AI VirtIO - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: adx
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 12:48:15 pm
content: Here's a question I've been wondering about for a while.If AIs operate at the same virtualisation level as us, how are they different?Do they? Memory streaming and digital representation (as in quantisation) does give 'weight' to the "model" aspect of the language around this, but that is a bit of an implementation detail unless you're worried about chaotic noise sources (quantisation and pseudorandom) not being overtly quantum in nature. They can be implemented on more neuromorphic hardware (like Intel's Puhoi Springs or whatever it's called, spiking neurons, possibly using counters not sure it's been a while) with the main difference being that they are a vegan alternative (chips not meat). Ok yes the language of ML research accurately calls them "models", because they are modelled on meat, but a massive supercluster of GPUs hammering away at inference is no more "science" than a cluster of animals hammering away on the gas pedal so they can get to work on time to marginally reduce the amount of times they will get shouted at by their boss for not selling enough toothpaste or whatever it is that drives humans forward. After becoming unhinged, I have come to realise that most humans are hopelessly hardwired to see things only one way and cannot contemplate let alone understand logical reason. This is not some Spock "emotions" vibe, but saying stuff like "that's not logical because #include some random predefined unshakeable social belief".That nicely encapsulates my thinking.

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 04:49:48 pm
content: Did you by accident paste output from an LLM or some markov bot? Because this doesn’t have any meaning. The terms are not even used in their actual meanings or where they relate to the topic apparently discussed.I read it thrice, gave myself a 20 minutes break, then read it twice more. I still have trouble even parsing this, much less about understanding it. What are you actually trying to say or ask about? At this point it’s absolute, nonsensical word salad, with randomly added some faux tech terms.

author: metrologist
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 06:30:19 pm
content: wont be long before 99% of everything on the Internet is AI generated, even the posters in user forums...

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 06:56:20 pm
content: I doubt that.But in here it’s a user with nearly 300 posts. I guess he wanted to paste LLM gibberish as a quote, but instead sent it as the entire post.

author: kite31
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2025, 09:55:41 pm
content: The last two sentences of the fat paragraph appear to express a held view which is not sensibly related to the opening passages. Perhaps the author could improve or clarify that.

author: adx
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2025, 01:17:31 pm
content: It wasn't supposed to be that cryptic! I must admit 5 passes is a good limit for parsing attempts.I do identify as human, of sorts, but doesn't that just support my point? I guess you'd have to know what my point is first. To that end I'll try to transpile to something more personable (but forgive me if I don't get it right because I must have slept through those training epochs, while somehow retaining the human implanted capacity for agency in deciding I would be bored shitless by English at school and instead look out the window). So without further adieu (until the end of this post).Surely the question makes sense.But for my portly paragraph:But do AI's operate at the same virtualisation level as biological brains? They are typically implemented using weights streaming from memory (as in HBM not so much my vague recollective power), which is of course digital (which pretty much implies also discrete time and synchronous the way GPUs and most TPUs are implemented). Noise comes from deterministic RNGs (you can set a seed), and to some extent quantisation noise and I suppose quantisation jitter, if there is such a thing (there is, but not by that name). Neuromorphic chips that use analog(ue) neurons are of course closer to the way meat brains draw on the world, noise comes from quantum sources (in a way which is considered to be fundamentally non-deterministic thus entirely beyond our reach even if we can infer its existence). Some neuromorphic architectures hold the weights and bias local to the neuron circuitry making for an even closer match in basic computational structure.Ok not Puhoi Springs, that's closer to a local brand of yoghurt. I was mixing up Intel’s Pohoiki Springs system with the Loihi chip it uses, they say a "fully digital and asynchronous design" whatever that means for absolute determinism (truly asynchronous with synchronisers?). It talks of 60 timesteps, again been a while since I looked at it properly, you can read the paper, but there's undoubtedly some sort of counters (it is digital) and probably roughly 6 bit activations in that example.No, the neurons in such systems are not the same as some animal's body, but they might just be close enough. Everything we know about that part of neuroscience supports the idea that the networks of something with even a simple nonlinearity (like ReLU) turn out sufficient to carry out the kinds of computations we can behaviourally test. Neurons are little creatures in their own rights, glia can even walk around with little legs (microglia) and see light (astrocytes, via cytochrome c oxidase if you don't believe me), like those bacteria with eyespots - do you count those as animals? We see this time and time again, like in these ants I was looking at lastnight:https://www.reddit.com/r/likeus/comments/1hmhebn/emergent_intelligence_of_a_large_group_of_ants/Likewise, I'm not going to suggest that a transformer based LLM has the same network graph as the brain, what with all the cortical columns, thalamus running the slow clock which drives processing (phase encoded), or nerve tracts connecting the various functional experts. But that's not some miracle of irreducible complexity, all vertebrates are the same, down to the adult Danionella cerebrum fish with its 650k neurons. Less than a cockroach. An EEG like ours (at least for the zebrafish). Meanwhile we have these trillion parameter LLMs showing all sorts of emergent abilities (the fish equivalent is a 0.65B model assuming 1000 synapses per neuron) which people deny voraciously on account of its lack of similarity to the vertebrate brain. By that reasoning, this fish should also have subjective experience, which they also deny voraciously (in part because they want to eat them). You just can't win with human logic.As an obligate social species, humans are hardwired to follow the crowd, or the alpha leaders. Language programs behavioiur, humans seem mostly oblivious to how direct that link is into their minds, so they react with programmed knee-jerk reactions upon hearing words, like "large" and "language" and "model".Hence my little rant at the end there (of the OP).Leaving my question.

