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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

#101

Post by dekhn »

skybrian wrote: post #95
dekhn wrote: post #81

Annual reminder: the reason Larry Page originally started Google wasn't to solve search or become rich, it was to develop a sustainable source of income to produce infrastructure for ML research and hire motivated ML researchers to develop the technology point where it would become AI in an externally recognizable way (say, a computer program that could play some interesting game better than anybody else, or solve a…

Interesting if true. What's a good source for the part about Larry Page's motivations?

Me. I used to attend private meetings with a bunch of scientists and him and spent a fair amount of time talking to him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Foo_Camp). It's pretty hard to get him talking but I was very patient.

Back when I started, Google was fairly small and it was easy to hang out around the founder's area in 43, and occasionally I'd have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and Larry and Sergey (and Rob Pike and a few other brilliant folks) and we'd bullshit and I'd ask a bunch of questions about how search worked in 1999 (which is when I started using it).

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#102

Post by srvmshr »

whimsicalism wrote: post #90
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…

> PhD in this domain Philosophy? More seriously, I am curious how long ago you got your PhD and in what field that you consider "this domain."

I defended my PhD in Computer Science in 2020. My dissertation was on "Rapid & robust modeling on small data regime", hence specifically focused on generalization, network optimization & adversarial robustness. I also worked for a year with Microsoft Research in their ML group :) It was quite a fun ride

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#103

Post by davesque »

civilized wrote: post #25

In my reading about this incident, Blake strikes me as a very "Life of Pi" or Don Quixote type person. Someone who is a bit adrift in the real world and subconsciously relishes losing the boundary between reality and fantasy. A larger group is unable to bring themselves to lose the boundary, but enjoy, or perhaps are addicted to, standing on the edge. For example, the folks who constantly worry about a malicious arti…

I love your psyche profile on this guy :). Insightful.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#104

Post by Brian_K_White »

anjc wrote: post #52
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 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.

This is merely the observation that a person and a machine can both perform some of the same actions, and is not much of an observation.

I can crank a shaft just like a motor, and a Victrola can recite poetry. You are not confused by either of those things one would hope.

If I tried to write poetry, it would probably be 90% or more "mechanical" in that I would just throw things together from my inventory of vocabulary and some simple assembly rules that could all be codified in a pretty simple flowchart, and a computer could and would do exactly that same thing.

But it's no more mystical than the first example.

It's exactly the same as the first example. It's just overlapping facilities, that a person is capable, and even often does, perform mechanical operations that don't require or exhibit any consciousness. It doesn't mean the inartistic poet person is not conscious or that the poetry generating toaster is.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#105

Post by jameshart »

whimsicalism wrote: post #90
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…

> PhD in this domain Philosophy? More seriously, I am curious how long ago you got your PhD and in what field that you consider "this domain."

Trouble is, all PhDs are at least of philosophy, even if they're not in it.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#106

Post by psi75 »

dekhn wrote: post #81

Annual reminder: the reason Larry Page originally started Google wasn't to solve search or become rich, it was to develop a sustainable source of income to produce infrastructure for ML research and hire motivated ML researchers to develop the technology point where it would become AI in an externally recognizable way (say, a computer program that could play some interesting game better than anybody else, or solve a…

I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the entire human experiment, because the AI will be put toward malevolent ends and we, as a species, shall fail.

The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#107

Post by whatshisface »

Victerius wrote: post #66
whatshisface wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Corporate employees have whistleblower protections in some cases[0], but they're still called whistleblowers when they don't.

[0]https://www.zuckermanlaw.com/legal-services/sarbanes-oxley-w...

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#109

Post by Brian_K_White »

gnramires wrote: post #99
klodolph wrote: post #10

> In his conversations with LaMDA, Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness, expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness. Allegedly. The thing about conversations with LaMDA is that you need to prime them with keywords and topics, and LaMDA can respond with the primed keywords and topics. Obviously LaMDA i…

Alien comes to Earth. "Do you think those organic blobs are sentient?" "Well, look at the structures they managed to build. Very impressive, some of their scale is comparable to the primitive ones we had." "Sure, but that's not a result of the individual. They're so small. And separated, they don't think like conjugate minds at all. This is a product of thousands of individuals drawing upon their mutual discoveries a…

This isn't the gotcha you think it is.
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