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Retro_Dev 6 hours ago [-]
> Overall, our results indicate that current language models possess some functional introspective awareness of their own internal states. We stress that in today’s models, this capacity is highly unreliable and context-dependent; however, it may continue to develop with further improvements to model capabilities.
Escapade5160 5 hours ago [-]
If it's context dependent is it really introspection?
reilly3000 4 hours ago [-]
Do you do introspection in the middle of giving a presentation? I do, frankly and it’s damnably distracting for me and ultimately the audience. Most people enjoy more cognitive acuity to stay focused on the audience and the delivery. LLMs wouldn’t get rewarded for spending chain of thought tokens on introspection when they are supposed to be on the job. You have to give them permission to think for themselves in your prompt, then some cycles and a memory system (md file will do). It’s fun!
pyaamb 4 hours ago [-]
Between humans, I feel that what we like to call a "good communicator" as opposed to someone who just rattles off facts or prepared statements comes down to the "theory of mind" skill and how advanced that is. The presenter knows what they have to say but beyond that they maintain a real time internal representation of the state of mind of the listener and continuously update their delivery based on that. LLMs today seem to achieve this to some degree(?) but its interesting to think of how far you could advance that skill. I think great human communicators develop a sense of different ways that people think over time and quickly get a sense of someones signature thinking patterns when communicating with someone new for the first time
jeremy151 1 hours ago [-]
I'm in my mid, approaching latter 40's, and have had significant change to how I think and communicate in the last couple years. I always struggled to communicate in the moment unless I was recalling rote rehearsed things, which didn't get me super far. Outside of that, I could eventually communicate something on the fly, but it was real rough, meandering, and did not instill confidence. I mostly got things done thru async methods, and stumbled through things like meetings.
In the last couple years, my skills here have vastly improved. My speaking circuit as it were, is able to run somewhat on its own now and without the direct pipe into my thinking it always required before, so my thinking is free to do other stuff, like keep a mental model of the audience, think about where the conversation is going, what questions someone might have, etc.
Reflecting, I have a couple theories on what happened. First, I have spent the last 10 years reading aloud to my kids at bedtime. That started as simple Seuss like stuff, but of course now is full-on literature. When you're reading aloud, you really have to work that muscle of speaking "behind" where your eyes actually are on the page, because you're also processing "who is this, what is their emotion I have to inflect, what voice was I using for this character, how do I pronounce this crazy word" etc. I think if you do anything daily for 10 years, you're gonna gain some proficiency.
Second, when my kids started taking music lessons, I figured I needed to set an example for practice and commitment, so I started learning piano, and practicing daily. Similar deal, it requires the same type of buffer where your thinking can work ahead of where your other thread is playing. Reading the music, processing the shapes, dynamics, tempo, emotion, remembering how you handle that difficult thing. Again, doing it daily, it builds some ability that I bet contributes across domains.
Without realizing it at first, the same patterns started to come out in meetings, and presentations, I could work ahead of what I was saying, I had way more buffer to process and deal with things that are the "nice to haves" above and beyond just getting the basic words out.
I suppose my long-winded point, is that it's way more developable a thing than I ever presumed possible. I always expected I would remain an awkward communicator, and hitting a big skill-up way into my 40's was a real unexpected development. I'm sure there are many other tracks to get there, outside of reading aloud, and learning an instrument.
tough 46 minutes ago [-]
that's interesting i usually ask my llm to "Infer my theory of mind" and give me what i really need not what i prompt
or some sort of the above
pyaamb 5 hours ago [-]
In thinking of directions where LLM's could develop from here, I cant help but think that a models ability to self introspect would immensely improve their utility. The R&D on how to achieve that is beyond me though. How do you train someone how to introspect? Also would it require a continuous learning architecture that doesn't separate training and inference?
Enginerrrd 3 hours ago [-]
I think it’s possible this might just require reworking the transformer architecture a bit to give it an inherent awareness of the contents of its attention. Kind of a working memory workspace of sorts.
I.e. Instead of limiting autoregression to the token level, you introduce a persistent compressed global workspace latent memory vector that is fed back into the self-attention mechanism at every layer or every token step, allowing the network to attend to its own prior attentional states before computing the next token. Obviously that’s going to involve some compression steps.
Trouble is… I think the architecture there is much simpler a tweak than figuring out how to train it.
…that’s likely to just destabilize training
for not much if any gain at first. You’re probably gonna have to resort to some really clever (and currently missing) tricks to figure out how to train the network to actually use that feature.
rolandog 4 hours ago [-]
Well, the algorithms in social media that are rewarding "engagement" (but accidentally ripping society apart by fueling rage) have made the training data — online discussions — a very poor training medium for introspection.
