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What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

quantamagazine.org

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Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#111

Post by KhoomeiK »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #94
KhoomeiK wrote: post #89

People outside the NLP research community need to understand that a language model does nothing more than calculate probabilties for the next word given some context. The way it learns that probabilistic function can be quite complex, involving billions of parameters, but it's still fundamentally the same. Most of the increase in performance in recent years has come from the ability to train LMs that better generaliz…

What if to predict next word you need to compress/understand universe in the end? AFAIK we have no clue how exactly NNs pick up/structure information. For me backprop and learning is similar to evolution thus result might be simialar. My knowledge is very limited though but I am happy to read any proofs/insights.

This is basically my area of research right now, compositional/symbolic representations in neural language models. I'll let you know the answer in a few months :)

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#112

Post by mannykannot »

_fnhr wrote: post #71
chermi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*Edited because I can't type* I do not understand this argument. I'm going use the word magic for whatever you're calling this non-"materialistic" spiritual explanation. I'm not trying to be a jackass, that's truly the best word I can find for it. I don't think magic is a bad thing, I just don't think you should summon magic until you need to. Magic is not an explanation, it's a non-explanation. It's non-falsifiable…

> I do not understand this argument. The unfortunate thing is that, I think, I understand your side. But something happened, I read some book or heard some talk that placed a seed of doubt in my mind. At first it was just a seed and I oscillated back and forth between being 100% materialist and between entertaining the proposition that there is something beyond matter in this world. But as time went on I began to shi…

You say there is nothing to explain, but there is something that has not been explained (by anyone), which is how minds work. If you are claiming that they cannot possibly be explained, that is just your intuition. You are, of course, entitled to your opinions, jus as much as those whose intuitions lean the other way, but there is no particular reason for us to regard anyone's intuitions on the matter to be an indicator of which way reality lies.

The observations of Russell's that you mention - which, I believe, were considerably influenced by his working with Wittgenstein - seem to be a critique of analytical philosophy's approach to learning fundamental truths about the universe. "Hold my beer", said his scientific contemporaries, "we're going to put these worries aside and see what we can learn anyway."

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#113

Post by mannykannot »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #107
chermi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*Edited because I can't type* I do not understand this argument. I'm going use the word magic for whatever you're calling this non-"materialistic" spiritual explanation. I'm not trying to be a jackass, that's truly the best word I can find for it. I don't think magic is a bad thing, I just don't think you should summon magic until you need to. Magic is not an explanation, it's a non-explanation. It's non-falsifiable…

Taking an absolutist view that empiricism is the litmus test for all truth is similarly magical thinking, in my opinion. Asserting “something that isn’t falsifiable isn’t real” is just as arbitrary as asserting that there exist phenomena that are beyond the absolute boundaries of our capacity to perceive them (that is, no amount of technical innovation will allow us to observe such phenomena). The latter statement, t…

I would tend to agree with your claim "the latter statement, though, seems much more reasonable of an assumption", but that does not give any particular reason to think that minds are examples of such phenomena.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#114

Post by mannykannot »

interstice wrote: post #99
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't qualify as 'unexpected' in any way. The system's ability to express any questions it might have is severely curtailed by the limitations of its inputs and outputs.

And yet the go games had some very unexpected and creative plays, so if the inputs and outputs were language based are we simply moving the goalposts for what is considered 'unexpected'?

It is more a case of moving the goalposts back where they belong, I believe. The original moving of the goalposts was in calling any 20th-century technology AI.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#115

Post by simplestats »

chermi wrote: post #93
simplestats wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this line of dismissal necessarily fits. If we ended up having to expand physics to include some new (today seen as mystical) property of the universe, then you are essentially wrong here. With QM (which I doubt is related to consciousness) we had to add unmeasurable quantum phase to everything and accept certain previously-"nonphysical" new properties of systems. Similarly with other revolutionaly theo…

I don't think I follow? What am I dismissing? I don't quite understand QM analogy. QM arose to explain new observation from more detailed measurements. Consciousness and intelligence and all things brain have been (to an extent) known 'properties' and difficult to explain (from first-principles) for quite some time. The more we probe, we answer some questions, and in the process reveal some more detail, leading to mo…

What progress is there towards the "hard problem" of consciousness? Even a oversimplified approximation akin to the Rutherford atom? Research in the area is considered fringe anyway, as no one has any hope a researcher will get anywhere.

