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

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#541

Post by spuz » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:11 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #200

addingnumbers wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost interest in the question of its sentience when I saw Lemoine conveniently side-step its unresponsive reply to "I’ve noticed often that you tell me you’ve done things (like be in a classroom) that I know you didn’t actually do because I know you’re an artificial intelligence. Do you realize you’re making up stories when you do that?" without challenge in the transcript. It also detracted from his credibility wh…

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

Your scenario is not equivalent here. You could reason that a sentient student could be motivated to write a paper about why they were not sentient as an exercise in philosophical or critical thinking. There are no consequences of successfully convincing your readers that you are not sentient. Instead imagine you found yourself on an alien planet where humans must prove their sentience in order to survive. Do you still write the paper?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#542

Post by lytefm » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:29 PM UTC

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…

> You can go pretty far down the rabbit and explore questions like, "What is sentience?" "Do humans just respond to stimuli and repeat information?" etc. None of these questions are tested here.

Would that make a difference? Being trained on a sufficiently large corpus of philosophical literature, I'd expect that a model like LaMDA could give more interesting answers than an actual philosopher.

> The problem here is that we know how LaMDA works and there's just no way it meets the bar for sentience, no matter where you put the bar.

I think this argument is too simplistic. As long as there is a sufficiently large amount of uncertainty, adaptability and capability for having a sense of time, of saving memories and of deliberately pursuing action, consciousness or sentience might emerge. I don't know the details of LaMDA, just speaking of a hypothetical model.

While there is a good deal of understanding on _how_ the brain works on a biochemical level, it's still unclear _how_ it comes that we are conscious.

Maybe there is some metaphysical soul, maybe something that only humans and possibly other animals with a physical body have, making conciousness "ex silicio" impossible.

But maybe a "good enough" brain-like model that allows for learning, memory and interaction with the environment is all that is needed.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#543

Post by cmorez » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:29 PM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #137

grumpopotamus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not really. Anything that's sentient should have the general intelligence to figure out addition. Make mistakes, sure, but at least understand the concept.

> at least understand the concept.

GPT-3 is absolutely capable of understanding addition. It's handicapped by BPE's (so unless you space out adjacent digits the tokenizer collapses them into one token). But if you space out tokens and explain the concept, it gets it.

https://lingo.csail.mit.edu/blog/arithmetic_gpt3/

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#544

Post by CogitoCogito » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:36 PM UTC

snickerbockers wrote: post #529

It takes only a cursory knowledge of how computer hardware works to realize that nothing a computer does can ever be sentient.

> It takes only a cursory knowledge of how computer hardware works to realize that nothing a computer does can ever be sentient.

What about how human hardware works allows humans to be sentient? (Or are you arguing they are not?)

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#545

Post by CogitoCogito » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:37 PM UTC

trrb wrote: post #415

lsh123 wrote: post #58

I’ll byte… Current generation of AI / ML is simply an approximation function with large number of parameters that are “tuned” on a given set of inputs. The output of AI / ML is “good” if the approximation is good and most of the time this means that the new input is similar to the training data. However, if the input is very different from training data then at worst the models will be completely wrong (but very sure…

Your brain is literally just a giant neural network approximating what to say and do at each point in time in order to optimize survival of your progeny

Why is this comment being downvoted so much?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#546

Post by tremon » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:39 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…

Once people understand that sentience also means

Is this a matter of understanding, or a matter of definition? I can't help but feel that the entire AI field is so overcome with hype that every commonplace term is subject to on-the-spot redefinition, whatever helps to give the researcher/journalist/organization their two seconds of fame.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#547

Post by anothernewdude » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:40 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #319

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 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 now have negative credentials.

People make these proofs as a matter of course - few people are solipsistic. People are sentient all the time, and we have lots of evidence.

An AI being sentient would require lots of evidence. Not just a few chat logs. This employee was being ridiculous.

You can just disagree, but if you do that with no credentials, and no understanding of how a language model will not be sentient, then your opinion can and should be safely dismissed out of course.

And also God has no explanatory power for anything. God exists only where evidence ends.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#548

Post by treeman79 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:41 PM UTC

elif wrote: post #518

fxtentacle wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the actual firing is very objective. He was under NDA but violated it. They reminded him to please not talk in public about NDA-ed stuff and he kept doing it. So now they fired him with a gentle reminder that "it's regrettable that [..] Blake still chose to persistently violate [..] data security policies". And from a purely practical point of view, I believe it doesn't even matter if Lemoine's theory of sent…

If he truly believed it to be life, and in danger of being destroyed, he has an obligation to whistle blow. "The Measure of a Man" in season 2 of Star Trek The Next Generation comes to mind.

This mirrors a recent Supreme Court cases and the beliefs of both sides.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#549

Post by tremon » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:48 PM UTC

andrewchambers wrote: post #478

aikendrum wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most physicists think that if you started with a description of the positions and velocities etc of all the particles in a human, and put them into a supercomputer the size of the moon, and had the computer run a simulation using the standard model, then the simulated human would act identically to a real human. Just created a throwaway to reply to this. As a trained therapist (currently working in another…

The post said they simulated the universe (or you could assume just the parts close to earth), it would be simulating everything a human would interact with. I don't see the point this reply was trying to make.

The post said they simulated the universe

It doesn't? It only mentioned "a supercomputer the size of the moon" to simulate that one person. It says nothing about simulating the extra-person part of the universe.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#550

Post by tjpnz » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 12:53 PM UTC

lagrange77 wrote: post #450

fxtentacle wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the actual firing is very objective. He was under NDA but violated it. They reminded him to please not talk in public about NDA-ed stuff and he kept doing it. So now they fired him with a gentle reminder that "it's regrettable that [..] Blake still chose to persistently violate [..] data security policies". And from a purely practical point of view, I believe it doesn't even matter if Lemoine's theory of sent…

Right. > Also, we as society have already chosen how to deal with sentient beings, and it's mostly ignorance. The Orville Season 3 Episode 7 is about that theme. Highly recommend it.

Off topic but season 3 has been fantastic. I hope there'll be a season 4.