[FRIAM] deducing underlying realities from emergent realities

[Marcus Daniels]

Anyone that has looked at job ads for these companies can see that they are putting extensive effort into reinforcement learning and developing focused training. It’s not like one is limited to training on stuff on the internet (or even copyrighted physics textbooks). They can teach LLMs how programming/physics/whatever works by giving example programs and then running them. (This isn’t the same thing as using a LLM to extend data.) The robot taxi companies have extensive training that is simulated physics, for example.

In terms of copyright material, I see the Atlantic is providing their archives: 

https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2024/05/atlantic-product-content-partnership-openai/678529/ <https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2024/05/atlantic-product-content-partnership-openai/678529/>



From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org>
Date: Sunday, November 17, 2024 at 8:46 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <Friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] deducing underlying realities from emergent realities 

Sabine is wondering about reported failures of the new generations of LLM's to scale the way the their developers expected. 


https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/11/ai-scaling-hits-wall-rumours-say-how.html <https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/11/ai-scaling-hits-wall-rumours-say-how.html> 



On one slide she essentially draws the typical picture of an emergent level of organization arising from an underlying reality and asserts, as every physicist knows, that you cannot deduce the underlying reality from the emergent level. Ergo, if you try to deduce physical reality from language, pictures, and videos you will inevitably hit a wall, because it can not be done. 



So she's actually grinding two axes at once: one is AI enthusiasts who expect LLM's to discover physics, and the other is AI enthusiasts who foresee no end to the improvement of LLM's as they throw more data and compute effort at them. 



But, of course, the usual failure of deduction runs in the opposite direction, you can't predict the emergent level from the rules of the underlying level. Do LLM's believe in particle collliders? Or do they think we hallucinated them? 



-- rec -- 



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