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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?

#121

Post by GhettoComputers »

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…

I’m very interested in asking a question to you; what is intelligence? When deep blue beat a grandmaster it was just memory and algorithms. When GPT3 writes creatively from prompts and answers it’s just a transformer with a lot of parameters. When we use deep learning it’s just gradient descent. When we we have object recognition it’s just matrixes. When we use text prediction, it’s not intelligent, it’s just a markov chain.

The goalposts for intelligence keep changing. What exactly is intelligence?

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#122

Post by wbsss4412 »

mannykannot wrote: post #113
wbsss4412 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Certainly not, my only goal is to assert that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#123

Post by SxC97 »

trabant00 wrote: post #24

It's incredible how stupidly powerful the rational part of the human brain is. It has this unlimited capacity to get lost in details. "What does it mean for AI to Understand?" - we keep arguing over definitions and moving the goal posts to make it seem we are an step closer to reaching AI. When my first AI coworker will read the on-boarding docs and start solving Jira issues I will have no doubt we have done it. That…

When my first AI coworker will read the on-boarding docs and start solving Jira issues I will have no doubt we have done it. That simple.

It’s not exactly what you’re after, but we’re already pretty close!:

https://mobile.twitter.com/gabro27/status/117354793413217894...

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#124

Post by [deleted] »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #122
mannykannot wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Certainly not, my only goal is to assert that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

[deleted]

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#125

Post by [deleted] »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #122
mannykannot wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Certainly not, my only goal is to assert that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

[deleted]

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#126

Post by mannykannot »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #122
mannykannot wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Certainly not, my only goal is to assert that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

Yes, the uncertainty of what can be known and the arbitrariness of empiricism make a wonderfully powerful hypothesis generator, allowing one to hypothesize against not only unverified hypotheses, but also against any claim that any given hypothesis has been empirically verified. One can, for example, employ it to say that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that the apparent global pandemic is not being caused by a virus, or that homo sapiens did not evolve from other species.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#127

Post by jonplackett »

ShamelessC wrote: post #97
jonplackett wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. this is interesting. In a way it's opposite thought-direction of what we are talking about. eg. can it look at an avocado shaped chair and recognise it as a chair in the shape of an avocado - for me that would display a lot more understanding of the concept of 'chair' and 'avocado' than being able to produce an image of the phrase 'a chair shaped like an avocado' - but maybe the same process must be happening…

https://openai.com/blog/clip/ CLIP is the corrolary model created purely for classification purposes rather than generative as in DALL-E and is quite impressive across a range of tasks. Give it an image and a caption, and in return you get a score (0.0 to 1.0) telling you how much they match. I think it is more in line with your premise. Others have taken CLIP and combined it with frozen language models (GPT2) to cre…

Thanks for writing such detailed reply! Very helpful.

It’s exciting that this is happening.

Do these models still have to be trained in the same way and then become essentially static? What I also find very different about teaching a child is how dynamically their understanding can shift based on explanations and observations. That’s probably the another hallmark of understanding.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#128

Post by jonplackett »

yboris wrote: post #95
jonplackett wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

Thank you for the response. A bit of a push back: On the driverless cars example you're right that AI models abstract away needless complexity, but so do we, as humans, can live without understanding that bodies are made up of cells (or how muscles move during a tennis match). If we want AI models to include a person's gaze in their calculations, we can make it happen. From an abstract-enough perspective, the AI mode…

Thanks for yours too! Isn’t this civilised? I can tell I’m not on reddit… I think what I’m getting at is the way an AI learns is kind of a black box. Maybe it is learning about cyclists head movements. Maybe it only learned that for cyclists wearing helmets. We don’t really know it’s put the pieces together correctly - like the classic example of training an AI to recognise friendly tanks and it just learning the difference between day and night.

Because we let it essentially define its own characteristics for recognising things we don’t know if it picked the right ones. We just have to hope the training data was large enough to average out. Using the right features is fundamental to understanding what’s really going on. Perhaps occasionally an AI might notice some connection we humans have been ignoring and that might be good. But in general I think we’ve done a pretty good job of allocating words and language to the important things. We separated out the body into parts that make sense. That kind of thing. If an AI had those underlying building blocks wired up more like our own. maybe understanding in a similar way that we do would be a lot easier.

Last quick example / thought experiment:

To test understanding in a person you try asking them questions that would confuse them if they didn’t understand.

Eg. If I photoshopped a crocodile head onto a Tiger’s body and have it a fish tail and put it on the moon. My toddle would still recognise all the bits and describe it as such. An AI would just come up 33% ish for each possibility because it doesn’t understand what an animal is and that it has those parts.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#129

Post by wbsss4412 »

mannykannot wrote: post #126
wbsss4412 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not, my only goal is to assert that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

Yes, the uncertainty of what can be known and the arbitrariness of empiricism make a wonderfully powerful hypothesis generator, allowing one to hypothesize against not only unverified hypotheses, but also against any claim that any given hypothesis has been empirically verified. One can, for example, employ it to say that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that the apparent global pandemic is not being caused by…

I mean that’s getting into the point of being unnecessarily facetious.

If something is true from an empirical perspective that is one thing. It is another thing to say that even though we have been unable to form a conclusion from an empirical point of view, the ultimate ability to do so is given, and that all hypothesis that cannot be tested in such manner must be completely disregarded, even if they make sense.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#130

Post by yboris »

jonplackett wrote: post #128
yboris wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the response. A bit of a push back: On the driverless cars example you're right that AI models abstract away needless complexity, but so do we, as humans, can live without understanding that bodies are made up of cells (or how muscles move during a tennis match). If we want AI models to include a person's gaze in their calculations, we can make it happen. From an abstract-enough perspective, the AI mode…

Thanks for yours too! Isn’t this civilised? I can tell I’m not on reddit… I think what I’m getting at is the way an AI learns is kind of a black box. Maybe it is learning about cyclists head movements. Maybe it only learned that for cyclists wearing helmets. We don’t really know it’s put the pieces together correctly - like the classic example of training an AI to recognise friendly tanks and it just learning the dif…

I love that we can, for some network architectures, "ask" it to generate a (set of varied) super-stimulus example(s), something that is 100% "that thing". So at least sometimes, we can see what "friendly tank" means.

I wonder if in many of the AI can/can't discussions we are implicitly talking about different time horizons. I think you're right, yet given enough time, I feel like an AI (designed for, among other goals, understanding) would be capable of communicating out its credence values and points of misunderstanding.

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