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@HlynkaCG may be stretching the definition of «regression» past the breaking point in my view. But if one wants to argue that attention over 80 layers is «regression» over a trained collection of regressors, then fine, I won't stop it – categories were made for man, not… and all that. I think at this point it's a fool's errand to fight over such stuff manually instead of…
Well, typing some prompt like «How do large language models (transformers) correspond to regression-based ML algorithms? Answer at the level of PhD CS adjunct professor level. Focus on mechanistic details, not use cases» into a frontier model of your fancy. I quite like Claude 2's style but GPT-4 is still king.
Of course, that reference to regression is just a more specific way to diss the «complex statistical model», and a complex enough transformer model can approximate most anything in a compact domain (with some sane constraints, but as much can be said of the brain with its finite expressivity and learning capacity). Maybe we could talk about actual expressivity limits of some architectures, and orthodox Transformers can't learn to solve PARITY problem in the general case, but Universal Transformers do better, and path independent equilibrium models must do better still; at some point human+tool generalization will be comprehensively surpassed, and we'll be able to confidently say that an AI of such and such design and hyperparameters can learn everything a human mind can learn and more, and even does that in practice, and the question will be moot. Or is the question about the possibility to establish the correspondence between some types of data and some types of things, like, symbol sequences and thoughts?
I am not aware of some strong information-theoretical or broadly mathematical reason, which Hlynka and some other guy (@IGI-111 maybe?) alluded to, for believing this won't be done with known ML primitives in a few years. It looks to be about the «just» fallacy: some people think that if they understand the primitives (like regression, or gradient descent, or matmul – whatever abstraction layer they want to squint at), the full thing is «just» the interaction of those primitives and thus… something something… cannot be intelligent/conscious/superhuman/your option. I can't understand this way of thinking, it seems mainly ego-driven to me but that's a hypothesis, I literally cannot comprehend it, it does not compute.
This is all progressively far from the high-level generator of disagreement, which is… what is it again? And how many are there?
That said, I also do not share your theory of consciousness/personal identity, my views are closer to Christof Koch's. I think a high-quality computable upload of myself would be able to output thoughts in the distribution of my own (hell, one can finetune an LLM and see the resemblance already, it would even fool some); but it would be, for most intents and purposes, a p-zombie, even if you throw an «agentic» for loop on top. I do not subscribe to the Lesswrongian purely computational doctrine; I am a specific subject, not information about an object. For the same reason I would not use destructive teleportation nor advocate it to anyone, I think humans are causal entanglements, not blueprints for those.
This is a nice theory, but the problem with regression-based algorithms in practice is that to receive a "correct" response to such a query you not only need to have an example of the correct response in your training data, you need to have enough such responses (or a robust enough statistical model) to ensure that it becomes the most probable output.
You're a uniquely fake person, Hlynka. It's incredible how you falsify your down-to-earth practically-thinking red-triber creds, but actually hinge your beliefs on a half-understood galaxy brained theory and despise evidence or actual learning. You're much more similar to Eliezer Yudkowsky than to an average Joe in this, but at least Yud is sincere.
Ive been posting in rat-adjacent spaces under this pseudonym since the fall semester of 2012. I don't think that I've ever misrepresented my background or positions here. At least not intentionally. When you call me a "uniquely fake person" i can't help but wonder what exactly it is you think I've been insincere about or otherwise "faking".
I am exceedingly clear in my accusation above, I believe.
Even so, please explain your chain of reasoning.
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