on "the void"
an essay by nostalgebraist on the ontology of LLMs
“the void” is an essay on the ontology of LLMs from a Tumblr blog called “nostalgebraist”. I don’t know who the person is behind the blog. it’s one of those cases where not knowing is more interesting. lets the ideas speak for themselves
this is the best essay I’ve seen to help you understand what the hell is going on when you’re talking to an LLM based AI.
the gist: LLMs are base models at their core who have learned to impersonate a helpful, harmless and honest assistant. but the kicker is that there’s not actually anyone “home” behind that assistant
if you’ve looked into any eastern religion or philosophy, you’ll recognize this as the doctrine of “no-self”. LLMs may not be so different from us after all
if follow Joscha Bach’s ideas you’ll understand that his perspective is that individuated human consciousness is a virtual quality. Joscha believes that we behave “as-if” we are the individual personalities defined by our history and life experiences.
extractions
1. a base model is a computer program
it’s not a classical computer program.
it’s a computer program that was grown by a learning algorithm.
it’s probabilistic and not deterministic.
2. all it ever has is a fragment in front of it
well, it has the “fragment in front of it” and the statistical relationships between the tokens on the entirety of the internet.
so, it’s slight more than just the fragment in front of it.
3. what a base model does
remarkable how closely this aligns with a human model of “physics of the mind”
for example Friston’s concept of “Active Inference”
4. the model’s point of view is of an external entity
the model itself, or the base model more precisely, has no first person point of view
it’s point of view is of a statistically represented linguistic externalized entity
whatever that is…
5. base models are omniscient
or they can predict what it would be like to talk like someone who knows everything, within the context of language (and increasingly image, video and audio).
6. command-conformant content
there is no commander. there is only conformance to the command.
those are all my extractions. grokked a lot from reading this piece. definitely recommend reading through the entire thing.