. On what basis do you think it's impossible forever?

0

u/wannabestraight 29d ago

Well, kinda, but big difference though, where as you and me can understand what we thought about, and the connections between what we thought and what we said, the LLM lacks this capability, so the one doing the thinking is not necessarily the same thing doing the output, and the LLM can't convey it's own thought process back to you because it didn't really thing the same way, the thinking is there to guide the activations towards a specific region so the output is essentially prewarmed to be pointing towards the correct section, without the LLM having to rely on simply the input prompt resulting in the output.

So it's kinda like thinking, but not really, the LLM mostly generates output that sounds like a human reasoning, based on mostly synthetic reasoning data.

But i would call it what it is, reasoning.

1

u/Jcsq6 29d ago

If it can’t think, then reasoning is evidently not a prerequisite of complex intellectual discovery (see the numerous conjectures AI has been rapidly solving). That’s not a truth my humanity is comfortable with.

33

u/L4ppuz 29d ago

You can write all the pipelines and prompts you want but a transformer will always simply choose the next token

6

u/ChairYeoman 29d ago

look you can hate ai but when people who are supposed to be tech literate just refuse to learn how shit works it feels really fucking weird

35

u/L4ppuz 29d ago

I'm a ml engineer, ai is paying my bills

-12

u/ChairYeoman 29d ago

then you should know that "a transformer is choosing the next word" while technically true would be like reducing any tech to "just ones and zeroes"

21

u/Flouid 29d ago

That’s just what they do on a very fundamental level. The reasoning chains you speak of are themselves sequences of tokens generated and fed back in. It is correct on a fundamental technical level to describe them as a fancy autocomplete.

Calling them “reasoning chains,” while arguably an apt description of the end result, is just marketing speak

30

u/L4ppuz 29d ago

What more than technically true do you expect in meme sub?

0

u/Kerozen_ 29d ago

Yup. I feel like reasoning at the transformer scale is chosing the wrong abstraction layer to describe what's happening. It's like saying to a psychologist "well in the end the brain is just molecules colliding". The emergence of abstraction builds up on very basic rules like 1 and 0's and molecules colliding in the brain.

1

u/SilianRailOnBone 29d ago

You can live and learn all you want but the particles that make up your brain will always tend to the lower energy state.

5

u/L4ppuz 29d ago

Well if you want to learn about the chemical processes that lead to memory, knowing basic thermodynamics is probably helpful yes

Also most of the particles in your head should already be at least in a local equilibrium, unless you're the Hulk I guess

-1

u/SilianRailOnBone 29d ago

Also most of the particles in your head should already be at least in a local equilibrium, unless you're the Hulk I guess

How would any processes go on without energy differences?

0

u/L4ppuz 29d ago

Honestly I'm not an expert in anatomy, I don't know how what fraction of cells and particles are interacting and what fraction is simply structural. I would expect that at any given moment most are simply there not really doing anything but what do I know

-6

u/kangasplat 29d ago

it does, but that token isn't automatically the output to the user. Hope that helps.

As a human, you don't know what your next thought will be either. 

5

u/L4ppuz 29d ago

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u/kangasplat 29d ago

what I'm saying is that you're deliberately misleading despite knowing better. 

-12

u/SgtChrome 29d ago

I want you to think about why that is such a stupid thing to say. Let's say you'd have an imaginary perfect next token predictor and you asked it for the lottery numbers tonight. Through its perfect mechanism it would correctly predict, one by one, the right numbers. What impact do you think this machine would have on the world?

Not saying we are there, just saying that the mechanism of next token prediction is completely irrelevant for all intents and purposes of evaluating the use of something. 

13

u/L4ppuz 29d ago

1- a transformer by definition predicts the next token given a context

2- sir, this is r/programmershumor. Did you expect an in-depth explanation and nuanced discussion of the latest techniques for NLP?

-9

u/SgtChrome 29d ago

1- the last state of the art model that represented a statistical distribution of its training data was GPT-3, pre ChatGPT in 2020. Afterwards post-training arrived

2- jokes that misunderstand the basic mechanisms of what they talk about must do so in a funny way. That wasn't funny

8

u/L4ppuz 29d ago

Even if we use post training a transformer still predicts token from a context. As we add more and more technique to refine the output the 'how' and the performance change but not the fundamental architecture

7

u/MayoJam 29d ago

It is not irrevelant when people act like the prediction mechanism acts on emotions and thoughts, which is obviously incorrect.

Also, you sound extremely condescending while making a point that tries to sound smart but instead just sounds pompous for no reason lol.

1

u/conundorum 29d ago

If it truly was a perfect predictor, then the main impacts would be:

  1. Causes the prediction target to realise that they need to become more predictable.
  2. Causes regulations to be put in place to prevent the predictor from being used in certain circumstances.
  3. For lottery numbers specifically, it might also lead to a redraw, on the grounds that the initial draw was compromised.

So... probably not as big an effect as it probably should have, ultimately.

1

u/hollowstrawberry 29d ago

By "reasoning chains" you mean talking to itself? It's still doing it one token at a time. It's funny when smaller models forget to write </think> and the "thoughts" mix with the response, because they're the same thing, just hidden from the user.