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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

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Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Smart CS students in the 1960s and professional AI engineers with Ph.D level education (as I believe he has) in 2022 are a world apart.

And now you have empirical evidence that a Ph.D education just means someone stayed in school entirely too long.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#52
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…

> I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding.

In effect this is how humans respond to prompts no? What's the difference between this and sentience?

People also fail to use logic when assimilating/regurgitating knowledge.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#53
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's not sentient, but why would commonplace logic be a pre requisite for sentience / consciousness / qualia / whatever you want to call it?

A brilliant colleague Janelle Shane works specifically on how language models fail (obnoxiously often). This is her line of research to show how LLMs are overhyped / given more credit than should be. I think her fun little experiments will give a better answer than I ever can :). She's on substack & Twitter https://janellecshane.substack.com/p/okay-gpt-3-candy-hearts

+1 for SHRUBBERY'S PRECIOUS

if anything, this proves that candy hearts should be larger, and less disgusting

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#55
post #48

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)

IMHO "I think therefore I am" is the only provable statement in philosophy but only to the person referenced by "I".

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#58
I’ll byte… Current generation of AI / ML is simply an approximation function with large number of parameters that are “tuned” on a given set of inputs. The output of AI / ML is “good” if the approximation is good and most of the time this means that the new input is similar to the training data. However, if the input is very different from training data then at worst the models will be completely wrong (but very sure) and at best - simply not produce any output. We are far away from real sentience that would not stop by use an unusual input (situation) to learn new things about the world. Yes, it is amazing that we can create an approximation function automatically for very complex input data sets. But no, this approximation is dumb and not sentient. Not even close.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#59
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…

> As someone with a PhD in this domain,

What is sentience then? Last I checked the Searle Chinese Room argument was still unresolved.

Is it not possible that our brains are also just "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" machines?

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