They don’t actually understand anything.

This isn’t correct and has been shown not to be correct in research over and over and over in the past year.

The investigation reveals that Othello-GPT encapsulates a linear representation of opposing pieces, a factor that causally steers its decision-making process. This paper further elucidates the interplay between the linear world representation and causal decision-making, and their dependence on layer depth and model complexity.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07582

Sizeable differences exist among model capabilities that are not captured by their ranking on popular LLM leaderboards (“cramming for the leaderboard”). Furthermore, simple probability calculations indicate that GPT-4’s reasonable performance on k=5 is suggestive of going beyond “stochastic parrot” behavior (Bender et al., 2021), i.e., it combines skills in ways that it had not seen during training.

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17567

We introduce SELF-DISCOVER, a general framework for LLMs to self-discover the task-intrinsic reasoning structures to tackle complex reasoning problems that are challenging for typical prompting methods. Core to the framework is a self-discovery process where LLMs select multiple atomic reasoning modules such as critical thinking and step-by-step thinking, and compose them into an explicit reasoning structure for LLMs to follow during decoding. SELF-DISCOVER substantially improves GPT-4 and PaLM 2’s performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks such as BigBench-Hard, grounded agent reasoning, and MATH, by as much as 32% compared to Chain of Thought (CoT).

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03620

Just a few of the relevant papers you might want to check out before stating things as facts.

Standardized tests were always a poor measure of comprehensive intelligence.

But this idea that “LLMs aren’t intelligent” popular on Lemmy is based on what seems to be a misinformed understanding of LLMs.

At this point there’s been multiple replications of the findings that transformers build world models abstracted from the training data and aren’t just relying on surface statistics.

The free version of ChatGPT (what I’m guessing most people have direct experience with) is several years old tech that is (and always has been) pretty dumb. But something like Claude 3 Opus is very advanced at critical thinking compared to GPT-3.5.

A lot of word problem examples that models ‘fail’ are evaluating the wrong thing. When you give a LLM a variation of a classic word problem, the frequency of the normal form biases the answer back towards it unless you take measures to break the token similarities. If you do that though, most modern models actually do get the variation completely correct.

So for example, if you ask it to get a vegetarian wolf, a carnivorous goat, and a cabbage across a river, even asking with standard prompt techniques it will mess up. But if you ask it to get a vegetarian 🐺, a carnivorous 🐐 and a 🥬 across, it will get it correct.

GPT-3.5 will always fail it, but GPT-4 and more advanced will get it correct. And recently I’ve started seeing models get it correct even without the variation and trip up less with variations.

The field is moving rapidly and much of what was true about LLMs a few years ago with GPT-3 is no longer true with modern models.

This isn’t quite correct. There is the possibility of biasing the results with the training data, but models are performing well at things they haven’t seen before.

For example, this guy took an IQ test, rewrote the visual questions as natural language questions, and gave the test to various LLMs:

https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/ais-ranked-by-iq-ai-passes-100-iq

These are questions with specific wording that the models won’t have been trained on given he wrote them out fresh. Old models have IQ results that are very poor, but the SotA model right now scores a 100.

People who are engaging with the free version of ChatGPT and think “LLMs are dumb” is kind of like talking to a moron human and thinking “humans are dumb.” Yes, the free version of ChatGPT has around a 60 IQ on that test, but it also doesn’t represent the cream of the crop.

Actually, you can give chatbots a real IQ test, and the range of scores fall into roughly the same spread as how they rank on other measures, with the leading model scoring at 100:

https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/ais-ranked-by-iq-ai-passes-100-iq

IQ tests have the goal of measuring intelligence.

The range of LLM scores on IQ tests:

https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/ais-ranked-by-iq-ai-passes-100-iq

But maybe if you keep reading you’ll find out it was actually leading into telling you about the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.

I don’t think it takes a genius to start making these connections and to start asking questions

That’s correct.

