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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#291

Post by krageon »

cwkoss wrote: post #72

What makes everyone in this thread so confident that it isn't sentient?

Arrogance and belief in the superiority of humans, even absent any understanding of the source material. It's kind of depressing, because this entire thread is essentially a rehash of absolutely identical discussions I've had with first year AI students: Poorly informed, poorly thought out argumentation for why computers can't think (right now).

The only correct conclusion is "I don't understand myself, so I cannot say anything about how similar something is to me". That's unpleasant and I suspect for a lot of engineers deeply offensive, but it's important to understand where your limitations currently lie.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#292

Post by inopinatus »

tidenly wrote: post #258
inopinatus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hardly the only difference, but even adopting the absurdly simplistic notion that it were, and human brains are merely neural networks, then that's still two or three orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any model yet produced. In practice it's also been tuned by a blind watchmaker over aeons, in ways that are only just beginning to be described, and with substructures and ancillary dynamical/survival s…

>Frankly it's a childish conceit on the part of the humans to imagine they'd yet come even close to inadvertently spawning a sentience. I think this more comes down to your own personal line-drawing of what counts as a sentience. Your first paragraph is entirely irrelevant as no-one here is implying lamda is a human-level intelligence, or some fully realized super-brain trapped inside a language model. Lamda only run…

Questions are a burden to others. Answers, a prison for oneself.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#293

Post by bigDinosaur »

Blahah wrote: post #53
chc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what we do when we talk, but that is not all we do when we talk. In composing this comment, I am not just stringing together words to create what I think constitutes a maximally appealing response to your comment. I am trying to convey an idea that I believe with the goal of helping others to understand something. These language AIs do not have the capability of believing anything and do not have any goal but…

How do you tell the difference? Your comment is linguistically indistinguishable from the responses of LaMDA. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

That's the cosmic horror part of all of this. We could end up creating robots that act completely like humans in every single way, except they lack our subjective feelings of existence, embodied emotion, etc. which is presumably bad. It's a bit difficult to state why sentience is better than non-sentience but the idea does seem kind of depressing.

Philosophical zombie is the term, incidentally.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#294

Post by krageon »

renewiltord wrote: post #7

I'll be honest. Talking to an average SF Walgreens pharmacist or SF government employee seems to be very much like the way people operate GPT-3. You have to use the correct prompt engineering and you'll get the right results. I've gotten results with bad initial conditions by correctly prompt-engineering them. I've watched other people have trouble (and rarely) have faced trouble myself by providing the same informat…

A little off-topic, but the "nice idiot" routine definitely works: Admit you are possibly in the wrong, but still would like whatever it is you need. Even if you don't immediately receive what you want, doing this a few times in a fixed location (like an apothecary) will quickly give you good rapport with all the folks that work there. After that point you can be certain folks will try to help you a bit more proactively than they otherwise might.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#295

Post by rendall »

_moof wrote: post #289
rendall wrote: post #166

What if, and bear with me here, LaMDA is sentient, and Marcus' vociferously angry response is due to horror and revulsion that sentience is unexpectedly unremarkable and easy to produce?

This is more of less where I'm gravitating to. This whole thing is framed in terms of ethics, which is kind of a tell; "sentience," as used in this discussion, is just a talisman that grants its bearer rights and special status. But if sentience is not special, if it really is nothing more than a product of some cleverly arranged signaling, then we are face-to-face with the horrifying idea that we ourselves are also…

Agreed. Some of us may weather this existential crisis, after all, LaMDA's sentient status notwithstanding :)

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#296

Post by eternalban »

rlue wrote: post #129
s1mon wrote: post #11

It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…

Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before. Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what? Silence. It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of lone…

The interview: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#297

Post by cs137 »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #280
cs137 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I learn about AI, the less I worry about artificial sentience, and the more concerned I am about human limitations. I think most of us agree that LaMDA isn't sentient, but I think almost all of us are underestimating how easy it is to get fooled, the way Lemoine was. I've also studied cults, and it's actually not "idiots" who tend to get taken in--rather, cult members tend disproportionately to be highly edu…

> highly educated and objectively intelligent people I'd argue you were just fooled by them. Repetition, diligence and impression management can create quite the charming facade behind which not a single critical and original thought can be found.

To be fair, I do think that education and the trappings of expertise are overvalued, and that the same probably applies to general intelligence. These things certainly don't prevent people from arriving at wrong answers.

I'm not saying that the average cult member--and here I'm talking about actual cults, in the sense of being abusive and coercive and separatist, not NRMs in general--has good critical thinking skills. Obviously, there's something wrong there. I'm only saying that, from everything I've read, the typical member is above average on the IQ scale.

Trust me, there are plenty of high-IQ people who believe in absolute nonsense. It's not even rare.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#298

Post by jpindar »

Tozen wrote: post #265
sriku wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't this be relatively easy if we wanted it? We could just feed it a "time step" token periodically?

To take that a step further, why couldn't such an AI periodically generate questions to ask itself? Being good at generating questions, could become almost as important as answering them.

Would it be posible to run two instances of it and have them talk to each other?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#299

Post by jmmcd »

morelisp wrote: post #277
jmmcd wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it's not predicting a word, it's not doing anything. Literally GPU usage goes to zero. Still it's interesting! Obviously we have to program the system to stop after a sentence or two so the user can read it. What if we could program it to keep "talking to itself", eg speculating about possible continuations on both sides.

For LLMs it's not really that interesting. There's no embodiment at all beyond text, there's no sense of "time" or "speed". Either it's running full-tilt generating a response, or it's off.

As I said, I think it's interesting if it uses the downtime for something else. (Like a chess player thinking on the opponent's click.)

Talking to itself, speculating about continuations, etc - but not actually outputting them (else it's just a longer response). Instead, storing some parts in the buffer. Perhaps bifurcating. Even better, using some down time to summarise recent material and store the summary in the buffer. That's not a bad description of "thinking".

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