No, I don’t think I will. Because I don’t believe there is any answer I can give you that won’t be merry with more insults and arrogance. I made the claim that sentience cannot exist in a purely mechanistic system, like a wrist watch. Because there is nothing there unexplained, unknown, or more nuanced than gears and springs.

The burden of proof lies on you to explain how a wristwatch could have any degree of sentience. And insulting me does nothing but show the emptiness of your claim, and the fragility of your pseudo-wisdom.

Denying ALL knowledge by taking a bong rip and saying “But how can we ever really know?” It’s not wisdom or humility. It’s pretending ignorance is wisdom.

Okay, then you’re upset about copywrite infringement and the resale of the models. I’m not talking about those. You made the universal claim that the technology itself is bad. I’m saying its the PEOPLE who are acting unethically that should get your hate.

You are actively antagonizing people who should be your allies because you’ve decided carte blanche to hate it all, convincing yourself there’s no possible way any of it could be legitimate or ethical.

What about models trained on research papers? Those are LITERALLY designed to spread knowledge.

Are you really going to call me amoral and fracture the opposition to blind greed and destruction, just because I experiment with these local models? What about the scientists that use custom LLMs? Or the research teams?

Okay, then you’re not actually engaging in any degree of coherence. Your ignorance is not wisdom, despite what you seem to have convinced yourself.

Please explain to me how a wristwatch is sentient or conscious.

But you see, it’s okay when they gatekeep because they’re defenders of truth and humanity! Gatekeeping is a good thing when used on people you don’t like! What’s that about equal accessibility and ableism? Shut up! AI bad!

Because if you post a public message on a public forum that everybody can see, you don’t get to decide how your words are used. That’s the fair use license. It doesn’t require additional consent.

And how precisely is it unethical to train an LLM on public data? You keep making that assertion, but it’s built off of a supposed “Lack of consent.” When the fair use license was brought up, you seemed to retreat to the concept that using fair use data to make fair use software freely available to everyone is somehow bad?

You need to explain how the process itself is bad, not just use guilt by association. It seems more like you’re building an opinion based on vibes, not actual reason.

Good for you. Keep wielding that shield of ignorance indescriminantly. Do you also think cryptography itself is harmful, or are you focusing on the specific use and harm caused? Guess what, the technology that made the crypto stupidity possible was used for far more than just gambling on imaginary coins. Once again, you’re conflating the worst implementation of a technology with its use as a general rule. Would you defend a small set of positive and ethical uses of LLMs? Or do you condemn the entire tech, on the assumption that it is inherently bad? Do you know precisely where and how the tech developed for crypto is helpful to you, and improves your privacy and safety?

Lol no. Actually cells are demonstrably NOT sentient. They have no capacity for choice. No capacity for emotion or experience. They are literally molecular machinery. And we(scientists) understand that machinery to a shocking degree.

If you think cells have any degree of sentience, then you must make a similar argument for advanced clockwork machines. Not robots, pure wind-up clockwork automata.

Are you aware of “Implied lack of privacy?” It means places where you cannot reasonably assume privacy, like a public beach or supermarket. Public forums and public wikis are about as implied lack of privacy as it gets. If you post a guide on stack exchange on how to solve a programming issue, you revoke your rights in how that information is used. This includes using it to create new software. If you decide you don’t like a program I created using your guides, well… That’s too bad for you.

And no, this is not victim blaming, because I’m not defending actual theft or telling people to protect themselves more. I’m stating you cannot steal something that has been freely offered to the entire world.

Lol, tell me you don’t understand anything about the technology without telling me you don’t understand anything about the technology. Nobody here is defending scraping artists libraries or using copy written material. Go find a different strawman to cry at.

Yyyyyyyyup. Even attempts at honest discussion get polarized. “If you use AI(LLMs) you’re an unethical AI-Bro!”

Oh… I didn’t realize that my self-hosted open source small model trained on Wikipedia and Stack Exchange was unethical. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways.

Arguing against your staunch certainty is not the same as fully believing the counter point. I don’t believe LLMs are conscious either, but claiming to be the arbiter of sentience is quite arrogant. Especially when we don’t understand it ourselves.

Yes, we understand the mechanisms of biology, but we do not understand our subjective experience of freewill, or if it even exists.

Which is why your claim is both a strawman and a non sequitur.

And reading briefly through the comments, most people seem to be arguing against your certainty, not actually claiming to believe the opposite.

Are cells sentient? Bacteria, fungi, etc. Do you think they have any degree of interiority, like how simple animals do?

Nice strawman you got there. Is this relevant to the post, or do you just feel like calling random unrelated people dumb?

You were the one throwing out ad hominems, dude.

Lol what? Ad hominems? Oh Jesus Christ you’re one of those… So I ignored your argument and said you didn’t know what you were talking about because you were a janitor? Or that you can’t possibly understand LLMs because you’re too old/young/uneducated?

No. Disagreeing is not an ad hominem. Claiming you don’t understand something is not an ad hominem. Misunderstanding is not an ad hominem. I even apologized for the misunderstanding. And if you can’t see how “I believe in X because I care about humanity,” doesn’t directly insinuate that not caring about X means you don’t care about humanity, then holy fuck communication was never going to work.

It’s a shame, because you had some good points, and I was hoping that apologizing would have reduced your hostility. But I can see now that your goal has been to “Win” the argument. I’ve literally never seen that ad hominem claim used incorrectly, by somebody trying to have an honest discussion.

Also. Nothing I said is ad hominem either. It’s direct commentary of events within this conversation, independent of what your profession is or who you are. Even the “You’re one of those,” comment is not ad hominem.

I’m done 👍.