Jan 2023 - EXPLAINER: List of states banning TikTok grows

Jan 2023 - These Colleges Just Banned TikTok

One of the smarter ad analysts I knew likened ad spaces to ecosystems, where a bunch of companies come in with crap ads that aren’t related to what people are actually in market for or are misleading, and act as polluters which turn people off from green pastures.

As an example, when mobile browsing was first getting off the ground CTR for mobile banner ads was 15%.

Reddit’s metrics are about to go to shit.

I always kind of wonder how it would go if I ever actually answered the door to proselytizing folks.

They’d clearly be unprepared to answer about the late insertion of the fundraising reversal in Luke.

Or the ambiguous engendering of God.

Or the eroding of a matriarchal tradition in early Judaism.

Or that a lot of the stories were probably appropriated from elsewhere.

How long before they fold their arms and say “well I don’t know about that” or “I’ll have to ask my preacher”? Will I stay on their list for another round of discussion, or not?

To date the only folks I’ve interacted with around my neighborhood were Mormon missionaries, who are just so well mannered and youthfully naive I didn’t have the heart to pull out a map that shows the distance between Manchester, NY and Jerusalem.

‘Angry’ proselytizers though I feel like I’d have at least a few words for their deaf ears to balance things out for the rest of the neighborhood having to hear their words in turn.

Fun fact - in both apocrypha and multiple gospels, Jesus is all like “don’t carry a purse with you when ministering and just accept food and shelter when offered.”

You can see attitudes against this prosperity BS in some of the earliest Christian documents, where in 1 Cor 9 Paul is arguing against preexisting attitudes in the Christian community in Corinth about whether he has a right to collect money for his ministering.

You even see in Paul’s letters that he gets personally gifted a fragrant offering, which must’ve caused a bit of controversy as decades later in the gospels there’s a part where Jesus gets personally gifted a fragrant offering and gets pissed at people saying he should sell it and give the money to the poor.

That part about “carry no purse and no money” gets explicitly reversed at the Last Supper in Luke. But curiously, it’s not present in Marcion’s version which was probably the earliest version of the text.

It’s pretty wild that you had Paul - who called himself lawless, performed signs and wonders, was constantly swearing he wasn’t lying, was a false prophet of apocalypse, and inserted himself into the center of the church - straight up representing positions exactly opposite widely alleged positions of Jesus’s, and yet so many don’t even blink an eye at their blind faith in the guy while frantically looking everywhere around them for “the antichrist” that’s supposedly going to lead them astray.

That said, I have little doubt that Paul would be extremely pleased with the conmen that followed in his footsteps and the profits they raked in under his name.

And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), “Let us do evil so that good may come”?

• Romans 3:8

True, though I did once need to do a double take when researching a document from antiquity:

Next after them, Epicurus introduced the world to the doctrine that there is no providence. He said that all things arise from atoms and revert back to atoms. All things, even the world, exist by chance, since nature is constantly generating, being used up again, and once more renewed out of itself—but it never ceases to be, since it arises out of itself and is worn down into itself.

Originally the entire universe was like an egg and the spirit was then coiled snakewise round the egg, and bound nature tightly like a wreath or girdle.

At one time it wanted to squeeze the entire matter, or nature, of all things more forcibly, and so divided all that existed into the two hemispheres and then, as the result of this, the atoms were separated.

• Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion book 1 chapter 8

This was pretty early into researching the Epicureans, and the level of detail here about all matter being squeezed down actually made me wonder if this had been a hoax document or something that was actually from modernity.

I’m not sure how the heck the Orphic egg and serpent ended up mixed up with Epicureanism (only here AFAIK), but when I found this I’d also been really into Neil Turok’s CPT symmetric universe theory as an explanation for the baryon asymmetry problem, so its discussion of matter being squeezed and then splitting into two which divided the particles was particularly eyebrow raising.

Not a hoax - just a group that were pretty clever in their approach to knowledge with a smart methodology that brought them rather close in a number of ways to the later determined correct answers on several big questions (probably most impressively on evolution). Still have no idea how or why they settled on matter being squeezed in the beginning of things as the mechanism here though.