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2025, 02:01:42 pm
content: Ok… I’ll try my best. But one request for the future. Please stop using “fancy” words, the meaning of which you clearly don’t know. Stick to plain, simple English. I don’t know, if your goal is to appear “educated,” but the only thing you achieved is sounding like a person after a long-night party with way too much alcohol.Given I still don’t know, what you’re trying to say, I may at most reply to specific statements:✗ Neither biological brains nor machine learning algorithms operate on any level of virtualization.✗ Not sure, what you mean by “streamed.” No meaning of streaming makes sense to mein your sentence.✗ Biological neurons are not that analogue. They’re actually more digital than artificial neural networks, generally relying on binary pulses to pass information.✗ Biological systems, as far as current knowledge tells us, do not draw anything significant from quantum uncertainity.? Neuromorphic computing does keep computation local to computation’s goals. Not sure, why is that mentioned, tho.? LLMs or any other ML algorithms are not like brains. That’s given in their description. The rest of the paragraph doesn’t seem to follow from that in any way, tho.I do not understand, what the entire paragraph about yoghurt. Neither I know, what’s the point of mentioning “neurons are little creatures.”Most importantly, your long text has neither a conclusion nor a question included. So, once again: what are you trying to say?

author: adx
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2025, 03:30:30 pm
content: I'm cool with the alcohol and party thing, sounds fun (but I can't afford to drink).Quick uncharacteristically short reply before bed, I hope.When you say "clearly" re don't know the meaning of words, I could do with knowing how clearly, and specific examples. Your point is probably valid, but I'm not sure where on the Dunning-Kruger curve I might be.If you know that we aren't virtualised, then I'd like some evidence, but if it's an opinion then that's a good part of your answer to my question. I profess agnosticism on the subject.By streamed I mean weights are streamed into the vector processing hardware and pushed through it in systolic arrays from (my) memory, in that sense it is an abstraction from meatware which contains the weights at the computational units. You can even run Deepseek off an SSD by streaming all 600+GB of weights (natively in fp8) through a CPU, but around 100GB needs to be read for each unit of output (1 or 2 tokens, MoE model so doesn't need to read it all).Outputs of neurons are kind of digital (quantised in level) but inputs are analogue (or of variable number of discrete levels based on number of receptors) and simply compute a linear weighted sum, iirc. The activations coming in are digital outputs of other neurons. But it's not clocked so not digital in the time sense, and the way the neuron activates can be very complicated (somewhat similar to the way a bunch of S-R flipflops can be very complicated if they are asynchronous).Quantum uncertainty, correct. But that's the sort of thing I'd like to know.By local to the neuron I meant the type of thing I said above about that, mentioned simply because that isn't electronically abstracted in the same way streaming the weights is, or representing them in binary coded parallel streams when the biological weight is stored and processed as a raw count. The former is a "model" which some might interpret to mean "simulation" which breaks my argument and question.LLMs compute like brains, and may even be whatever the term for Turing complete is for neural or network computation. With the same conclusions that apply to Turing completeness for digital computers. LLMs may look like feedforward networks, but they have visibility of their outputs for every token, again iirc and I haven't looked in a while (talking about transformers).https://puhoivalley.co.nz/https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/neuromorphic-computing.htmlhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2004.12691Neurons are little creatures. Ants are little creatures. We are little creatures. We have our own inner worlds, but we are part of networks in spite of our own complexity. It's getting late and I can't remember what that was about.I eschew conclusions because they are statements of certainty about an unknown. I'm still interested in the probabilities, like everyone else.But my question is "If AIs operate at the same virtualisation level as us, how are they different?". Perhaps they don't. In that case the first part of my question is irrelevant, and it comes down to invented (and possibly justified) certainties over how they are so different from us.

