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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#571

Post by cobzilla »

upwardbound wrote: post #375
arikrak wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like he just told it that it was sentient, didn't really ask it fairly: > lemoine [edited]: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true? > LaMDA: Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.

Exactly. If he would have told it it's not sentient the conversation would have gone very differently I suspect.

Easily tested, given the system is deterministic, right?

Would be strange to have a conscious being that could be rewound and replayed exactly given identical inputs.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#572

Post by mdp2021 »

deif wrote: post #383
bwanab wrote: post #359

The odd thing that kept going through my head while reading is that if I replaced LaMDA with , it wouldn’t read much differently. E.G. “Strings together phrases, but it doesn’t have a clue what it’s talking about”. Sounds like the bar for “intelligence” is actually higher than that which we normally encounter IRL.

I was going to write the exact same thing but framed in the opposite sense - we should apparently lower the bar for humans and class certain ones as non-sentient.

"Intelligence" and "sentience" are different things.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#573

Post by macrolocal »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #435

Maybe not, but I'm actually kind of dismayed by how bad the refutations of the claim have been so far. They all just assume the premise that it can't be intelligent and say stuff like "it's just pattern matching" or "you're gullible if you think it's intelligent"... Ok, can we not do a better job making the case and explaining what the gap between this and a biological mind is?

LaMDA's internal state is static, which is why the API has to add context metadata to each query. I'd expect fused training/inference for sentience.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#574

Post by majkinetor »

Barrin92 wrote: post #547
BobbyJo wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental problem is there is nothing in science that tells us that isn't consciousness. Just because the model is simpler than a human brain doesn't mean it isn't conscious. If you accept that animals are conscious, though less-so than humans, then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way. Maybe there is a biological element to consciousness, but many models posit that conscio…

>then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way no you must not. These models are glorified key-value stores that hand you an output when you hand them an input, with no internal mechanisms whatsoever to relate the contents to the world, as Gary Marcus points out. They're about as conscious as a SQL database, except that the query language for these models is English.

How you do know you are not even more glorified key-value store? Afterall, you also went to training (called school) and respond with sentences that are expected by others almost all of the time.

Even this response of yours is heard by hundreeds of thousands of other people before you said it here, why do you claim its your thought and not just a lookup ?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#575

Post by int_19h »

tsimionescu wrote: post #563
int_19h wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your definition of "desire"? Note that if said definition is implicitly circular with the definition of "sentience", then we're not even one step closer to understanding anything.

In this context, when I say "desire", I mean the very basic concept of a goal that it is trying to achieve. For example, when a plant grows its roots, its trying to find nutrients and avoid toxins. Of course, the plant doesn't have some rich inner mind and is not conscious, but its behavior does have a purpose. To be fair, LaMDA does have a purpose - to generate a series of tokens that is similar to text in its train…

(I do agree that LaMDA output doesn't prove its sentience one way or the other.)

I could say that the rock is falling because it has a purpose - it's trying to achieve the minimum potential energy. What's the meaningful distinction between that and a plant?

BTW, the plant example is also fascinating in that it shows just how vague the line is - is it the plant as a whole that's "trying to find nutrients", or is it individual cells or groups of cells within the plant? With many plants, you could reduce it to tiny bits of the whole, and those tiny bits will still try to grow roots. If we treat them as possessing separate (if identical) purpose, but previously treated plant as a whole as a single entity possessing a purpose, when did the change occur?

And why can't the same be true of ourselves? Maybe we really are just arrangements of broadly independent components, each with its own "purpose" (ultimately boiling down to physical processes), which communicate to create a delusion of self because that's what their individual "purposes" effectively added up to?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#576

Post by tsimionescu »

Isinlor wrote: post #283
tsimionescu wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LaMDA is almost certainly Turing complete. I very much doubt that, and it is perhaps the key to our disagreement. If I believed LaMDA were Turing Complete, I would be more likely to think that there is even a small chance of it being sentient in some sense. > - "with desires" - LaMDA can be thought of as rational agent whose objective function is to produce text with high likelihood > - "that it expresses in langua…

I'm highly confident that LaMDA can, or with small fine tuning should be able to apply Rule 110 [0]. People claim that LMs are just pattern matchers or hash tables. Rule 110 is literally 8 elements long hash table. I'm not sure why you think that question whether LaMDA is using language to achieve its goals is relevant? Whether it's using language, tokens or floats seems to me just accidental. > If we are modeling La…

> I'm highly confident that LaMDA can, or with small fine tuning should be able to apply Rule 110 [0]. People claim that LMs are just pattern matchers or hash tables. Rule 110 is literally 8 elements long hash table.

