"They're made out of weights"

turtleyacht

Numbers that dream.

CSSer

It works until they get to the sentience part. Neat idea!

noosphr

It's not often I see something that's fractally wrong but here we are. There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer. There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 The point of the original short story is that the computational substrate doesn't matter when you have Turing completeness. This one seems to think that you don't need structure and interpretability just because you change substrates.

oofbey

I love this. For anybody not getting the joke, it’s riffing on the classic 1990s essay “They’re made out of meat.” https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

kami23

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigger its internal state of certain phenomena, and that sent me down a rabbit hole that I'm still exploring. This story resonated with a lot of questions that can come out of figuring a good solid answer to the what is consciousness question. The one I triggered for me is: Is our perception of time just a slow thread in the giant GPU we are running the universe on? Or more generally, what is time? That's a fun YouTube rabbit hole if you ever need one.

luca-ctx

Truly fantastic bridge from the original, this deserves an award

eclipticplane

The short film version of the original is great, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg It stars Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey!

Waterluvian

It must have been kind of incredible early on to be exploring this tech and you’re suddenly getting what look like sentences.

samrus

I have to agree. It is messed up that transformers can just talk, and it been pretty normalized. We are only talking about the impact they will have and whether they can do what people say they can, but we arent talking about how crazy it is that they can talk

satvikpendem

Great concept. It would've been even more amusing if the entire thing were generated with AI instead, ironically.

dvh

Will they have their own Jesus?

pstuart

I couldn't help but grin like a fool reading this. Not only is it an artful parody but these thoughts have been thought.

photochemsyn

No mention of ‘static’ vs. ‘dynamic’ is a bit disappointing in reference to the weights. Because you could argue that every neuron in your nervous system can be modeled as a collection of weights, firing likelihoods, receptor sensitivities, current dynamic state of that neuron - but LLMs are static collections of weights at inference time, with the dynamic adjustment of weights takes place at training time. So, just a ROM construct, like something out of Neuromancer, just trained on all written knowledge, not just one person’s total lived experience. The above take fails in the real world because neuronal cells don’t exist in a vacuum; they are products of cellular development from a zygotic union of haploid contributors of sequential genetic information optimized for survival in an oxygen-rich biosphere powered largely by our local star that supports mammalian life (and microbial, plant, avian, etc.). Real AI would thus be AL - artificial life - as much as artificial intelligence. I don’t think you can have the one without the other, which upsets the simulationists who think an agent in the Matrix would be intelligent. What either interpretation implies is that any real ‘artificial’ intelligence would be no more artificial than you or I, but it would have to dynamically update its weights at the same speed a human nervous system could (think how quickly we learn not to poke a cactus). For it to be at all trustworthy, then like a human, it would have to undergo a socialization process, one of the results of which is the development of a sense of embarrassment when it breaks acceptable social norms. Hmm, this reminds me of the recent statement of the Pope about AI, of which I immediately thought, “Wait a second, aren’t there a fair number of people like this? The narcissistic sociopath profile, I think it’s called, a bit unfair to assume any real AI would turn out this way, isn’t it?” Pope: “ Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

ProllyInfamous

Imagine writing something so incredibly brilliant (rather: adapting from the original) that it's entirely unlikely that you'll ever write something so incredible ever again . But congrats: this is absolutely & incredibly brilliant. Can't wait for the Jon Benjamin voiceover.

gobdovan

You can take the weights and model description, write them down on a notebook, then, by hand, compute the next token. Try to do the same with meat.

fullstackchris

The prose in the post is what I've been shouting from a rooftop since the LLM hype started. Just tokens produced by weights. Useful, but never forget that ground truth!

zkmon

They are made out of data bits (memory) and switching bits (transistors/compute). Bits are made out of electric voltage and no voltage. Voltage is made out of flow of positive electric charges. Charges are made out of quarks ...