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…
Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
401–410 of 749 posts
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#402Just 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)
sentience and consciousness are the same thing...
if i believe i am conscious and so do you, then it's good enough for me. why does there need to be a light switch.
if there are 5 deer in the field and i have 1 bow and arrow, i need to focus my attention and track one deer only for 5 or 10 mins to hunt it - consciousness allow us to achieve this. it is a product of evolutionary process.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There is no "you" nor "self". Western indoctrination made us believe free will exists. When seeing the world with the ego dissolved it is very hard to grasp what sentient really means.
I don’t know anything about AI but I understood that some symbolic AI systems had a symbol referring to themselves (correct me if wrong).
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you asked me to add two large numbers in my head and give my best guess I might not do any better than GPT3 does. And I think I could probably do better than the average person.
Sure, but in your head is a squishy organ, and in GPT3's "head" is a bit of silicon purpose-built to make such calculations.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raise a human in a machine-like environment (no contact with humanity, no comforting sounds, essentially remove all humanity) and you may find people to act very robotic, without regard for its own existence in a sense.
This still falls into the same trap. Why would a machine care about its own existence? Humans care about our own existence because doing so is an evolutionarily beneficial trait. If you care about being alive, you are more likely to do things that will keep you alive, which will make you more likely to pass your genes on to the next generation. As a result those traits get selected for over time. LaMDA isn't rewarded…
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, he's a self-proclaimed "Christian Mystic". https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/religious-discrimination-...
Which is weird because articles about him from when he was convicted describe him as pagan. He was sentenced to jail time for being in the armed forces and refusing to follow orders. Not "charge that hill, soldier" types of orders, or "pilot this drone and kill people" types of orders. He's certainly trying to sell that story, telling papers he "served" in Iraq. He was a mechanic. Working a desk job. He just stopped…
> Which is weird because articles about him from when he was convicted describe him as pagan.
I suspect something similar to the purported horseshoe effect in politics.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
#408LLM 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…
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#409LLM 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...
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, philosophers avail themselves of science all the time. Good ones do, anyway. But you were claiming science has no bearing on consciousness, yet even non-physicalists like Nagel heavily cite scientific knowledge. So which one is it? I'm not on some crusade against the field of philosophy. Certainly philosophy has contributed mightily, and continues to do so. But I think physicalists like Dennet are making far m…
I don’t know where you get the idea that these guys are dualists. Maybe Chalmers, but I don’t think so. My favorites are Nagel and Searle, and neither is a dualist or a neo-Cartesian. Their main contribution, I believe, is simply to show how silly the computational theory of mind is. Dennet may be easier to read because he professes something which inspires the imagination, and is easy to digest, since it doesn’t con…
The hard problem of consciousness is an inherently dualist conception.
Goff for instance subscribes to the patently absurd view of panpsychism, where matter is posited to have subjective experience "built in" somehow. This is such an absurd view. He first posits that there must be some fundamental subjective experience. But then he can't actually come up with a cogent theory for it, so he then just posits that mind is fundamental to matter. So he's effectively just inventing new properties of nature out of whole cloth. But then even still he has no solid conception of what those properties are, what they do or how they interact to form a conscious mind in a brain. How is any of this helpful in any way? He took one dubious problem and projected it onto the entire universe, and gave himself another problem of emergence to boot. This is not progress, more like digging a hole for himself.
As for Searle, I'm not hugely familiar with his work, but I find his Chinese Room experiment, or rather his conclusions about it, misguided at best and wilfully ignorant at worst. The system reply, which I think is just obviously true, is simply dismissed with very little argument.
Again, I fail to find justification for fundamentally subjective experience other than it sure feels that way. That's more of a theological argument than a philosophical one.
The idea that Dennet is easier to read because he doesn't conform to the truth is pretty strange. He's clearly a very skilled writer and speaker. He's very good at avoiding a dense jungle of -isms, and when he does use them, he defines them very precicely and carefully. This to me is good philosophy. Dennet does a good job of laying out and explaining these ideas in a way that isn't completely convoluted. Argument is the core methodology of philosophy, and if a philosopher fails to represent their argument in clear way, why should I even take them seriously?
Philosophers are great at dressing up bad arguments in fancy, mystical, ill-defined terminology like "qualia". This to me is the philosophical equivalent of code smell. Whenever I read these closet dualists' arguments I have to pinch my nose.