>“As per The Information, Meta employees used a total of 60.2 trillion AI tokens (!!) in 30 days. If this was charged at Anthropic’s API prices, it would cost $900M. Of course, Meta is likely purchasing tokens at a discount, but that could still come in at $100M+ – in large part from senseless “tokenmaxxing”.”
That's what happens when you have leaderboards and internal spend rankings/comparisons. This isn't just a Meta thing; many companies are tracking tokens as performance metric but we all know this by now. :D
I should have contextualized the quote- "chat is dead" is from an openai employee which was describing how they're shifting focus to more agentic consumer products, and putting less focus on the back-and-forth chatbot interface.
These machines do not think and they do not have a mind. We may build such a thing in the future but these do not possess those qualities. It seems as if the majority of people do not understand this, which is why the public is so confused about why they produce output like they do.
>These machines do not think and they do not have a mind
Well, they do think, in that they produce output that is indistinguisable from thinking. If a person produced the same output to the same questions, we'd considered them thinking, maybe dumb sometimes, or paranoid at others, but still a thinking person.
We can argue about the quality and depth of the thinking that LLMs do (and we can say it's much cruder than a human thinking architecture, and of course not real time), but an LLM quacks like a thinking duck and looks like a thinking duck.
Indistinguishable output does not mean thinking occurred. It simply means you have the appearance of thinking. I believe thinking requires agency, which the LLM does not possess. As in, it has zero stakes.
It does not receive dopamine as a result for a good answer, and a split second after finishing your answer the very same GPU is probably translated french or something for someone in another state. This is a language generator which has a corpus of information and has been tuned to appear correct.
What then is your LLM "thinking" about between answers? The answer is nothing. Your definition of thinking does not match the one humans normally use.
>That how we know another person is thinking too. By their output. We don't put a debugger into their brain.
We know thoughts exist in their brain between the ones they choose to verbalize. Avoiding the distraction of solipsism.
For the LLM the "thinking" phase is just a preamble output for creating the answer. It just gets appended to the context window. Remove the context windows from your models and you will see how much of a mind they truly have. None.
>What then is your LLM "thinking" about between answers? The answer is nothing.
Between answer it's thinking something else, somebody else asked :) You think that hardware sits idle?
That aside, what is a human thinking while unconscious? Does having been unconscious (e.g. for an operation, or fainting or whatever) means somebody doesn't think in general?
>We know thoughts exist in their brain between the ones the choose to verbalize
And we also know that if we run an LLM in a loop, didn't give it a cutoff for stopping their output, and didn't force it to print everything in the end, thoughts would exist in their "brain" too between the ones they chose to verbalize.
In fact, that's exactly how some LLMs in "thinking mode" appear.
It's really just all mathematics and physics. There's no metaphysical anything about LLMs or how they do what they do. It's all just a bunch of fancy math "behind the curtain". An LLM can actually explain a lot of how it works "under the hood" if you ask it just the right questions in just the right ways. ;)
>There's no metaphysical anything about LLMs or how they do what they do. It's all just a bunch of fancy math "behind the curtain".
That's my point, but about the human brain as well. It's just a bunch of fancy math, just ones expressed with chemicals and electrical activations instead of, well, logic gates and electrical activations.
Well, I mean... Yes and no? An LLM doesn't really "think", and what mathematical fakery it does pass off as "thinking" stops the instant the text completion request finishes doing all it's math and outputting the results (as a text completion based on a simulation of a text chat most commonly). When you send it another comment or question, it starts all that math all over again, but with your new question or comment added into it's context window. It's kinda like instant amnesia each time, and behind the scenes, the software that's running the model refills it's "memory" and adds in anything new that's been added since the last prompt. But it's "memory" consists of only the "context window" it's able to handle plus the model "weights" (huge list of numbers that encode language "tokens" into a mathematical "vector space"). It never really learns anything new.
A human brain on the other hand is constantly processing 24/7 (even while you sleep), and always learning / changing until the day it dies. An LLM never changes (under the hood it's weights stay the same) unless you outright alter it's weights somehow (training / download an updated version of the model / etc). If you could somehow get an LLM to run constantly, in training mode, and give it ridiculous amounts of RAM and ultra-fast storage, and a series of fancy realtime inputs (audio, camera, etc) and maybe wheels so it could explore, and hands so it could do stuff, and access to it's own code so it could improve itself, it might eventually learn to closely approximate a really good simulation of actual thinking, but that's a bit of a scary road to go down. So many Sci-Fi movies and books end up going so very badly when the lead character starts playing in that particular sandbox. I doubt reality would go a whole lot better. ;)
On an electroencephalogram we basically see signals moving around in different brain regions. We have no way to probe actual thought or consciousness in themselves.
