Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient • Hacker News Board

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#61

Post by srvmshr » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 11:55 PM UTC

arcturus17 wrote: post #33

Trasmatta wrote: post #14

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?

Is there really a difference between commonplace logic, advanced logic, and otherwise? Logic is logic, if there ever was a tautology...

Of course there is. In AI domain (and philosophy) for e.g you have associative logic: "Grass is a plant. Plant is green. Grass should be green". There is symbolic logic too where relationships are established based on rules of observable world.

Logic isn't treated as the CS logic per se, but as a high level concept although at a fundamental level they will be compositional of the mathematical logic rules. That is still an ongoing goal - a unification of "world models" which can be modeled and explained

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#62

Post by whatshisface » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 11:56 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #29

> So, it’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.” You can't expect to be employed by a company while simultaneously building a personal brand around publicly criticizing th…

>It also becomes difficult to trust someone when their position stops being one of (supposed) moral responsibility and starts becoming a source of fame, celebrity, and access to influential podcast/media circles that were previously out of reach.

If you use known-good whistleblowers of the past as a reference, does that filter stand up? You've come up with a catch-22 where you will only listen to whistleblowers you haven't heard.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#63

Post by dekhn » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 11:56 PM UTC

spullara wrote: post #55

briga wrote: 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".

I don't think that's a philosophical or scientific statement. It's merely something an ostensibly self-aware creature cognizant of its awareness making a subjective statement.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#64

Post by grumpopotamus » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 11:57 PM UTC

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…

> 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 gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.)

These things are orthogonal to sentience.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#65

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 11:58 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #29

> So, it’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.” You can't expect to be employed by a company while simultaneously building a personal brand around publicly criticizing th…

[deleted]

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#66

Post by Victerius » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 11:58 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #62

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #29

> So, it’s regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.” You can't expect to be employed by a company while simultaneously building a personal brand around publicly criticizing th…

> It also becomes difficult to trust someone when their position stops being one of (supposed) moral responsibility and starts becoming a source of fame, celebrity, and access to influential podcast/media circles that were previously out of reach. If you use known-good whistleblowers of the past as a reference, does that filter stand up? You've come up with a catch-22 where you will only listen to whistleblowers you…

Don't whistleblowing protections only apply to government employees?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#67

Post by jameshart » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 11:58 PM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #30

Trasmatta wrote: post #14

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

I don't understand how frequency of failure is a relevant concern here.

Humans are frequently monumental idiots. The human language and inference model produces nonsensical, dangerous, and stupid results with alarming frequency.

(not to say I believe language models are sentient, but... you need something more than 'sometimes they spout made up BS' to refute the claim, because it turns out that is not particularly indicative of sentience.)

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#68

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 11:58 PM UTC

Trasmatta wrote: post #14

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…

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?

[deleted]

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#69

Post by t_mann » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 11:59 PM UTC

Less surprised about this outcome than that the guy was a Google engineer in the first place. Their hiring standards seem so high from the outside, yet this guy comes across as barely computer-literate, the kind who would have fervently demanded an in-person session with the ELIZA 'therapist' in the 70's.

He really should know better what's under the hood. I guess he got carried away by his impressions, or he's playing some game with the media and the impressionable public.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#70

Post by dougSF70 » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 11:59 PM UTC

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…

Exactly...most displays of AI are well trained circus animals...so far.