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A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

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Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#21

Post by armitron »

bitshiftfaced wrote: post #11

I'm surprised he would be so taken in. Presumably he understands the inner workings. He even had to show the author how to prompt it so it would sound more sentient. To me, this is like pulling back to curtains to reveal the "trick." When you prompt it as though it's a chat bot, it will reply with the most statistically likely response, given that prompt. What's the most statistically likely response when you've shap…

“Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult.”

I stopped reading after this.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#22

Post by jotm »

arkitaip wrote: post #3

I'm not seeing lots of proof that Lambda is sentient but I do see compelling evidence that it might not matter if people believe that the AI is human enough. Most people, myself included, probably couldn't tell that Lambda was a program.

> the AI is human enough

That could count as sentient.

I mean, look at most people - we follow a preset course from birth to death. Anyone doing "their own thing" is the exception. And even they have limits.

Enter the job market and you're almost guaranteed a heavy grind (maximum productivity) with no time for novel thoughts, or indeed any thoughts at all.

Of course, there are professions where that's not true, but for the majority of people, who are at the bottom, it's not an easy life and intelligence either fades or is an obstacle (pesky thoughts like "I need to escape this bs" but lacking resources is even less pleasant than just working mindlessly till you die).

Just wait for retirement. And the governments hope you die 2 days before it :)

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#23

Post by swid »

The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there…

I believe two things:

-1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness. The simulated entity will believe all the same things as a real one. And there are likely huge shortcuts we can use to optimize so we aren’t simulating a whole brain or person. Maybe matrix math is all you need.

- 2. I don’t know how to build consciousness, but I believe wherever it exists in the universe, some kind of interconnected network like we find in the brain or neutral networks will exist at its foundation.

Given this, I don’t think it’s crazy to say we are making in roads to sentience.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#24

Post by shkkmo »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #16
sylware wrote: post #4

Do you realize the size of the silicium system you need to reach real time simulation of 1 human brain complexity (at the neuron/synapse level)? Anybody did run the numbers? Not to mention the recent discoveries that the human neuron/synapse encode way more states than expected.

I'm not commenting on the claims of the article, just the points in your comment. I think it's pretty clear that an entire human brain is not required for the operation of consciousness. Certain people have lost massive portions of their brain and still maintained regular consciousness functioning. On top of that, the typical human brain only consumes about 20 watts of power to do its thing. So that's just a safe upp…

I think that you need more than just computing power, you need high levels of interconnection with low latency.

So while we undoubtedly have sufficient aggregate computing power, I don't think it is structured in a way that would allow it to emulate human cognition and problem sovling, not just pattern recognition.

That said, consciousness is an incredibly heterogeneously defined term but can probably be pretty widely applied (many people confuse consciousness with sentience or sapience.)

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#26

Post by skohan »

gilbetron wrote: post #14
sylware wrote: post #4

Do you realize the size of the silicium system you need to reach real time simulation of 1 human brain complexity (at the neuron/synapse level)? Anybody did run the numbers? Not to mention the recent discoveries that the human neuron/synapse encode way more states than expected.

Google has a few million hosts in it's datacenter. Each host has a few CPUs. Each CPU has a few billion transistors. That means there are on the order of 10s or 100s quadrillion transistors at Google. The human brain has around a quadrillion synapses. So, the rough numbers are there. Of course, that assumes the brain is like a computer, at all - my favorite hacker news comment someone made was the idea that maybe the…

A computer is a pretty bad analogy for a brain. But even so, 1 synapse is much much greater in complexity than 10 or 100 transistors. Each synapse is a complex system unto itself, which interacts with all kinds of cellular mechanisms which make up the highly dynamical system which dictates information processing within the neuron.

So if we wanted to make a simulation with reasonable fidelity to the mechanisms of cellular information processing we know about, I would wager to guess it's more on the order of 1GPU == 1Synapse at a minimum.

That's not to say that all of this complexity is required to reproduce consciousness in a meaningful way, but actual information processing in the brain is gob-smackingly complex.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#27

Post by shkkmo »

xenr1k wrote: post #17
throw457 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe emulating a human brain is the only way to achieve consciousness?

Agree, are animals not sentient?

Animals are pretty clearly sentient, it is the sapience and consciousness that are harder to pin down.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#28

Post by _bruh »

swid wrote: post #23

The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there… I believe two things: -1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousn…

No post body was provided.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#29

Post by williamtrask »

swid wrote: post #23

The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there… I believe two things: -1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousn…

Assumption: determinism

Counterexample: quantum mechanics

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#30

Post by feet »

williamtrask wrote: post #29
swid wrote: post #23

The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there… I believe two things: -1. the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules which can be simulated to high enough precision on hardware to approach what happens in the real world. If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousn…

Assumption: determinism Counterexample: quantum mechanics

What, exactly, in quantum mechanics is nondeterministic and how does that translate to nondeterministicness in the macroscopic/biochemical world?
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