this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
184 points (91.8% liked)
Technology
59424 readers
2961 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Many of the building blocks of computing come from complex abstractions built on top of less complex abstractions built on top of even simpler concepts in algebra and arithmetic. If Q* can pass middle school math, then building more abstractions can be a big leap.
Huge computing resources only seem ridiculous, unsustainable, and abstract until they aren't anymore. Like typing messages a bending glass screens for other people to read...
The thing is, in general computing it was humans who figured out how to build the support for complex abstractions up from support for the simplest concepts, whilst this would have to not just support the simple concepts but actually figure out and build support for complex abstractions by itself to be GAI.
Training a neural network to do a simple task (such as addition) isn't all that hard (I get the impression that the "breaktrough" here is that they got an LLM - which is a very specific kind of NN, for language - to do it), getting it to by itself build support for complex abstractions from support for simpler concepts is something else altogether.
I know jack shit, but actual mastery of first principles would seem a massive leap in LLM development. A shift from talented bullshitter to deductive extrapolator does sound worthy of notice/concern.
The simplest way to get an LLM to "do" maths is to have it translate human language tokens relative to Maths to a standard set of Maths tokens, then passing it to a perfectly normal library that does Maths and then translating the results back into human language tokens: easy-peasy LLM "does Maths" only it doesn't, it's just integrated with something else (which was coded by a human) that does the maths and only serves as a translation layer.
Further, the actually implementation of the LLM itself is already doing Maths. For example a single neuron can add 2 numbers by having 2 inputs each with a weight of 1 and a single output because that's exactly how the simplest of neurons already calculate an output from its inputs in a standard neural networks implementation - it can do simple Maths because the very implementation is already doing maths: the "ability" to do maths is supported by the programming language in which the LLM was then coded, so the LLM would be doing maths with as much cognition as a human does food digestion.
Given the amount of bullshit in the AI domain, I would be very very weary of presuming this breakthrough being anywhere near an entirelly independent self-assembled (as in, trained rather than coded) maths engine.
This sounds very knowledgeable. If the reporting is to be believed, why do you think the OpenAI folks might be so impressed by the Q* model’s skills in simple arithmetic?