QM required that we accept a new phase property of matter which cannot be observed even in principle, and which causes counter-intuitive experimental outcomes that require contradictory physical explanations. This remains unsolved, physics simple sucked it up and moved on using it. The Copenhagen Interpretation essentially says some questions are not "askable" (e.g., what is the state of an unobserved electron), and observation instantantaneously changes vast-universe-wide systems via collapse of the wavefunction (pretty magical in the opinion of many). The many-worlds interpretation is even kookier, though much more intuitive, and is gaining popularity lately. If parallel universes and "spooky action ata distance" (quoting Einstein) is not magic to you then what does it take?

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#116

Post by mannykannot »

mcguire wrote: post #104
jll29 wrote: post #30

As 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…

Ah, but the question remains: Are you intelligent? :-) How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention?

How does life emerge from materials that are not alive?

It is still possible to believe all of current scientific knowledge and also be a vitalist without contradiction, but few people aware of the state of current knowledge hold that artificial life is utterly implausible.

Einstein famously held that certain experimental outcomes could only be explained by local hidden variables, but we have since found, to the contrary, that they actually rule out local hidden variables as an explanation.

Statements of incredulity are not, by themselves, evidence against a proposition.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#118

Post by jrm4 »

tiborsaas wrote: post #47
jrm4 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. This all seems very simple to me: So-called AI is mostly not different from books, movies, videogames etc. No, they don't "think" and they are not "intelligent." But that in no way precludes that it an instance of it being mind-blowing and world-changing. Books, etc. do that, too.

Can a book drive a car by attaching some sensors to it? AI models definitely have intelligent aspects to them since they perform tasks we can't write algorithms for manually in a straightforward way. But a movie or a book is nothing like an AI model, they don't process information, they are static. AI models can react to numerous inputs in various ways.

I mean, a light switch reacts to my input by turning on.

If the measure is "reacting to numerous inputs in various ways," the Bible's definitely more intelligent than any "AI." It already figured out how to control humans.

(Like, I'm joking but I'm not? It really does speak to my opinion that at the end of the day "what humans do" is the thing that matters. People will get inspiration and ideas from both AI's and books. And people will use and misuse machines and computers, but that's about it.)

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#119

Post by chermi »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #107
chermi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*Edited because I can't type* I do not understand this argument. I'm going use the word magic for whatever you're calling this non-"materialistic" spiritual explanation. I'm not trying to be a jackass, that's truly the best word I can find for it. I don't think magic is a bad thing, I just don't think you should summon magic until you need to. Magic is not an explanation, it's a non-explanation. It's non-falsifiable…

Taking an absolutist view that empiricism is the litmus test for all truth is similarly magical thinking, in my opinion. Asserting “something that isn’t falsifiable isn’t real” is just as arbitrary as asserting that there exist phenomena that are beyond the absolute boundaries of our capacity to perceive them (that is, no amount of technical innovation will allow us to observe such phenomena). The latter statement, t…

My "blah-Popper" comment was a joke/self-deprecating to my argue. I agree that non-falsifiability isn't strictly sufficient grounds to dismiss something, but it is a curious smell.

Edit- crap, I'm pretty new at actually participating in HN comments, I don't think I followed chain properly

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#120

Post by ShamelessC »

jonplackett wrote: post #58
bpizzi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Assuming the 3 year old already knew what a lion looks like, and point at 'things with stripes' and 'things without stripes'. I think that a model that can already recognize separately lions and…

Maybe… but this is just one very easy example and also using something very obvious and visual. I could also say “a Cheetah is like a lion but it’s smaller and has spots and runs a lot faster. And a leopard is like a lion but smaller and can climb trees and has spots.” I could probably start with a house cat and describe an elephant if I wanted to and I’ll bet the kid would work it out. The ability to take apart and…

It is believed that the solutions neural networks learn may be rather elegant, to a degree. It is perhaps unscientific to say that the neural network is always decomposing and re-composing tokens in a _generic_ and intelligent way; but it's becoming increasingly obvious that it probably is; particularly in the case of the "self-attention" architectures.

https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/

> The concepts, therefore, form a simple algebra that behaves similarly to a linear probe.

Because the loss encourages words to be mapped as linearly independent vectors; you can literally do addition/subtraction with concepts and it sort of works.

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