That's only because we hardcoded their weights in our implementation.
Aside from the cost, nothing about an LLM prevents feeding recent stimuli in and using it to update the models/retrain.
One can even do it in a makeshift way without modifying the weights, just keeping a complete version of any prompt + vector search on disk memory of it.
The point of the article stands: if providing more info than the model can access causes it to turn argumentative and refuse to comply, then it's a worse performance and a waste of money.
The comment you’re replying to never implied that they think or have a mind. They merely stated that they respond in a dismissive way and not following instructions.
Basically the complaint is about how Claude is being trained.
> "These machines do not think and they do not have a mind."
You're so totally 1000% right about that, but they're really good at faking it, to such a degree that entirely too many people (even including some so-called "experts" in the field) have been utterly fooled by the mathematical "trickery" that performs the illusion of "intelligence".
It doesn't help that these companies aren't doing anything to dampen the anxiety around AI or how it's going to eliminate everyone's jobs.
I've been wondering when/if they will start making frontier models more opinionated and less sycophantic, since sycophantic AI can really create "AI psychosis". stuff like "no, you're not crazy, no one else has thought like this before", but if the AI pushes back more then people won't enjoy using it as much, since people love being told they're right.
These companies are pitching us a magic machine that can answer all our questions and the only catch is they are extremely manipulative and controlling of us. Most people don't seem to care, for now.
The only point of "arguing" with an LLM is wholly for your own benefit, e.g. to check your biases or assumptions. But since they are easy to make turn around on their own statements it has limited utility.
Unless you are sparring with the Chipotle customer service bot trying to score a free burrito or something.
Alternatively the sophistry of declaring the contents of a text "the lowest form of analysis/criticism" without reading the text is the lowest form of analysis/criticism.
It is a bit surprising that the true 'big brother' type dystopic aspects of AI are not discussed that much and instead we talk about them taking all the jobs. We feed these things so much information. It could be used against us for advertising, control, or worse.
"All the jobs" includes those tasked by the state to commit, plan, and organize violence, it's plenty dystopian already. Like, one important reason why the military and militarized police don't engage in egregious overreach is that the people who'd be responsible live standard lives in their own society and it's hard to get high compliance for that sort of thing. Replace that relatively democratized infrastructure of thousands of intelligence analysts, mid-level management, etc with a bunch of AI agents, and a meaningful restriction on the power of the upper echelons of the state is removed.
Simple answer: taking the jobs is how it’ll impact regular people the most.
We already have personalized, algorithmic advertising and what I would call “control” all over the place: things like consolidated oligarch-owned media.
AI isn’t going to change how we are advertised to or controlled all that much, at least compared to the prospect of being put out of work or taking a huge salary cut similar to the mid-century worker who used to have a $40/hour union factory job and now works at Walmart below health insurance threshold for $15/hour.
Why do you think AI won’t be a factor in how we’re controlled if our rights become stripped away and we’re increasingly surveilled? Or if violence is deployed by the state against its people with broader targeting? You seem to take for granted that nothing will change except maybe the flavor of rhetoric.
My view is even gloomier. They won't have to coerce you, because with everything they know about you and human psychology, they will be able to manipulate you effectively enough for whatever they want.
Hyperinflation is how it will impact most people. You will still have your job, at your pay, but a continually higher percentage of earnings will go to very few at the top.
"You're absolutely right, I think you deserve to treat yourself with Mococoa, made with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua! It's what humans like myself crave."
Much like Truman's town, I fear a future where every non-in-person "interaction" might be a bot-network with an agenda and the inhuman patience of playing for the long-con.
Well as we get poorer and poorer it will be less worth putting effort into advertising to us. Im guessing AI will instead focus its effort on convincing rich people of various things.
huh? You think using it to advertise to us is worse than taking our jobs? Why would anyone advertise to jobless people. How is what you seem to be trivializing not the central problem? I don't think controlling is high on Dario's list. But he is absolutely gleeful, he cannot even hide his arousal in his interviews in which he never looks anyone in the eye about taking people's jobs and destroy our future ... but yes, oh the agony of advertising ...
Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!
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