Live data from Hacker News

Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

economist.com

11–20 of 85 posts

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#12
post #9

Queue the hacker news haters. As someone that works with neural networks on a daily basis, I am constantly stunned by the effectiveness of modern attention based NLP models. They actually work for real world tasks, and you don't need to be an expert in them to apply them. Not only that, the newer ones are drastically better than the ones only two years ago. These are the models released in public. The sheer amount of…

The question being asked isn't "are language models really good?", though. It's "are language models (moving towards being) conscious?".

They really are. Distance functions used on the encoded embeddings of sentences work stunningly well. While a primitive use case compared to true AI, the sheer trajectory of the effectiveness of these models is breathtaking.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#13
post #3

>In our conversation, lamda tells me what it believes Ramesh felt that Lucy learned about what Mateo thought about Lucy’s overture. This is high order social modelling. I am not sure the example convinces me that what GPT-3 is doing here is 'modeling' the agents in the story. It feels like the author is trying to draw a contrast between rote statistical language modeling and higher-order understanding, and it's not c…

Yup. I'll believe it when the model gets decent grades in a GRE comprehension test.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#14

Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.

I don't see why this is true. Just because a thing is difficult to precisely define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, nor does it mean you can't get closer to it.

I could say that I'm "taking strides towards becoming a better person" and that could still have meaning, despite the lack of any objective measure and, even, with the understanding that "a better person" could change over time.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question being asked isn't "are language models really good?", though. It's "are language models (moving towards being) conscious?".

They really are. Distance functions used on the encoded embeddings of sentences work stunningly well. While a primitive use case compared to true AI, the sheer trajectory of the effectiveness of these models is breathtaking.

Yes but that’s not necessarily progress towards consciousness.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really are. Distance functions used on the encoded embeddings of sentences work stunningly well. While a primitive use case compared to true AI, the sheer trajectory of the effectiveness of these models is breathtaking.

Yes but that’s not necessarily progress towards consciousness.

I argue that the effectiveness of the matrix factorizations (creations of abstractions) in the embeddings points to the fact that the math works. Meaning, abstractions that are meaningful are created. Which is a building block of consciousness.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#18
post #9

Queue the hacker news haters. As someone that works with neural networks on a daily basis, I am constantly stunned by the effectiveness of modern attention based NLP models. They actually work for real world tasks, and you don't need to be an expert in them to apply them. Not only that, the newer ones are drastically better than the ones only two years ago. These are the models released in public. The sheer amount of…

The question being asked isn't "are language models really good?", though. It's "are language models (moving towards being) conscious?".

What's your definition of consciousness?

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#19
post #4

Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.

Which I wonder if we'll ever have as consciousness is a strictly subjective thing.

> consciousness is a strictly subjective thing.

I’m wondering whether that can be taken as an objective truth.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#20
post #11

Would be awesome if they could also make strides towards a working fingerprint sensor on their flagship Pixel phones. The accuracy on my P6 is 30% on a good day.

Instead, some future Pixel phone will probably start feeling bad about it. ;)
Post reply on HN