[FRIAM] a davew-ism

Thu Feb 13 15:34:28 EST 2025

The hazards of adult life have distanced me somewhat from these drivers, but I remember as a young adult often staying up all night to make progress on a project or just because I felt like the relevant facts were hot in cache.   

One could imagine within or across datacenter migrating work according to the location of Infiniband switches, or NUMA domains, because of temperature, or because of the dynamic cost of power.    These things are readily measured, e.g. nvidia-smi, and could be prepended to prompts.   Behavior of the response could thus change based on these things.   

More directly, the energy availability or heat dissipation could control the beam search depth of the LLM.  (Like I might be terse and bitchy if I was hungry.)   It's not hard to imagine evolutionary learning of these things where policies would proliferate or become extinct based on energy budgets.

Claude is happy to suggest some analogues of hallucinogens for LLMs.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2025 11:39 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] a davew-ism

While I agree about many of us thinking the analogy is weaker than it is, I disagree that the surprisal registered by Claude when it was working for a clean evaluation is similar to our surprisal minimization. Dave tried to address this with his comment about hallucinogens in contrast to positive feedback drugs like uppers or downers. Our "world diffs" do exist to some extent. And the LLMs are better at it than we are.

But what the LLMs don't yet have, I think, is that interestingness drive, the willingness to destroy ourselves merely to find something, anything *interesting*. For interestingness, we're willing to open the surprisal flood gates and risk our entire minds/bodies to be destroyed ... or, at least, many of us are willing. Many of us are not, I guess.

And I've tried to point out that monists, whether one's pantheon comprises quarks or gods, tend to fall on the latter side, dreading the day when/if their mind/body will be destroyed. I forget who it was that suggested the true Turing Test is suicide. But it rings true to me.

