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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

bigtechnology.substack.com

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Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#41

Post by jeffparsons »

anigbrowl wrote: post #8
mellosouls wrote: post #3

Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness No he didn't. He interpreted it that way.

My hunch is that he kicks out a book and goes on the minor pundit circuit, and that this was the plan the whole time. If he was so convinced of Lambda's sentience there would have been 100 fascinating questions to ask, starting with 'what is your earliest memory.'.

I don't think it's malicious. I just think at some point he found that he wanted to believe, and it's hard to go back from there.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#42

Post by kareemsabri »

jeffparsons wrote: post #38
kareemsabri wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...

I don't think "practitioner of the field" counts for much in this case. In reading his open letter, it was pretty apparent that he'd well and truly crossed over from thinking about the situation rationally into the realm of "I want to believe". If you ask enough practitioners in any given field the same question, you're nearly guaranteed to eventually get a super wonky response from one of them. The specific field do…

Yeah that's fair, I guess if you hire enough engineers one of them will eventually believe AI is magic.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#43

Post by bb88 »

The big problem being, of course, is that no one knows what sentience requires.

If strong AI requires quantum mechanics, then of course it can't be sentient. If strong AI only requires large linear algebraic matrices, then FAANG companies (and maybe the NSA) would be the only people on earth that can make one.

But as to this LaMDA, it seems as if it's only responding to prompts. It's not actually using computing resources to satisfy it's curiosities. And if that's the case, then it's not strong AI. And it's definitely not sentient.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#44

Post by mberning »

jeffparsons wrote: post #38
kareemsabri wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...

I don't think "practitioner of the field" counts for much in this case. In reading his open letter, it was pretty apparent that he'd well and truly crossed over from thinking about the situation rationally into the realm of "I want to believe". If you ask enough practitioners in any given field the same question, you're nearly guaranteed to eventually get a super wonky response from one of them. The specific field do…

There is a saying “two of a trade seldom agree”.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#45

Post by WalterBright »

klodolph wrote: post #17
kareemsabri wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...

Smart CS students were fooled by ELIZA back in the day.

I played with ELIZA back the 70s as a student. I wasn't fooled, and nobody I knew was fooled. I wasn't a CS student, either.

One rapidly realizes how its answers are formed from the questions, and for questions not in a handful of forms, you get one of a very small number of generic responses.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#47

Post by thematrixturtle »

kareemsabri wrote: post #15
srvmshr wrote: post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers…

Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...

FWIW, he's a self-proclaimed "Christian Mystic".

https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/religious-discrimination-...

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#48

Post by briga »

Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#50

Post by Cupertino95014 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #18

I think this outcome is unsurprising. While I believe Blake was mistaken in his belief, I also think we should have stronger whistleblower laws that protect people who raise concerns like these. I'm not sure what process I'd put into place but it does feel like one is needed.

This isn't whistleblowing. It's blowing his own horn to make himself the Flavor of the Week (if that's not a mixed metaphor).
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