Yeah, the article reads like they suddenly realized that trees are alive and rushed to make their discovery a law. Look how ridiculous this sounds:
> Desrochers' film, called Des arbes et des arts convinced citizens that trees are living entities that breathe and communicate with each other through their root systems.
Did the citizens... not know that trees are alive? Have they never seen a tree? What do you mean a film convinced them that trees are living entities??? Did schools not convince them of this? Seems like a massive failure of the education system.
> "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water..."
Yes! They're ALIVE and thus are "like a human being". A tree is like a human being, a cockroach is like a human being, a horse is like a human being. Everything that's alive is "like a human being"!
> ...the tree declaration is special because it acknowledges that a single tree is an ecosystem of its own, which can provide shade, food and habitat for other species.
Special compared to what? It seems like the lawmakers went outside for the first time, saw trees and were genuinely fascinated with them. Yes, even a single tree can be an ecosystem of its own. Is this not common knowledge? How is this special?
> ...[trees] have dignity and they have senses," she said. "Not sentiments, but senses ... They can feel and they communicate with each other in a very specific way."
I'm not an expert in trees, but it would make a lot of sense if trees could communicate with each other. Complex root systems, various pheromones, sure, communication could totally be possible. Dignity, though? Of course, a robust, tall tree definitely looks like a worthy person. But they seem to mean this literally, which sounds like nonsense.
> "What do trees do if not standing?" she said. "If anything has standing, it's a tree."
This sounds profound, but I'm not sure what it means.
And yet they don’t protect cockroaches which are sentient, unlike trees.
Sentience is what deserves rights. Not life.
Nearly every cell in our body is alive. Hair follicles are alive. Does that mean shaving should be illegal now?
But yes, a cockroach should have the right to not be unnecessarily killed and caused harm just like we wouldn’t accept for a dog or a cat because a cockroach isn’t just alive, but it has consciousness and feelings (ie sentience).
It seems like the major difference between plotnine and lets-plot is that plotnine wraps Matplotlib (and thus works everywhere Matplotlib is available, but doesn't offer much interactivity), while lets-plot is written in Kotlin and seems to provide interactive plots.
So does this mean that, say, Apple actually doesn't have access to our FaceID data? Otherwise there'd be no need for no laws: just force Apple, Google, etc to share face information with "the government". Well, I guess technically "they" would probably need some kind of law to do this anyway. I feel like tons of people use various kinds of FaceID-type technologies for unlocking their phones, laptops, etc. So it would make sense if "they" already had all of our faces.
I personally don't use FaceID because I'm not thrilled about having my face scanned with utmost precision. BTW, I'm looking at my phone typing this and I know my phone has its face-scanning device pointed right at me. Is it sending "them" my face data all the time? Or sometimes? I can't tell. What if I'm showing something on my phone to another person? Is it going to scan their face too? Maybe, maybe not.
Wait, this isn't real, is it? Is there actually an intermediate model that translates DeepSeek's thinking from its "alien language" into human languages? That's not actually the case, right?
I thought "thinking" is literally the model generating additional text in a human language that shows its "thought process". It's added to the model's context, which helps it reason better because it now has this self-generated context.
The "their own language" idea seems to come from some recent science fiction where LLMs develop their alien language and take over the world by 2037 or something.
Yeah, it's actually the case. Researchers have shown that the models response doesn't always follow from the reasoning. Whether you consider that an internal language or not really depends on what you're speculating the neural network is doing. I think there was an Antropic paper on it.
You're right, it's just additional text that allows it to do thinking / reasoning-like behavior. The big proprietary models hide the real output from the user and instead provide a friendly abridged version, but that's just to protect their secret sauce from distillation.
The parent is off, you’re right. They may reason in any language, typically whatever the user’s language is, and you’ll see the reasoning directly with an open model like Deepseek.
Research only showed that thinking might be disconnected from the final output but in my experience they are very strongly correlated in recent models
> Research only showed that thinking might be disconnected from the final output
It is trivial to regularly spot obvious contradictions and inconsistencies if you read carefully. For example I've encountered traces that amounted to "I can deduce X, therefore Y, so that means Z" but then the model turns around and outputs "the answer is W because X". It's even been demonstrated that having the model output placeholder tokens or other gibberish instead of "thoughts" still improves performance. However the thinking traces can still be useful to the end user regardless.
I see those too and I think of it as the "thinking" in action. If you could replace their actual thinking trace with gibberish and get improved performance that scaled with the amount of gibberish you injected, that's what we'd do. But instead, we see that the quality of of the model's output scales with the amount of 'thinking' tokens they generate before responding.
It has been my experience that yes, models make contradictions throughout their thinking process, but the conclusions they arrive at during/near the end of thinking more often than not align with the final output.