They were the OG atheist philosophers in an age not long after Socrates had been put to death in the epicenter of open discussion for the charge of impiety. So they didn’t completely deny the existence of gods (likely for their own safety) but did so in all practical ways.

In the Bible’s offense, it probably wasn’t even originally a flood story.

There’s a number of places where Old Testament stories may actually be describing the stories of Bronze Age Libyans who end up relocated into the Southern Levant along with the sea peoples. Joseph with a colorful coat and an interpreter of dreams is sometimes likened to the Hyskos but compare the coat vs the depiction of the Libu. Not only are the Libu sporting blue in their coats, like the tekhelet later found in the OT, there’s even the Tuareg Libyan people known for their blue dye and matriarchal lineage.

Around the time that tomb image is recorded there’s even a papyrus talking about how the followers of Set have red hair and interpret dreams, and this is also the period when the Egyptian story “A Tale of Two Brothers” emerges with a number of similarities to the Joseph story.

This is interesting in light of the flood mythos because we now know that at the end of the ice age there was a migration down from Europe across the ice bridge to North Africa. This was around the time there really was coastal flooding including relatively rapid events which may have even persisted in local oral traditions.

Part of the issue with analysis of Biblical stories in terms of historicity (outside of the supernatural stuff) may be that we’re analyzing a collection of stories that had been syncretized into a local tradition and later appropriated, much like the story of ‘Israel’ (Jacob) taking the birthright and blessing of Esau (the eponymous founder of Edom, meaning ‘red’) in the Bible.

In fact, according to the Dead Sea scroll fragment 4Q534 Noah had red hair.

So it need not even necessarily be that there was flooding in the Southern Levant for the flood mythos to be based on an oral tradition.

All that said, personally I’m rather persuaded by Idan Dershowitz’s analysis that the Noah story was originally a story of drought and famine before syncretizing the Babylonian flood mythos into it later on and transforming it into a flood epic.

Were there people that call themselves “Jews” attacking the Al Aqsa mosque and violently shooting Muslims one year ago? Do you think he is referring to that?

Considering the first article is from 2017 and the second from 2014, no I don’t think either are referring to the Al Aswa mosque violence in 2023.

If they were, that would be really surprising.

In a July 21 lecture posted on the Davis Masjid YouTube channel, Muslim preacher Ammar Shahin spoke in English and Arabic about how all Muslims, not only Palestinians or Syrians, will be called upon to kill all the Jews on “the last day.”

In a video translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Shahin also stressed that the Hadith (oral tradition of sayings attributed to the prophet of Islam) does not say where the final battle will take place. “If it is in Palestine,” for example, “or another place,” hinting at the possibility that such a battle could happen in the United States or Europe as well.

He also prayed that al-Aksa mosque be liberated from “the filth of the Jews.”

From this link: https://m.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/California-Imam-calls-on-Allah-to-annihilate-Jews-500676

In a clip of the kids’ TV show “The Pioneers of Tomorrow,” broadcast on May 2 and uploaded Thursday by the MEMRI media watchdog, the host of the program, a young girl in a hijab, interviews two very young children, one of whom says she hopes to be a police officer like her uncle Ahmad.

The host asks what policemen do, and, after establishing that they catch criminals, adds that “they shoot Jews, right?” and stresses to her young guest that “you want to be like him.”

“I will shoot the Jews!” the little child says.

“All of them?” the host asks.

“Yes,” the girl says

“Good,” the host answers.

In a previous segment, a co-host of the show, an anthropomorphic bee character, talks on the phone with a child in the West Bank Jenin refugee camp, and encourages him, if Jews come into the camp, to “punch them” and “turn their faces into tomatoes in order to liberate Palestine.”

• https://www.timesofisrael.com/kill-all-jews-urges-hamas-tv-host/

Yeah, nothing antisemitic here.

You pasted random Hasbara from internet that you didn’t read and called criticism of israel anti-Semitic.

Citation needed, as it appears we’re just making up straw men now. In this comment thread, I literally didn’t even write the word ‘antisemitism’ outside of quoting your use of it.