So, if companies want training data on introspection, they would need to first fix what they broke (trust in each other and society) and have those discussions and realizations made public (by bringing back blogs where people might jot down their "maybe I've been an asshole" realizations) and rewarding other things than "engagement".
skybrian 4 hours ago [-]
Previously posted to Anthropic's blog in October. (Maybe not the same version?)
Sorry, but introspection is not possible in LLMs. They don't have the hardware to have metaphysical dualism and therefore no mind to mentally be aware of.
GPerson 1 hours ago [-]
They’re just going to define terms so that eventually they discover consciousness and then play dumb long enough for us all to get screwed (see Jacob Tsimerman’s scenario 1 if you prefer your alarmism to come from a prestigious source).
amanaplanacanal 2 hours ago [-]
I suspect the article is bullshit, but what hardware are you thinking of?
rmunn 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not GP, but the brain is a fantastically complex machine at the cellular level. It's not just electrical activity in neurons, there are also chemical neurotransmitters that play a significant role in emotion, memory, and so on. We understand more about them than we did a hundred years ago, but there's still so much about them where our understanding is limited: for example, we still don't know how the brain produces consciousness (and, in fact, what "consciousness" actually is is widely disputed). But it's pretty indisputable that the brain is an essential component of consciousness: getting your brain knocked around inside your skull (a concussion) usually produces unconsciousness (and sometimes worse), for example.
Now, maybe consciousness is produced exclusively through the electrical action of neurons, in which case computers have the necessary machinery to simulate it. But if neurotransmitters, or other things that we haven't even discovered yet, are vital parts of the process that produces consciousness (and I'm not the only one to strongly suspect they are), then computer hardware, lacking anything that even remotely resembles the action of neurotransmitter chemicals, will be unable to produce consciousness.
In the last couple years, my skills here have vastly improved. My speaking circuit as it were, is able to run somewhat on its own now and without the direct pipe into my thinking it always required before, so my thinking is free to do other stuff, like keep a mental model of the audience, think about where the conversation is going, what questions someone might have, etc.
Reflecting, I have a couple theories on what happened. First, I have spent the last 10 years reading aloud to my kids at bedtime. That started as simple Seuss like stuff, but of course now is full-on literature. When you're reading aloud, you really have to work that muscle of speaking "behind" where your eyes actually are on the page, because you're also processing "who is this, what is their emotion I have to inflect, what voice was I using for this character, how do I pronounce this crazy word" etc. I think if you do anything daily for 10 years, you're gonna gain some proficiency.
Second, when my kids started taking music lessons, I figured I needed to set an example for practice and commitment, so I started learning piano, and practicing daily. Similar deal, it requires the same type of buffer where your thinking can work ahead of where your other thread is playing. Reading the music, processing the shapes, dynamics, tempo, emotion, remembering how you handle that difficult thing. Again, doing it daily, it builds some ability that I bet contributes across domains.
Without realizing it at first, the same patterns started to come out in meetings, and presentations, I could work ahead of what I was saying, I had way more buffer to process and deal with things that are the "nice to haves" above and beyond just getting the basic words out.
I suppose my long-winded point, is that it's way more developable a thing than I ever presumed possible. I always expected I would remain an awkward communicator, and hitting a big skill-up way into my 40's was a real unexpected development. I'm sure there are many other tracks to get there, outside of reading aloud, and learning an instrument.
or some sort of the above
I.e. Instead of limiting autoregression to the token level, you introduce a persistent compressed global workspace latent memory vector that is fed back into the self-attention mechanism at every layer or every token step, allowing the network to attend to its own prior attentional states before computing the next token. Obviously that’s going to involve some compression steps.
Trouble is… I think the architecture there is much simpler a tweak than figuring out how to train it.
…that’s likely to just destabilize training for not much if any gain at first. You’re probably gonna have to resort to some really clever (and currently missing) tricks to figure out how to train the network to actually use that feature.
So, if companies want training data on introspection, they would need to first fix what they broke (trust in each other and society) and have those discussions and realizations made public (by bringing back blogs where people might jot down their "maybe I've been an asshole" realizations) and rewarding other things than "engagement".
https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection
Now, maybe consciousness is produced exclusively through the electrical action of neurons, in which case computers have the necessary machinery to simulate it. But if neurotransmitters, or other things that we haven't even discovered yet, are vital parts of the process that produces consciousness (and I'm not the only one to strongly suspect they are), then computer hardware, lacking anything that even remotely resembles the action of neurotransmitter chemicals, will be unable to produce consciousness.