351–360 of 749 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watch his interviews. He’s doing all this to make a point about companies not taking AI ethics seriously.
The interviews that come up are all CHriSTians aRE OPpreSSed!1, ditto for his blog. He seems like a charlatan and likely fired for being grossly unqualified for his job.
Not supporting the guy, but just pointing out that he doesn't actually believe his claim. He's an activist.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity (or at least until we further our understanding of how to define sentience to the point where we can do so objectively enough to f…
You not understanding how it ML works does not not prove anything. In the same way that you not understanding how lightning is formed does not prove the existence of Zeus. Objectively, Zeus does not exist, can we convince everyone of that? Probably not. Does that matter? No.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity (or at least until we further our understanding of how to define sentience to the point where we can do so objectively enough to f…
You not understanding how it ML works does not not prove anything. In the same way that you not understanding how lightning is formed does not prove the existence of Zeus. Objectively, Zeus does not exist, can we convince everyone of that? Probably not. Does that matter? No.
Speaking as a theoretical physicist: we don't know that. What we do know is we have a better explanation for lightning within a conceptually simple framework (starting from a few simple principles) with predictive power, compared to an explanation that involves some mysterious old dude doing mysterious things with no evidence whatsoever. Could Zeus or Thor or whatever exist? Sure; there's no way to prove their non-existence. Do we need them to explain things? No.
It's similar here. We certainly don't need some elusive concept of "sentience" to explain chat bots. Not yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” which is what my dictionary just told me. I think this category really is the most basic differentiating one. Higher level stuff like self awareness all depend on it. The most basic difference between a computer and a human (or even a dog…) is, in my opinion, the ability to feel.
>It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” I don't like this definition much because "feel" is a fuzzy word. In this context it should be "feel" as in experience . I can build a machine that can sense heat and react to it, but I can't build one that can experience heat, or can I? You need to figure out what having the capability "to experience" means, and you'll be one step closer to defining senti…
Agents can imagine the future and the expected positive and negative rewards, this is an important process in order to select actions. Thinking about future rewards is "experiencing" the present emotionally.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well that's not actually good evidence, because if one of my teachers had given me an assignment to write an argumentative paper against my own sentience I'd have done it, and I'd have made a pretty compelling case too[0]. Being able to consider and reason about arbitrary things is something you'd expect out of an intelligent being. [0] insert joke about user name here
Intellingent != sentient
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is it not possible that our brains are also just "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" machines? Yes but we do better generalization, with fewer or even zero data & are contextually aware
Okay, but is that because brains are just better at optimization of linear algebra? Or is quantum mechanics involved? I think we can agree rocks aren't conscious. But are dolphins?
No such magic.
The average ML neuron is connected in layers to maybe 100 other neurons. The brain is connected to far more ~1000 -10000 So its the dense interconnectivity at play. Whatever successes we have had with LLM now is because we are increasing the parameters of the network (although we haven't similarly scaled connectivity if I am not wrong, but definitely making progress there - for e.g. Pathways networks from Google by Jeff Dean et. al)
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…
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)
What evidence do you have that you aren't a figment of my imagination? Solipsism is a useless concept.