• doctordevice@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    I agree with your first paragraph, but unwinding that emergent behavior really can be impossible. It’s not just a matter of taking spaghetti code and deciphering it, ML usually works by generating weights in something like a decision tree, neural network, or statistical model.

    Assigning any sort of human logic to why particular weights ended up where they are is educated guesswork at best.

    • andyburke@fedia.io
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      5 months ago

      You know what we do in engineering when we need to understand a system a lot of the time? We instrument it.

      Please explain why this can’t be instrumented. Please explain why the trace data could not be analtzed offline at different timescales as a way to start understanding what is happening in the models.

      I’m fucking embarassed for CS lately.

      • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        … but they just said that it can. You check it, and you will receive gibberish. Congrats, your value is .67845278462 and if you change that by .000000001 in either direction things break. Tell me why it ended up at that number. The numbers, what do they mean?

      • Match!!@pawb.social
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        5 months ago

        That field is called Explainable AI and the answer is because that costs money and the only reason AI is being used is to cut costs

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 months ago

          Thank you. I am fucking exhausted from hearing people claim these things are somehow magically impossible when the real issue is cost.

          Computers and technology are amazing, but they are not magic. They are the most direct piece of reality where you can reliably say that every single action taken can be broken into discrete steps, even if that means tracing individual CPU operations on data registers like an insane person.