Prediction.
Setting aside the metaphysical questions of subjective "meaning" and "understanding" what else is there?
What a system can predict is the measure of its "understanding", surely?
What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
61–70 of 134 posts
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#62When it gets to questions like these I feel that we transcend discussions of technology and end up on questions of philosiphy which aren't going to be going anywhere anytime quick. I also feel that AI should be used to augment not replace human decision making, it seems that where AI shines is problems that are well defined with well defined solutions, and because the AI doesn't get tired, hungry or distracted it can…
[deleted]
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#63When it gets to questions like these I feel that we transcend discussions of technology and end up on questions of philosiphy which aren't going to be going anywhere anytime quick. I also feel that AI should be used to augment not replace human decision making, it seems that where AI shines is problems that are well defined with well defined solutions, and because the AI doesn't get tired, hungry or distracted it can…
AI had meaning that originated from CS theorists before being usurped and losing all meaning. I think tech and associated marketing (which are great, don't get me wrong, I love money!) are the ones at fault here. It should be more of a "philosophical" question, though I'd prefer instead perhaps it be academic.
I'm not trying to be rude, but your example of what AI should be is narrow and not very grandiose compared the original meaning. I understand you were talking pretty loosely, so I feel like I'm singling you out but this happened to be where I started typing, sorry!
It just reminded of how essentially all conversations about "AI" go. They seem to end up being quite specific, narrow pattern recognition problems at the end of the day. Maybe there's some decision theory on top of it. Maybe if there's enough money /people involved, there's more components, so it's a complicated enough supervised learning problem that it mimics people to a sufficient extent that it looks intelligent enough to make a headline. But it's a copycat, not intelligent. Hey, full circle, Melanie Mitchell! - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_(software)
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#64My understanding of "Understanding": Imagine a photo of a written poem: An image-processing program can "understand" the digital image: It can read the jpg, change the picture completely (e.g.: change the colors slightly), without changing the meaning one level up. But it doesn't understand the characters or words. An OCR program can read the image and "understand" the characters (or the textual representation. It ca…
Interestingly, the poet with the highest level understanding can be clueless about UTF-8 or what a pixel is
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#65Ignoring the associate debacle, the characterization of large language models as “stochastic parrots”[1] is the most accurate description I think I’ve ever heard for the capabilities of AI language models. These models don’t understand that a mistake on a Winograd question is not the same as a mistake on a medical diagnosis (as a contrived example). [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
I don't think it's a good name. GPT-3 is more like a dreaming hallucination machine. Humans do nonsensical things in their dreams, same kind of non sequitur as the language models. What GPT-3 lacks is being able to wake up from its disembodied hallucinations, in other words a body and something to motivate its actions.
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#66As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). But this does not mean we cannot produce operational models of understanding, for example we have models of propositional/logical semantics and discourse such as Lambda Discourse Representation Theory and others, which can compute…
I think your position couples intelligence with consciousness a bit too tightly. I can imagine a goldfish is conscious but not intelligent and I can imagine a very powerful supercomputer to be intelligent but not conscious.
The prerequisite to change your position can be satisfied by having a computer randomly generate a question, which I don't think would be an example of consciousness or intelligence. Furthermore even as a human (and one who is hopefully intelligent), I would not go so far as to say that I'm not programmed. Almost all of my opinions are programmed, the language I speak didn't just fall from out of the sky but was taught to me, my preferences are almost certainly due to programming and I am certain if I grew up in North Korea they'd be different.
All this to say that consciousness can be independent of intelligence, and both of them can be programmed.
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#67Prediction. Setting aside the metaphysical questions of subjective "meaning" and "understanding" what else is there? What a system can predict is the measure of its "understanding", surely?
Does a mechanical bomb sight 'understand' ballistics and aerodynamics?
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done a fair bit of work with multimodal deep learning and I am fairly confident that a DALL-E, CLIP, or NUWA architecture would output/classify those phrases accurately without being trained explicitly on images of Tigers. I see your point however.
I’d be interested in where to look for more info on that. Do you think it could work on anything more complex? As I said in comment below I reckon I could make a much more elaborate explanation and still have the kid get it.
https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ shows a decent ability to generalize to previously unseen concepts.
You're correct to consider the complexity of the phrase and just how good humans are at this sort of thing without needing much "training". For now, concepts that aren't explicitly in the training set are effectively composed from those which are. This can lead to some bizarre and outright incorrect results, particularly when it comes to counting objects in a scene or with relative positioning between objects (e.g. a blue box on top of a red rectangle to the left of a green triangle) but it's early days and there's lots of progress happening all the time.
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#69Anyone who has kids and teaches them things will know AI learns and ‘understands’ very differently. I can say something like ‘a tiger is just a lion with stripes’ to a 3 year old and they now ‘understand’ what a tiger is almost as well as if they saw a picture of one. They could definitely identify one from a picture now. This kind of understanding won’t work with an AI because we don’t understand what characteristic…
I'm curious, when you say "This kind of understanding won’t work with an AI", do you mean currently, or in principle, even in the future? note: children's brains come pre-loaded with so much stuff when we are born (we are not "blank slates").
What I mean is AIs aren’t really built with the goal of ‘understanding’ anything currently. They are awesome at individual tasks but they don’t have the kind of common sense a person can use to reason with and build up an understanding of how pieces of knowledge fit together.
Eg. Driverless cars can identify a car, or a motorbike or a cyclist and maybe work out a trajectory for it. But they don’t understand that a bike is a person on top of a metal frame and that person is made up of a head and body and limbs. And if that head is looking away from them it can’t see them coming.
For me, that’s understanding. Deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge to come to conclusions that add to your knowledge.
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#70My understanding of "Understanding": Imagine a photo of a written poem: An image-processing program can "understand" the digital image: It can read the jpg, change the picture completely (e.g.: change the colors slightly), without changing the meaning one level up. But it doesn't understand the characters or words. An OCR program can read the image and "understand" the characters (or the textual representation. It ca…
Sounds like you are describing the treachery of images.
Ceci n'est pas un poème.