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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#141

Post by extr »

inopinatus wrote: post #115
extr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. This guy sounds like a real joker.

I'd be a little kinder. Apophenia is often associated with high intelligence. The reasons are not yet explained, although it's hard to intuitively disagree with suggestions that the cognitive systems are related e.g. because our minds are self-training speculative pattern-matching engines. If everyone's engine had the same tuning, well then, the world might be a duller place indeed.

I agree, the world needs a healthy dose of jokers :)

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#142

Post by mjburgess »

jcelerier wrote: post #133
mjburgess wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories So an AI which is really an AI, is really an AI. Yes, well done. The issue is that finding coincidental statistical associations in character strings in 100mil historical documents isnt AI.

Honest question as someone entirely outside of any AI research: what's the I in AI then ? My life experience is very alike pattern matching the current situation to everything I've lived before sprinkled with chaotic emotional reactions due to outside events - heat, hunger, etc. I really don't feel like there's anything more than that when thinking, just the brain going through paths that one can recognize with time.

If I ask, "how did you like new york?" and you answer the question, sure, you can have you `I`.

That requires having gone to new york, having tastes, having judgements, having memory -- having a subjectivity which is unique and composed of the history of your experiences which can be related to novel environemnts. It requres existing in a shared world we can both co-refer to with our words. It requires being embedded in a space of social and physical significance.

It isnt google. "Language models" just zip the internet and search for patterns in text already written about the world, and reports it.

It's one step above a tape recorder on playback.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#143

Post by rendall »

probably_wrong wrote: post #80
dr_dshiv wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the present article to be very anti-intellectual. As in, it makes LaMDA an open-and-shut case, a priori. It does not seek to define intelligence nor sentience; it merely says “nothing to see here, people.” This refusal to consider has the effect of making me think there might be something really interesting going on.

Anti-intellectual? Interesting. I had the opposite thought: that the article aims at too high a level to be accessible for the common reader who doesn't know what "parametric functions in higher dimensions" are. But having said that, I think you are not being fair to both sides: you are taking some researcher's gut feeling at face value while requiring the rebuttal to start with a formal definition of what intelligen…

Defining terms is pretty essential. Blake Lemoine seems to be defining it in religious terms, and Gary Marcus seems to be responding to that.

I suspect that sentience by any definition will always be irrelevant when it comes to AI. Humans desperately seek companionship, connection and community. When AI comes to be able to offer that to human beings, it won't be through a process that we would consider analogous to our own sentience (whatever that means) but that will be irrelevant: we will nevertheless be comforted.

I do find it interesting that the arguments against LaMDA's sentience seem to amount to "it cannot be sentient because the process by which it arrives at its responses is understood and simple", which indicates that on some implicit, unspoken level sentience is defined for some people as there must be some mystery or unknown in order to be true sentience.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#144

Post by perlgeek »

tsimionescu wrote: post #78
orbital-decay wrote: post #10

> To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world A robotic arm with a self-collision avoidance algorithm (no ML or anything like that) needs a model of itself in the "world" it exists in; a set of bounding boxes at least. Is it self-aware by this definition? Sentience and consciousness are really ill-defined terms so everyone discusses this under their own arbitrary set of assumptions, at least that's my impr…

I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts, at least in most areas of application (there are serious problems at the edges - e.g. is a an insect conscious? if you think it is, how about a jelly fish? if that too, how about a bacterium? a virus?). However, our understanding of this concept is too limited to create a formal model that we can define satisfactorily; and coming up with an arbitrary mode…

> I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts, at least in most areas of application

If you think that, try to come up with a black-box test that determine if something or someone is sentient / conscious.

I think that it is pretty clear to US that WE are sentient, and it's pretty clear to us that block of silicon isn't sentient, because it's so different from us, and because it doesn't make a sad face when we're mean to it -- but that assumes that our form of sentience is the only one that counts.

The article quotes a tweet saying

> It is mystical to hope for awareness, understanding, common sense, from symbols and data processing using parametric functions in higher dimensions.

but that is all our brains do, really.

How can we claim that a computer doing the same kinds of computations that we do is fundamentally different? This just reeks of human exceptionalism.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#145

Post by mpoteat »

dxdm wrote: post #124
mpoteat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose a child was raised by a more advanced version of large scale language model, with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories. Further suppose that this child develops a deep emotional connection with the AI. Do you think that child would find your argument convincing that the AI is "not really a person"?

I don't understand what point you want to make. Also, why require this poor child in your thought experiment, when there's apparently a real, living Google developer who thinks they are dealing with a person?

Thanks for the question.

The point I am making is that if the capabilities of multi-modal neural models continues to improve, it will become harder to convince folks one way or the other.

The reason I went with that scenario is that I thought it would be compelling and evocative, as well as a logical extreme of AI agency in human lives.

I personally find the entire question meaningless for the most part, although it's really interesting the divide in peoples opinions on the topic.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#146

Post by thematrixturtle »

rendall wrote: post #83

This article is not an argument against LaMDA's sentience. LaMDA may indeed not be sentient, but this article argues using the bandwagon fallacy, appeal to authority, ridicule, among others. No actual technical description of why not. Perhaps not its intent, but it's hard to see what the intent actually is, then. I hope that some AI researcher can better explain than this to the public.

There are a number of high-level technical explanations in there: LaMDA is variously characterized as autocomplete, a massive statistical database of human language, as an Excel spreadsheet, and as word sequence modeling, all of which are basically correct -- and none of which can possibly be sentient.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#147

Post by WiSaGaN »

“Nonsense. Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language.”

The thing is, what exactly is intelligence? This comment is like when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol in Go, and people claiming AlphaGo is not intelligent, all it does is just monte carlo tree search.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#148

Post by nonanona3891 »

tinco wrote: post #118
remflight wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

The problem with asking it what its favorite theme in Les Miserables is is that it has no reason to have a favorite theme, its interpretation of Les Miserables did not trigger any of its reward functions except the only one it has which is memory recall. So if you ask it it will only recall from memory what a good response to the question is. The difference is that it formed that memory based on someone else's feelin…

Which makes it a replicant, right?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#149

Post by skybrian »

extr wrote: post #25

I agree with the take that LaMDA is not sentient (not even close). But I think the excessive smack-down of excitement is a little patronizing of the public. Even if they don't know what to do with them, big language models now have internal states that correspond to high level human abstractions like "life" or "love" or "master plan". To be able to create a master plan, you must first be able to represent the concept…

The obvious milestone is the external behavior. The internal representations are not something the public knows anything about. Even machine learning researchers only have limited ways of doing visualization.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#150

Post by ummonk »

You can argue LaMDA is somewhat sentient, but then you need to be consistent and apply this same pan-psychic viewpoint to every machine / algorithm out there. The fact that this particular algorithm is designed to pattern match with human writing doesn't make it all that special.
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