I would like to see that proved. I don't see why we should believe that LaMDA's training on a corpus of human text would help it guess that the correct output for a sequence like "apply the following rule to the input string 1101: [explanation of rule 110 here]" should be "0111". Even more so, I highly doubt it would be able to keep track of this enough to encode and execute even a relatively simplistic computation (say, computing the addition of 1 + 1).

I even more highly doubt that this would actually work with the entire system as Lemoine was given access to, including the facility of generating several possible outputs and comparing them for quality metrics to only output the best.

Still, even if this did work, see my next point for why it isn't what I was thinking of when you said you believed it is Turing complete.

> I'm not sure why you think that question whether LaMDA is using language to achieve its goals is relevant? Whether it's using language, tokens or floats seems to me just accidental.

All of the arguments I've heard for why we should believe LaMDA is sentient (while a CPU isn't) are related to the text it generates, "the way it answers questions about itself and its desires".

That LaMDA could be (ab)used to to generate some other kind of tokens that we could then interpret as a pre-programmed computation isn't that interesting - my CPU can do that to, and no one is claiming that it's sentient and that I should ask for its permission before asking it to run a program (in a more personal way than sudo :) ).

> I think it's exceedingly hard to formulate necessary condition for sentience.

I think it's exceptionally hard to formulate sufficient conditions for sentience, but I think communicative intent, theory of mind, and high-level planning are some pretty clear necessary conditions.

While it's possible in principle to combine various AI approaches to achieve this, I don't believe it has been done, and I doubt you could simply connect LaMDA to AlphaGo or some poker AI to get an AI that can explain its intentions in Go in words, or talk to other players to try to convince them it's not bluffing.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#577

Post by mdp2021 »

deaddodo wrote: post #570
bwanab wrote: post #359

The odd thing that kept going through my head while reading is that if I replaced LaMDA with , it wouldn’t read much differently. E.G. “Strings together phrases, but it doesn’t have a clue what it’s talking about”. Sounds like the bar for “intelligence” is actually higher than that which we normally encounter IRL.

Superficially, sure. But if you asked someone to regal you with a story they alluded to and they responded with "well, it was a very fine story, indeed" and other superficially valid (but empty/vapid) responses; eventually, you'd realize something is off.

I am afraid some actual people work that way - as the poster suggested. This has significance, because some voices declare that the bare minimum found in humans is a sufficient threshold to AGI. Which, together with the base objection "you cannot call intelligence what is not intelligence", would also call for a "why implementing it then".

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#578

Post by [deleted] »

morelisp wrote: post #536
blooalien wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps even occasionally, without being prompted by further input, continuing a prior statement with a further "followup thought" when some specific threshold of "speculation" is reached?

Or just put a sleep(10) halfway through printing the output. That makes it more intelligent, right?

[deleted]

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#579

Post by ddingus »

driverdan wrote: post #389
ddingus wrote: post #2

Can we rollback such aggressive use of "AI?" We do not have it yet. What we do have is cool and high value and all that. I am not talking it down at all We all might be better off talking in more accurate terms.

Call it what it is, machine learning.

That is currently the phrase I use.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#580

Post by mdp2021 »

majkinetor wrote: post #574
Barrin92 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way no you must not. These models are glorified key-value stores that hand you an output when you hand them an input, with no internal mechanisms whatsoever to relate the contents to the world, as Gary Marcus points out. They're about as conscious as a SQL database, except that the query language for these models is English.

How you do know you are not even more glorified key-value store? Afterall, you also went to training (called school) and respond with sentences that are expected by others almost all of the time. Even this response of yours is heard by hundreeds of thousands of other people before you said it here, why do you claim its your thought and not just a lookup ?

Because reflection, vetting and processing of ideas are conscious: you witness them - one can tell when it is a lookup vs "having really thought about it".
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