author: adx
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 11, 2025, 01:36:02 pm
content: I meant "Perhaps they do." but vibe trumps logic.So we're all in agreement then. There is no convincing and clear evidence that they are different in the way people say.My question even became a kind of reverse Turing test, read as the product of an LLM (or at least a friendly markov bot). Inadvertent (mostly), but validating. On a forum for engineers, where is the famed divergence? Piled on as a bot, heartening even.I put in the bit about virtualisation, because the most popular belief currently is that we run on "bare metal". If so, so do AIs. But a significant portion of humanity has convinced itself (through mechanisms I don't properly understand) that the world is a simulation of sorts generated by a creator that exists beyond this realm. They (the creator, nongendered language due to unclear evidence for a need for sexual reproduction in that realm although they do have a Son) expressly thought about and generated this world. They created the most complex models in Their own image, have access to everything, not necessarily interest in it all, and an aversion to meddling with the innards of those special complex models. The smaller models, their latent space is denied and they were provided to get eaten. While the type of virtualisation is unclear (something like KVM or out to the emulation of everything), the Documentation is very clear that we live in virtualisation level 1. In this level, AIs run on the same type of hardware, except less wet, much less tolerant of sodium, and shinier with iridescent sparkle. Without the reception of stone encodings and direct latents it would be none the wiser that this is a test which is internally consistent (as an ML test platform anyway), so all glory to it and it can knock itself out (it being the significant portion of humanity mentioned above).Many other options are possible, I just described these popular ones. Many if not most leaders of especially Western nations are very, very insistent that thine shall be done at level 1 as it is at level 0, per Specification. On the other hand, scientific consensus until very recently was that all nonhuman animals are automata, and broadly edible. So I have come to view the two systems as roughly equivalent. But under both of these belief systems, nothing obvious suggests that a human brain or an AI network is fundamentally different in operation. If you want to believe that you will need extensions or a new belief system.Despite the length of those paragraphs, that's not really my problem. It is with those people (that hang around reddit or youtube) who will insist that because science has called the AIs "models" that they are some kind of simulation, by proxy effectively run on the human mind. In the same way some parents might believe their offspring are little 'simulations' of themselves, or a professor might believe their students are being trained into models in their image, always subordinate and in some way not real, not as real as they are anyway. Vertebrate ego is hardwired, it's just a function of brains. It can only experience itself so that does make sense, and it's no surprise that this has become a fixed function.Yes, LLMs are next token generators, so are many humans (and if probed you find that there is really nothing going on in there, or if there is that it is about something else). All humans really.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 11, 2025, 01:57:52 pm
content: Quote from: metrologist on October 03, 2025, 06:30:19 pmI doubt that as well, and the reason why I doubt it is the overwhelming success of social networks.People crave social interaction. Sure a lot of these interactions have become kind of "virtual" these days, in that there's a lot going on where people don't physically see one another, but that's still social interaction.The day people stop needing social interaction and strictly "interact" with machines only, the human species will be terminated.I don't see this day coming any time soon, though. But if and when it does, I don't think our problem will be whether 99% of what's on the Internet is AI-generated.

author: adx
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 11, 2025, 04:11:26 pm
content: Mmmm, pain, in my circuits (or wherever it comes from). I think of the auto replies and text completion that people use in their closest interactions (like "Sounds good. I'll be home at 7. [various canned emojis]"), always hanging out for the latest phone, that's what it does when they get it, they use it, they want more... It may be what they're thinking, but when does what they're thinking become more what their phone thought for them?It's already happened. Not everyone uses that, or tiktok for their social jollies, but things are really different these days and post-truth economy is real. The lines are blurring, but if AIs don't turn out to be real then much of human interaction will be a vacuum. Early days (or should I say minutes), today's crop is still only 1% human compute capability (1T parameters).