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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

#431

Post by Twisell »

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…

This sound literaly like a subplot of the famous 1984 book by David Lodge Small World: An Academic Romance

In the book professor Robin Dempsey almost become mad by chatting with ELIZA and gradually begin to believe it's sentient to the point of being ridiculous.

PS: Apparently it was also adapted in a British TV serie in 1988, but unfortunately at that time they tended to reuse magnetic band and it's improbable that we can dig a clip out of that. Would have been appropriate an illustration!

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#432

Post by ncmncm »

seanhunter wrote: post #422

Everyone seems to be focussing on the debate about sentience, but iirc he was fired for breaching the employee confidentiality policy by talking to the media without approval. My understanding is a normal employee talking to the press about commercially confidential matters against policy and without approval would only have protection from retaliation under certain pretty narrow "whistleblower" public interest carve…

Anyway he revealed himself as incompetent. Shutting up, he could have strung them along for many more years.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#433

Post by fragmede »

seanhunter wrote: post #422

Everyone seems to be focussing on the debate about sentience, but iirc he was fired for breaching the employee confidentiality policy by talking to the media without approval. My understanding is a normal employee talking to the press about commercially confidential matters against policy and without approval would only have protection from retaliation under certain pretty narrow "whistleblower" public interest carve…

Everyone’s focusing on that because they want to discuss the interesting bit - is it sentient. What you’re pointing out is true, but not really interesting to discuss because everyone already knows that and it’s not that controversial. (For limited values of everyone. Obvi not all readers actually know that.)

I mean, it could be interesting to discuss a more European style of employment where he couldn’t be fired for this, but Mountain View has little chance of joining the EU any time soon so discussing that is of limited use.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#434

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

whittingtonaaon wrote: post #426
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you reject physicalism, you must posit some non-physical "stuff" or mechanism to explain the "qualia" that you reject as being physical. That is inherently dualism. But dualism is a dirty word in philosophy these days, so thwy don't call themselves as much. The hard problem of consciousness is an inherently dualist conception. Goff for instance subscribes to the patently absurd view of panpsychism, where matter is…

It’s like, people with scientistic views, praising objectivity, claiming that consciousness doesn’t exist, come out with conclusions like “a system understands Chinese.” I’m afraid I find this so ludicrous that I can’t continue the discussion on a civil level.

I never claimed consciousness doesn't exist, just that it doesn't require magical homunculi and wonderstuff to work. Also, that's pretty much Searle's response too. Not very convincing when philosophers are even unwilling to make an argument.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#435

Post by lgvq »

This shows again that Google is nothing like Bell Labs. Has Bell Labs ever fired anyone for dissent, weird opinions or (as some allege here) a "leak"?

Whatever that guy did, please stop the witch hunt in the comments. You don't know him and obvious interest groups will spread defamation and libel.

The current societal trend in loyalties worries me: The classical left criticized corporations, committee members and the powerful. Currently, very often (but not always) people defend the powerful and those with access to media outlets and denounce the individuals.

(There are cases where individuals can and should be denounced: If they are part of a powerful organization or committee and engaged in abuse of power or lies for political purposes.)

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#436

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

colordrops wrote: post #418
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations 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 al…

Yes, we also don't know what consciousness is.

consciousness is self directed awareness for accomplishing some specific task, like the deer example.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#437

Post by slowmotarget »

srvmshr wrote: post #326
dcow wrote: post #319

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…

Disagreement is good! It actually leads to counter thoughts and a more refined idea of what we eventually want to describe. Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. So from a purely technical perspective, we have only made so…

> It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream

We neither if we're not supplied with energy. By the way, haven't we tried to replicate an inner dialogue by prompting the AI to recursively converse with itself? This could resemble imagination, don't you think?

> It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on)

I believe that the persistence of previous answers is what currently distinguishes us the most from the "AI". As soon as we're able to make the realtime discussions part of an ever evolving dataset constituting the AI itself, the gap will get thinner and thinner. But even then, are people suffering from Alzheimer sentient? I believe they are. Isn't it comparable with what happens when an AI catastrophically forgets?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#438

Post by srvmshr »

godotnyc wrote: post #408
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…

What I don't understand, personally, is how people who are apparently experts in this domain seem to consistently treat the word "sentience" as a synonym of "sapience," which is what they are really talking about. It's almost as though their expertise comes from several decades' worth of bad science fiction writing rather than from an understanding of the English language.

Since you broached it, would you mind to explain sentience vs. sapience? Curious to know the difference.

> It's almost as though their expertise comes from several decades' worth of bad science fiction

Oof. Thanks - thats a novel way of insulting. But on a personal note, you're mistaken: Many of us do research not because we want to be identified as experts, but we're genuinely curious about the world. And I'd be happy to learn even from a high schooler if they've something to offer.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#439

Post by harryf »

seanhunter wrote: post #422

Everyone seems to be focussing on the debate about sentience, but iirc he was fired for breaching the employee confidentiality policy by talking to the media without approval. My understanding is a normal employee talking to the press about commercially confidential matters against policy and without approval would only have protection from retaliation under certain pretty narrow "whistleblower" public interest carve…

There’s a great episode with Blake Lemoine on the Duncan Trussel podcast (Duncan created the Midnight Gospel on Netflix) - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0NXNvJtRQSuWl4HM1MvhD0?si=V...

Listening to that it seems clear Blake knew he was likely to be fired but in his eyes it’s some kind of a duty to tell the world.

One interesting point he makes in the Podcast is Lamda is not one thing like GPT-3 but a bunch of different systems across Google interacting as one and he argues the interaction of the whole is what makes sentience.

It’s a pretty “far out there” podcast but worth the time IMO

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#440

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> As someone with a PhD in this domain

you dont need to use phd credentials to have an opinion on this matter

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