All of shiney's Comments + Replies

shiney11

Oh hmm that's very clever and I don't know how I'd improve the method to avoid this.

shiney30

This is interesting, its a pity you aren't seeing results at all with this except with GPT4 because if you were doing so with an easier to manipulate model I'd suggest you could try snapping the activations on the filler tokens from one question to another and see if that reduced performance.

2Kshitij Sachan
Yep I had considered doing that. Sadly, if resample ablations on the filler tokens reduced performance, that doesn't necessarily imply that the filler tokens are being used for extra computation. For example, the model could just copy the relevant details from the problem into the filler token positions and solve it there. 
shiney20

Can I help somehow

1planecrashpodcast
I've added 10 more episodes, and sent you a private message so that you can help!
shiney10

Hello, this is great.

OOI what's the reason you haven't just uploaded all of it? Is this a lot of work for you? Are the AWS credits expensive etc.?

2shiney
Can I help somehow
shiney21

I was reading (listening) to this and I think I've got some good reasons to expect failed AI coups to happen.

In general we probably expect "Value is Fragile" and this will probably apply to AI goals too (and it will think this) this will mean a Consequentialist AI will expect that if there is a high chance of another AI taking over soon then all value in the universe (according to it's definition of value) then even though there is a low probability of a particular coup working it will still want to try it because if it doesn't succeed  then almost al... (read more)

shiney10

Oh interesting didn't realise there was so much nondeterminism for sums on GPUs

I guess I thought that there's only 65k float 16s and the two highest ones are going to be chosen from a much smaller range from that 65k just because they have to be bigger than everything else.

shiney1-2

I might be missing something but why does temperature 0 imply determinism? Neural nets don't work with real numbers, they work with floating points numbers so despitetemperature 0 implying an argmax there's no reason there arent justmultiple maxima. AFAICT GPT3 uses half precision floating point numbers so there's quite a lot of space for collisions.

6LawrenceC
It’s extremely unlikely that two biggest logits have the exact same value — there are still a lot of floating point numbers even with float16!! The reason there’s no determinism is because of a combination of lower precision and nondeterministic reduce operations (eg sums). For example, the order in which terms are accumulated can vary with the batch size, which, for models as large as GPT3, can make the logits vary by up to 1%.
shiney230

Does anyone know if there's work to make a podcast version of this? I'd definitely be more willing to listen even if it is just at Nonlinear library quality rather than voice acted.

6planecrashpodcast
I created one! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MX8SAwa2rDJFSiiyW/planecrash-podcast https://anchor.fm/s/a48073e4/podcast/rss
3Henry Prowbell
I strongly agree
shiney10

Getting massively out of my depth here, but is that an easy thing to do given the later stages will have to share weights with early stages?

2[anonymous]
I'm not sure, but I could imagine an activation representing a counter of "how many steps have I been thinking for" is a useful feature encoded in many such networks.
shiney10

"we don't currently know how to differentiably vary the size of the NN being run. We can certainly imagine NNs being rolled-out a fixed number of times (like RNNs), where the number of rollouts is controllable via a learned parameter, but this parameter won't be updateable via a standard gradient."

Is this really true? I can think of a way to do this in a standard gradient type way. 

Also there looks like there is a paper by someone who works in ML from 2017 where they do this https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08983

TLDR at each roll out have a neuron that repr... (read more)

2Megan Kinniment
Just want to point to a more recent (2021) paper implementing adaptive computation by some DeepMind researchers that I found interesting when I was looking into this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.05407.pdf
3[anonymous]
Interesting! I think this might not actually enforce a prior though, in the sense that the later-stages of the network can just scale up their output magnitudes to compensate for the probability-based dampening.
shiney40

Thanks, I'll see how that goes, assuming I get enough free time to try this.

shiney50

If someone wanted to work out if they might be able to develop the skills to work on this sort of thing in the future, is there anything you would point to?

4Davidmanheim
If you're interested, I'd start here: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/YAa4qcMyoucRS2Ykr/basic-inframeasure-theory and go through the sequence. (If you're not comfortable enough with the math involved, start here first: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AttkaMkEGeMiaQnYJ/discuss-how-to-learn-math ) And if you've gone through the sequence and understand it, I'd suggest helping developing the problem sets that are mentioned in one of the posts, or reaching out to me.
shiney30

I don't think it's that hard e.g see here https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/01/my_end-of-the-w.html

TLDR person who doesn't think end of the world will happen gives other person money now and it gets paid back double if the world doesn't end.

shiney20

Are you sure the not spamming thing is a good idea it means that the nearest meetups section doesn't include London even if there is a meetup?

0philh
I'm not sure, no. But people have said (explicitly, implicitly and passive-aggressively) that they find the number of meetup posts annoying, and I think at one point London was a plurality of those. If I'm sufficiently on the ball, I can post for the 16th not long after this meetup, so that we are still in the nearest meetups section. And if it turns out that I just run a social on the 16th, I might deviate from my stated algorithm and post it anyway.
1Stefan_Schubert
Agreed. Being an advocate of guess culture I approve of the higher order thinking (thinking that others might think that you're spamming) but in this case I think it's not efficient. Ergo there should be an explicit posting every time there's a meeting imo.
shiney00

Maybe I missed something but I could never see why there was anything intrinsically good about (say) the short bias in the Solomonoff prior, it seemed like the whole thinking bigger programs were less likely was just a necessary trick to make the infinite sums finite. If we consider the formalism in the technical note that only keeps a finite number of sentences in memory then we don't have to worry about this issue and can sample uniformly rather than (arbirtrarily?) picking a bias.

In your paper http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Logical%20Prior%20Probability.pdf y... (read more)

shiney00

Can't you somewhat patch Demski's proposal by sampling uniformly from S rather than doing it biased by length. That would generate the right probabilities for the 90% issue, provided that all the ϕ(n) are in S to start with. If not all the sentences were in S then there still be a bias towards ϕ(n) being true but it would be only for the ones such that ϕ(n) is in S and it would be lower.

0abramdemski
This doesn't prefer simpler theories about the world, which "defeats the whole point" (to an extent): it can't be used as a general theory of induction and logical uncertainty.