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AI’s Language Problem

technologyreview.com

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Re: AI’s Language Problem

#111

Post by morgante »

posterboy wrote: post #104
protomikron wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't an engineering problem, it's a philosophical problem [...] Indeed. However we can not rule out the possibility that we engineer a system without a "body" (I think you are referring to the Embodied mind thesis?). It is a complicated topic and discussions about it are futile without precise definitions of loaded terms, like "intelligence", "body", etc. A rather well-defined test is the classic Turing test…

I don't find the Turing Test convincing either, because someone smart enough to build it should be smart enough to recognize it from its answers. And if that depends on the intelligence of the questioner, whose intelligence is tested then, really? IIRC the test is a binary classifier, but intelligence is a spectrum that's fuzzy and therefore inherently hard to define. IE, how low is someone willing to assume the lack…

> I don't find the Turing Test convincing either, because someone smart enough to build it should be smart enough to recognize it from its answers.

Why do you assume that? The creators of AlphaGo certainly couldn't beat it.

Re: AI’s Language Problem

#113

Post by scythe »

posterboy wrote: post #109
erikpukinskis wrote: post #84

No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don't understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I'm not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they…

Computers are programmed only using text, even if the text has just two symbols. Sensor interfaces use digital signals, again symbol streams. That would beget the question if there could be machines mightier than a Turing Complete one. I'm sure that's missing your point.

If you could simply program a human's behavior into a machine, that would be fine, but humans aren't capable of encoding their neural circuitry in a programming language; in fact, the combined efforts of all humans have only begun to shed light on what human behavior is. As such, generating formalized information (that describes behavior) requires some process (other than human hands) to do it -- and in the case of a machine that interacts with the world, "turing machine" is not a complete description of any such process.

Re: AI’s Language Problem

#114

Post by nawitus »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #84

No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don't understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I'm not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they…

Ben Goertzel of OpenCog fame has argued for this for a long time.

Re: AI’s Language Problem

#115

Post by AsyncAwait »

Houshalter wrote: post #102
erikpukinskis wrote: post #84

No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don't understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I'm not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they…

I believe we can get AI from just text. Obviously that won't work for babies, because babies get bored quickly looking at text. AIs can be forced to read billions of words in mere hours! Look at word2vec. By using simple dimensionality reduction on the frequency that words that occur near to each other in news articles, it can learn really interesting things about the meaning of words. The famous example is the vecto…

If we ever want 'true AI' then interacting with the world would certainly be a crucial component of building one. Text is a crucial component, but ultimately being able to 'see' gives one an entirely new perspective on what words mean. There's a reason after all, for why toddlers touch hot surfaces even after repeatedly being told that it will hurt - until they experience it for themselves, the word 'hot' doesn't quite connect even if they heard it dozens of times and have a very good abstract sense of what it means.

Re: AI’s Language Problem

#117

Post by posterboy »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #107

The problem with natural language processing is that we are trying to learn it (read: construct models of it) from utterances, things that are being said or transcribed. And that is a big, huge problem because there is a lot more to language than utterances. Hell, there is a lot more to language than language itself. There are things you cannot put into words, and yet you think them. There are things that you can't p…

> There are things you cannot put into words

I am a very bad example though, for one because English is just my second language. Sure there is thinking before words are learned. Language is a complicated problem to talk about, just like self awareness. Consciousness is a very nebulous term to me. Still, you'd have to prove that language is theoretically unfit. Any such logic might be incomplete if you suppose you cannot put it into words. A complete first order logic is expressible however, following Goedels completeness theorem.

Re: AI’s Language Problem

#118

Post by gerbilly »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #84

No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don't understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I'm not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they…

Reminds me of a quote I once heard, for which I can't find the source:

The cheapest way to make a brain is still the old way.

Re: AI’s Language Problem

#119

Post by kmicklas »

jknz wrote: post #79
artursapek wrote: post #75

I wonder if in the future we'll have matrix-style "blobs" of knowledge that we can plug into compatible AI systems. That way it has to just be trained once on a strong system, and then other systems can take advantage of the learning by forking the state and importing it. It would definitely speed up training AI, and possibly even enable it on lower powered hardware. Imagine downloading "english teenager slang 2016 v…

If the blob of knowledge consists of the weights of some neural network and if this blob is public... Then an attacker could easily perform imperceptible perturbation to the input in order to make the network believe that the yogurt is an Eiffel tower or vice versa. (Can't find the related publications right now but it appeared several times on hn before). So if you don't want the system to be gameable, such public b…

Likely by that time we will have overcome this problem.

Re: AI’s Language Problem

#120

Post by kafkaesq »

Houshalter wrote: post #102
erikpukinskis wrote: post #84

No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don't understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I'm not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they…

I believe we can get AI from just text. Obviously that won't work for babies, because babies get bored quickly looking at text. AIs can be forced to read billions of words in mere hours! Look at word2vec. By using simple dimensionality reduction on the frequency that words that occur near to each other in news articles, it can learn really interesting things about the meaning of words. The famous example is the vecto…

It's learning the meaning of words, and the relationships between them.

Word2vec is definitely an impressive algorithm. But at the end of the day, it's just a tool that cranks out a fine-grained clustering of words based on (a proxy measure for) contextual similarity (or rather: an embedding in a high-dimensional space, which implicitly allows the words to be more easily clustered). And yes, some additive relations between words, when the signal is strong enough.

But to say that it's "learning" the "meaning" of these words is really quite a stretch.

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