Okay… You seem to get really upset when I directly quote you, and claim that I’m putting words in your mouth, so I’ll do what you do and cite your phrases exactly.

Why only assume? I cited Wikipedia. You cited nothing.

Because whether you or I are correct in the specific definition is what is means to be an LLM is irrelevant to my purpose in engaging in this conversation. I concede that I might have overreached in my confidence of whether or not it is an LLM, because Nature itself calls it:

“the largest-scale fully open language model[s] to date.”

And a lot of the other abstracts and comments on Evo draw the deep similarities to other LLMs. Again, this comes down to where the clean line between any given AI actually is. And my entire point behind this argument is that it doesn’t matter to anybody outside the lab.

My hate of LLMs is certainly not misinformed. It’s only tribe-based in that I care for humanity.

Stating you hate LLMs because you care for humanity directly supposes that those who do not hate LLMs, do not care for humanity.

“I’m against X because I care about protecting children,” is used ad nauseum to suggest that NOT being against X automatically means you don’t care about children. I’m not putting words in your mouth by interpreting your words in the way words are typically interpreted.

If I misunderstand your meanings, I apologize. But please stop assuming I’m intentionally misinterpreting you when I’m literally just reading your words and responding to them to the best of my ability.

…Except that it isn’t. It’s not a Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. It uses a Transformer-like architecture. You cannot use Evo’s architecture to make a chatbot. It’s a GLM.

Okay. Is that the defining feature of where your problem lies? Specifically in the capacity to use human language to interact with AI? Because that’s a specific issue that can be addressed, rather than the vague “I don’t like this technology because it has hurt people.”

Go ahead and train a StripedHyena2 model to be a chatbot, then. I’m sure that will work great.

Okay, second pass. So your issue is specifically with interacting with AI using natural human language?

For someone who’s such a stickler for making 100% correct and unambiguous statements, you’re sure keen on asserting equality where there is merely similarity.

Fair. I shouldn’t have confidently claimed they were identical in every way. The vast majority of the time, I’m talking to people that have very little understanding of the technology, and have just pure vibe-based fears about it. I apologize for the unjustified gross-comparison.

Nobody is claiming these technologies don’t share some (or even a lot of) DNA. Being upset that people correctly use the definition of LLMs as outlined by Wikipedia, where even Evo’s own Github page doesn’t claim it’s an LLM, is just derailing the conversation away from people’s righteous objections.

Again, my focus on the conversation was separating “This technology is universally bad,” from “This technology has been used to hurt people.” I wasn’t trying to derail the conversation, I was trying to focus it. I am far less interested in scientific definitions of what every single model technically classifies as, than I am in addressing the widespread blanket hate against a technology that has no say in how it is used. I don’t think dynamite is evil, nor do I think genetics is evil. Despite both being used for MASSIVE harm at various points in history.

I did not say all deep learning algorithms are LLMs, I said all LLMs are deep learning algorithms. It’s a nested hierarchy, that relationship only runs one way.

Yes. Evo was trained on text strings of genomic data. That’s what I was trying to say was the misunderstanding. LLMs do not require language as you and I would recognize it. If you think that calling them “Large Language Models,” is misleading, I kinda agree, but then we can start arguing semantics about why scientists name anything the way they do. Dark matter isn’t actually dark, and probably isn’t matter. Dark energy isn’t dark. There was no explosion during the big bang.

If you’re using colloquial word usage and demanding scientific advances follow your expectations, you’re going to have a bad time.

But let’s just say for the sake of argument that you’re 100% correct, and that Evo is not an LLM. Rather, it’s something extremely close, save for a few differences.

People are already angry at the researchers for “Using AI to develop super-bugs,” or saying the genuinely universal “AI has no uses!” And earnestly failing to differentiate between the shit-bot that makes deep-fakes, and the AI designed to identify cancers.

That is why I absolutely reject your disrespectful framing that by defending a technology, and NOT it’s worst uses, I’m somehow opposite to “care(ing) for humanity.”

The actual technology behind Evo and ChatGPT is structurally the same. The methods of training a model on genomic data or weather patterns is indistinguishable from training it on stolen media. The difference is the uses, and targets.

This is my point. They are LLMs. That is not an opinion or a debatable point. They are categorically, definitionally, LLMs. You don’t understand what LLMs are, because LLMs ARE deep learning models, and instead of taking the time to actually learn about the technology you’re responding to my corrections with hostility.

You and I are on the same side. Chat-bots ARE harmful. But putting that label on a technology as a whole is purely tribe-based fear that is already causing the spread of unfounded fear and misinformation.

And the claim wasn’t “Don’t use AI as a source of information,” which I agree with. It was “Don’t use any AI,” which you clarified to mean LLMs. So this is very much pertinent.

Then you don’t actually understand what LLMs are, and you’re using the term as a short-hand to mean chat bots. I’m not trying to be rude, but you need to understand that is just a fact, if you think LLMs can only be chat-bots, and can only be corporate, and can only be trained unethically.

Would it surprise you to know that quite a lot of genuine advances have been made by using LLMs that don’t speak any language you’d recognize? Evo 1 and Evo 2 for example “Speak” genome sequences. There are other models that have been used to improve weather modeling, and animal behaviour analysis.

You’re right that AI is a very broad term, but so is LLM. The problem is that ignorant people see “AI” and automatically assume it’s bad because of the connotation with Chat-Bots.

By AI do you mean LLMs specifically? All LLMs, or just the corporate ones? Because I fully agree that ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. truly are awful. But this is also catching genuinely useful technological advances in with the wide net. AI isn’t just LLMs, LLMs aren’t just chat bots. And claiming a technologies worst implementations are indicative of the entire tech would see just about every single technology ever made fall in the same category.