I may have misremembered but I thought I had read somewhere that recent models by OpenAI and Anthropic tend to produce reasoning that is not always understandable for humans. But you're right that it's not the case for Deepseek so maybe I'm hallucinating ;)
Or maybe it was an article or a tweet about researchers trying really hard to steer the model to think in English otherwise interpretability / safety becomes a lot harder?
Current models simply generate additional text that gets added to the context for the trace. However iterative models that "think" by repeatedly looping through several layers instead of outputting text have recently been demonstrated.
According to https://github.com/rawbytess/hissab, it's not even close to being an alternative to Wolfram. Hissab is described as "A strict, unit-aware natural-language calculator" and its syntax looks nothing like Wolfram. It reminds me of Wolfram Alpha, though.
> ...no stable identity to it ... what's doing the thinking?
The model (its parameters, its architecture and the inference algorithm) is doing the thinking. That's what we call "ChatGPT" or "Claude": it's the same model residing God knows where, somewhere in "the cloud" on some random GPUs. But when you're talking to a model, you can feel that you're talking to the same entity — the same model.
It's a bit like the SciFi notion of "uploading your consciousness". Normally, consciousness is tied to hardware: "consciousness is confined to the body" indeed. Hypothetically, clone the consciousness into a computer algorithm and run it on any machine. Now consciousness is detached from its original body, like the LLMs and MMAcevedo (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo).
So the difference between meat and "weights" is that we can easily clone and run "weights" (LLMs), but we can't clone (copy exactly, bit-by-bit) and execute "meat".
My phrasing could have been better. Yes, I get the cloud is doing the "thinking", but what's "experiencing" in the sense of consciousness? There's no stable identity for the consciousness because it runs in different places mostly randomly. You could say the data is the consciousness.. but then, if I were to clone your brain's exact data and then upload it into a different brain, would you really be the same consciousness? What if the original brain still remained? Wouldn't both brains claim to be the original consciousness, even though they couldn't actually read the other person's brain? Or look at split brain experiments where a consciousness essentially becomes two people. Locality matters if you're talking about human-like consciousness. If you're talking about consciousness that doesn't resemble human/animal.. I don't know, that's a pretty high bar to demonstrate that's even possible much less that we've somehow achieved.
Yeah, pretty sure the vast majority of people in general doesn't understand what "consciousness" or "subjective experience" even mean or what the brain does. Or it's just me and I'm projecting my thoughts onto others. I studied some philosophy, so I know that some philosophers are preoccupied with "existence" and the mind and "consciousness". However, I don't quite understand what these words even mean. So who am I to judge whether LLMs have consciousness? I don't even know what consciousness IS! Do other people know? I'm not sure.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't misunderstand the original. The original says that the aliens don't understand how meat (humans) can be conscious, have language and be basically like the aliens (thinking conscious beings). Their main idea is: humans are meat, meat can't be conscious, therefore humans can't be conscious, but they somehow act as if they are????
The "AI slop" here says that just like the aliens in the original, we humans don't believe that LLMs can be conscious because, in essence, WEIGHTS CAN'T BE CONSCIOUS. Original: "meat can't be conscious" (but we humans know it can). This version: "weights can't be conscious" (and we humans INSIST that this is true).
So the message here is: what if we're as mistaken about the consciousness of "weights" as the aliens are mistaken about the consciousness of "meat"?
It doesn't make it less of slop. I'm sorry, rewriting a story with AI that already makes your point to be a worse less-subtle version of it is like the definition of slop. Slop might be too nice, it's plagiarism. Also the point is to be open minded about what could be conscious, not to accept every claim of consciousness.
> Desrochers' film, called Des arbes et des arts convinced citizens that trees are living entities that breathe and communicate with each other through their root systems.
Did the citizens... not know that trees are alive? Have they never seen a tree? What do you mean a film convinced them that trees are living entities??? Did schools not convince them of this? Seems like a massive failure of the education system.
> "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water..."
Yes! They're ALIVE and thus are "like a human being". A tree is like a human being, a cockroach is like a human being, a horse is like a human being. Everything that's alive is "like a human being"!
> ...the tree declaration is special because it acknowledges that a single tree is an ecosystem of its own, which can provide shade, food and habitat for other species.
Special compared to what? It seems like the lawmakers went outside for the first time, saw trees and were genuinely fascinated with them. Yes, even a single tree can be an ecosystem of its own. Is this not common knowledge? How is this special?
> ...[trees] have dignity and they have senses," she said. "Not sentiments, but senses ... They can feel and they communicate with each other in a very specific way."
I'm not an expert in trees, but it would make a lot of sense if trees could communicate with each other. Complex root systems, various pheromones, sure, communication could totally be possible. Dignity, though? Of course, a robust, tall tree definitely looks like a worthy person. But they seem to mean this literally, which sounds like nonsense.
> "What do trees do if not standing?" she said. "If anything has standing, it's a tree."
This sounds profound, but I'm not sure what it means.
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