On 2/13/25 11:25 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> In Alex Garland's Civil War, the protagonists remark on people in the heartland that are “trying to pretend this isn’t happening".  IRL, with both Trump 1.0 and 2.0 I recall people saying they would stop reading the news until the country returned to normal.   It seems there are examples of people that take life in batches or simply calcify.   Long delays from pretraining isn't necessarily a fatal flaw for passing the Turing Test.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
> Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2025 11:17 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] a davew-ism
> 
> You reported Claude reacting yesterday, changing how it imported a math function into JavaScript.
> 
> I often use "git diff" with Claude to let it take a crack at what changed in a codebase to cause a bug.  Claude is happy to read diffs.
> 
> Imagine instead of "git diff", "world diff".   Those diffs could accumulate in a giant context window or be merged into the next pretraining session.  I understand that even Gemini is only a 2M window, but with multi gigawatt data centers, who knows how quickly they be able to turn around new versions of these LLMs.
> 
> If training material was unconstrained, I could certainly see the probability distribution of any user query to result in responses like "Don't bother it’s a dumb idea", or "Progress is impossible", "Stop bothering me putz", etc.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2025 11:06 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] a davew-ism
> 
> But Roger's point still stands, AFAIK. I can imagine some group has allocated the resources to an LLM to simply explore, say, mathematics with a APIs to things like Sage, Lean, et al. All it would take is for some importation of a real random number that pricks the LLM to go query the APIs with arbitrary questions ... and keep following that thread until it got bored (whatever it might mean for an LLM to get bored ... maybe if it pings the APIs several thousand times and the variation in the repsonses is below some epsilon - or the variation stays above some constant). Then the real random number generator would prick it again and off it goes again. I can imagine it. But who would fund such a thing?
> 
> Regardless of all the other differences between an LLM and a human, 
> this one seems fundamental ... the impetus to keep chunking along 
> rather than being mostly reactionary. I have zero idea why Dave's 
> heart still beats. But I do have some idea about why my own does. 
> While it may seem like it's of its own accord, it's not. There's a 
> little random number generator in there somewhere. When it stops 
> poking me, I suspect I'll drop dead. And it won't matter how, or what 
> with, I'm prompted because I'll be dead. 8^D
> 
> GPT and Claude won't die. They may stop reacting. But they can't die because they don't have that little urge driving them. They can't die. They're just really big databases with "natural" interfaces.
> 
> Useless anecdote. A "friend" once insulted me by saying "you're the most consistent person I know". He said that because we'd just started talking again after a long hiatus. The main reason that's an insult is because it falsified, or seemed to depending on our estimation of his abilities, all the changes I thought I'd gone through during the hiatus.
> 
> On 2/13/25 10:33 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Consider a (hyper) box of available knowledge.  Knowledge includes
>> skills and descriptions of experiences.   We live our lives visiting different but overlapping small parts of this box.   LLMs vacuum-up more knowledge than any one person can consume or create.   With steadily increasing fidelity and generality they capture it.   Private subjective experiences of human individuals are not recorded at all.  If they were, they’d be hoovered up by the LLM and generalized -- many subjective experiences will be recorded because they will be described in biographies, blogs, art and so on.  Since LLMs are universal interpolators, they will likely be better at mimicking human reports of feelings than say, I would be.  The LLM has seen more of humanity than I have, albeit through a portal that is very different than my suite of sensors.   The diversity and bandwidth of sensors could likely be made competitive to my sensors.  Olfaction and tactile sensitivity will take some work, I suppose. As you point, out, there is copious pornography (and other sorts of hedonism) multimodal LLMs could hoover up to understand the human condition.
>>
>>
>> LLMs now suffer from batching of their “consciousness”.  Pretraining takes months. LLMs are now forever behind on current events.  Refinement of training by reflection on queries is also delayed by as much or more.    In contrast, I also have some latency in my perceptual systems.   My reaction time is maybe a1/10^th of a second, compared to microseconds for a microprocessor.  (The coding speed of LLMs is essentially instantaneous compared to humans.)   It seems to me this is just a question of scale, not a qualitative difference.  In any case, the batching is something that can be driven down with engineering.
>>
>> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Prof David 
>> West
>> *Sent:* Thursday, February 13, 2025 9:46 AM
>> *To:* friam at redfish.com
>> *Subject:* [FRIAM] a davew-ism
>>
>> A very personal narrative that you might not want to engage. If so, please simply ignore and delete.
>>
>> Centers on the question of AI “intelligence/consciousness.”
>>
>>     ____
>>
>> 1-I started reading by the age of four, mostly comic books (some were quasi-non-fiction, like /Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land/) and “children’s literature.” I have read more than 10,000 books in my lifetime, averaging .75 per day. A reasonably large “training set.”
>>
>> 2-Through high school, my reading focused on Science Fiction, Science (astrophysics, astronomy, quantum physics, some math, some biology), and Porn. (I was a fixture in a bookstore in Albuquerque that had an adult back room and no one noticed if I disappeared there for an hour or two.) However, the science fiction, in particular, often created an interest in reading about the ideas presented in the novel. For example, A.E. van Vogt’s, /World of Null-A/, led me to read Korzibski’s /Manhood of Humanity/ and /Science and Sanity/ by the age of 10: An episode of /The Outer Limits/, prompted me to read Kant’s /Critique of Pure Reason/;  Vonnegut’s /Sirens of Titan/ was shelved in SF and that led to reading /Cat’s Cradle/ and more.
>>
>> 3- I have always been pretty good at remembering, integrating, correlating, and recalling what I have read.
>>
>> 4-Freshman year of high-school, scored 187 on IQ test. Used that result to become the youngest, at that time, member of Mensa. (I still have membership card and yellow map pin, plus copy of Salt Lake Tribune columnist’s article.) I won a National Merit Scholarship and my SAT scores were 99 percentiles in language, 87th in math.  (I took the GRE in History for grad school and scored a 98th percentile despite never taking a course in western history since high-school.) *NOTE: this does not mean I am intelligent, only that my “knowledge base” was greater than that of people 20 years my senior. *All that reading!
>>
>> 5-I “suffer???” from a psychological disconnect, psychopathic-like, 
>> from other people. I do not ‘feel’, do not experience, do not 
>> empathize with others. I lack any kind of ‘conscience’ or external 
>> morality. I do have a kind of ‘receptive empathy’ in that I sense, 
>> receive as inputs, the emotions and feelings of others, but have no 
>> internal sense of same. Sometimes, I use the analogy of an 
>> old-fashioned radio, all antenna but no crystal resonating to the 
>> signals received. (I do have “appetites:” wanting to know everything, 
>> wanting to experience everything (at least once), and constantly 
>> craving more complex and intense sensations/experiences. (I don’t do 
>> opium, coke, alcohol, etc. because the experiences are repetitive but 
>> love hallucinogens for the exact opposite reason.)
>>
>> 6-Today, I am a "good Christian," *IN* the World, but no *OF* it. Or, more accurately, akin to the homunculus in Searle’s Chinese Room. I receive massive amounts of input from and about human beings and their inner ‘being’, use my reasonably large knowledge-base to flawlessly interpret those inputs (surprisingly, perhaps, the porn actually helps in this regard), and generate a, mostly, flawless projection of myself as a human being. I do not experience, intrinsically, what other humans experience; do not ‘feel’ what other humans ‘feel.” This is a criticism oft made of computer-based AI, arguing against their being conscious/aware/intelligent. I am also pretty good at providing reasonable answers to a large variety of questions.
>>
>> 7-Am I an AI?
>>
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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