I’m not sure why they are describing it as “a new paper” - this came out in May of 2023 (and as such notably only used GPT-3 and not GPT-4, which was where some of the biggest leaps to date have been documented).

For those interested in the debate on this, the rebuttal by Jason Wei (from the original emergent abilities paper and also the guy behind CoT prompting paper) is interesting: https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/common-arguments-regarding-emergent-abilities

In particular, I find his argument at the end compelling:

Another popular example of emergence which also underscores qualitative changes in the model is chain-of-thought prompting, for which performance is worse than answering directly for small models, but much better than answering directly for large models. Intuitively, this is because small models can’t produce extended chains of reasoning and end up confusing themselves, while larger models can reason in a more-reliable fashion.

If you follow the evolution of prompting in research lately, there’s definitely a pattern of reliance on increased inherent capabilities.

Whether that’s using analogy to solve similar problems (https://openreview.net/forum?id=AgDICX1h50) or self-determining the optimal strategy for a given problem (https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03620), there’s double digit performance gains in state of the art models by having them perform actions that less sophisticated models simply cannot achieve.

The compounding effects of competence alone mean that progress here isn’t going to be a linear trajectory.

This tech is going to get pretty wild.

Years ago Nvidia were playing around with things like this as the far future of DLSS.

Even imagine something like a remake - you could literally just pump the gameplay from GoldenEye 64 into a model that redoes the graphics with CGI levels of detail when generative AI like this can consistently pump out frames in realtime.

Particularly when the models can also predict inputs based on input so far, there wouldn’t even be perceptible lag (GeForce Now does something like this actually).

Huh? Written history begins around 2,000 years before these events. What are you talking about?

A number of the relevant pieces of information are the details in contemporary written accounts from Egyptian or Hittite sources which range from royal records of conflicts to letters written between countries.

That’s how we know for example that there was actually a single day battle between Egypt and the sea peoples with Libya which Egypt wins and takes captives from seven years before an usurper Pharoh conquered Egypt. There’s literally dozens of pages written about that battle by Merneptah. Which then bears a striking resemblance to the mythical story in the Odyssey of Odysseus fighting a one day battle against Egypt where he’s taken captive exactly seven years before “a certain Phrygian” shows up to try to ransom him to Libya.

We even have records from Ramses III which describe the end of the 19th dynasty around the time of this usurper as Egypt having been conquered with outside help, switching to a form of government of city state governors, and “making the gods like men.” Claims that resemble the Phoenician form of city state government emerging at this time and the claims of Phoenician euhemerism “from around the time of the Trojan War” in Philio of Byblos.

You have a weird hangup here dude. You aren’t at all engaging with my comment about media coverage, but are instead pulling a random excerpt from the opinion piece a few days after the Oct 7th attack to discuss…what?

The opinion piece doesn’t even call that ‘antisemitism.’ You cut off the lines immediately before it, which makes no claim in line with what you allude:

The Harvard students hardly stand alone in their abhorrent willingness to cast Hamas as freedom fighters rather than bloodthirsty terrorists. Equally offensive statements blaming Israel and effectively applauding Hamas abound at other universities and colleges too numerous to list. Take Ryna Workman, the president of the NYU Law Student Bar Association…

The author of that opinion piece is entirely entitled to the opinion that victim blaming terrorist attacks on civilians is offensive to them, just as there’s plenty of opinion pieces to the other direction that denying human rights violations is offensive to a lot of other people. That’s kind of the point of opinion pieces - to express an opinion.

But the brunt of the examples I provided in the main part of my comment (the many examples of religious leaders calling for the ethnic killing of the people they don’t like) were completely in line with the OP article.

The last two were simply included as examples of how little the mainstream press covers “these people call for genocide” claims from any side except when relevant to recent news - and to that point one of the only two mainstream pieces was an opinion piece.

You’re basically making my central point in citing the Newsweek opinion piece’s shortcomings - that contrary to the theory of the person I replied to, there’s little to no coverage of religious figure calls for violence outside of limited sets of articles with clear agendas.