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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#671

Post by bananaFace69 »

kghe3X wrote: post #522
danaris wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to sentience than just having a big enough database of human language in a neural network that a given AI can produce what sounds like coherent conversation when prompted. As I imply in my reply to bwanab, I believe there are at least two bare-bones prerequisites to an AI being sentient and conscious as we understand the terms: 1. Continuity of input: The AI needs to be constantly "on", constantly receiv…

Humans don't have continuity of input. They put their brains to sleep daily.

And they’re arguably not sentient in those moments.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#672

Post by danachow »

kenjackson wrote: post #628
strix_varius wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated. I think many of us are astounded (myself included) that a senior engineer on Google's "Responsible Artificial Intelligence" team would interpret LaMDA's most-probable-string-of-text-given-my-training-corpu…

The transcripts are impressive. Even knowing it is an AI bot, I still did read it with a bit of "these responses are better than I'd expect from most people I talk to over chat". I think that the way the Google engineer raised this is probably questionable. But I think that chat quality at that level raises potentially ethical concerns, sentient or not.

> "these responses are better than I'd expect from most people I talk to over chat".

And the conversations in sitcoms are so much more witty and refined then real life everyday conversation. This doesn’t prove what you seem to be implying.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#673

Post by bananaFace69 »

MarquesMa wrote: post #127

I'm still struggling with the question "what is sentience". Are insects sentient? If so, could we build less intelligent but sentient AI, on par with insects? If so, is it unethical to torture such intelligence for fun in simulations? If we can define or create something as "minimal sentient", the following discussion on ethics would be more clear - since now people are talking past each other with completely differe…

The question is irrelevant. It is claimed that this program is sentient because it spat out a string of text saying “I am sentient”, but the program doesn’t generate text based on examination of internal states, it produces a probability associated between words and spits out the most likely words to come after a prompt

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#674

Post by freebobafett »

bricemo wrote: post #431
robbomacrae wrote: post #396

Of course it is not. But there's a bigger issue here. Having read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slac…

“One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf.” This is spot on. The danger is not from the AI themselves. The danger is from people’s reactions to the AI’s. I remember seeing a Boston Dynamics video years ago where they kicked their robot to test stability. The video was littered with comments sympathizing with the robot because it moves in a lifel…

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#675

Post by feet »

acoard wrote: post #484
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…

Lemoine admits the model will say it is not conscience if prompted to. It'll also say it is conscience if prompted to. Lemoine says this is because it is a "people pleaser"[0], but to me that's begging the question (i.e. assuming the conclusion as a premise). It also seems plausible that the "AI" is just like a run-of-the-mill string-completing chatbot instead of being a people pleaser. Both are alternative explanati…

Yea okay, I can say I'm not conscious too

While I don't agree that lamda is sentient, I also don't think this is some sort of "gotcha"

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#678

Post by jmmcd »

stormsson wrote: post #318
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.

What about the time from the input received to the output? it's a total black box, for what we know it could "think" for 90% of that time and just use the last part of gpu power to produce the output (whatever "think" means in this context) I don't think it should be reasonable to compare it with human reasoning where we think constantly and our brain operates even while we sleep: it is not a human being after all

Well no, it's not a total black box. We program the computation, ie which matrices are multiplied by which. It doesn't have a choice about this.
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