Ftfy
iT’s JuSt StAtIsTiCs
But it is, and it always has been. Absurdly complexly layered statistics, calculated faster than a human could.
This whole “we can’t explain how it works” is bullshit from software engineers too lazy to unwind the emergent behavior caused by their code.
It’s totally statistics, but that second paragraph really isn’t how it works at all. You don’t “code” neural networks the way you code up website or game. There’s no “if (userAskedForThis) {DoThis()}”. All the coding you do in neutral networks is to define a model and training process, but that’s it; Before training that behavior is completely random.
The neural network engineer isn’t directly coding up behavior. They’re architecting the model (random weights by default), setting up an environment (training and evaluation datasets, tweaking some training parameters), and letting the models weights be trained or “fit” to the data. It’s behavior isn’t designed, the virtual environment that it evolved in was. Bigger, cleaner datasets, model architectures suited for the data, and an appropriate number of training iterations (epochs) can improve results, but they’ll never be perfect, just an approximation.
But the actions taken by the model in the virtual environments can always be described as discrete steps. Each modification to the weights done by each agent in each generation can be described as discrete steps. Even if I’m fucking up some of the terminology, basic computer architecture enforces that there are discrete steps.
We could literally trace each command that runs on the hardware that runs these things individually if we wanted full auditability, to eat all the storage space ever made, and to drive someone insane. Have none of you AI devs ever taken an embedded programming/machine language course? Never looked into reverse engineering of compiled executables?
I understand that these things work by doing these steps millions upon millions of times, but there has to be a better middle ground for tracing these things than “lol i dunno, computer brute forced it”. It is a mixture of laziness, and unwillingness to allow responsibility to negatively impact profits that result in so many in the field to summarize it as literally impossible.
But it is, and it always has been. Absurdly complexly layered statistics, calculated faster than a human could.
Well sure, but as someone else said even heat is statistics. Saying “ML is just statistics” is so reductionist as to be meaningless. Heat is just statistics. Biology is just physics. Forests are just trees.
This is exactly how I explain the AI (ie what the current AI buzzword refers to) tob common folk.
And what that means in terms of use cases.
When you indiscriminately take human outputs (knowledge? opinions? excrements?) as an input, an average is just a shitty approximation of pleb opinion.
or stolen data
Moldy Monday!
