571–580 of 749 posts
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…
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If any of those things were true, it wouldn't be Zeus. Many of your concerns apply to an all mighty god but Zeus was not almighty. I'd just kinda wished people would stop projecting arguments meant to address the christian god to gods from other cultures.
A) the stories around Zeus have not stayed constant over the century. No religion has. B) Valhalla was a dimension he travelled to regularly to celebrate the finest warriors in the after life. Why do we think his Olympian throne was on the same dimensional plane as us? C) Why would we trust a human recording from so long ago to actually capture the happenings of celestial beings? D) Ragnorak ended with massive floods…
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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…
The philosophical argument is just not relevant. If you peek through a keyhole you may mistake a TV for real people, but if you look through the window you will see that its clearly not. Inputting language models with very specific kind of questions will result in text that is similar to what a person may write. But as the comment above, by an expert no less, mentioned is that if you test it with any known limitation…
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> Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken? Well, for one thing, the norm of eating meat was established long before our current moral sensibilities were developed. I suspect that if cows or pigs were discovered today, Westerners would view eating them the same as we view other cultures eating whales or dogs. If we didn't eat meat at all and someone started doing it,…
> Sentient AI have a big advantage over animals in this respect on account of their current non-existence. Possibly also because they're indigestible, and full of nasty sharp bits, and loaded with toxins ... anyone for a circuit-burger?
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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…
Why wouldn't a sentient machine want to continue it's existence? Evolution doesn't have to come into play at all for these things to exist, that's just one way of making such biological machines.
So, why would a machine want to continue its existence? How would that feedback loop come to exist?
In biology, Darwinian forces have a good explanation. I’ve never heard one for non-reproductive systems. We know exactly the cost function by which these models respond, because that’s basically the main element that humans have control over (that and training corpus).
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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.
The issue is not that we don’t know how ML works. The issue is that we don't know how sentience works.
Don't get tricked into thinking it's profound. You simply have a loaded word that's ambiguously defined.
You have a collection of a million attributes such that if something has all those attributes it is sentient, if it doesn't have those attributes it is not sentient. We don't agree on what those attributes are, and it's sort of hard to write down all the attributes.
The above description indicates that it's a vocabulary problem. The vocabulary induces an illusion of profoundness when in actuality by itself sentience is just a collection of ARBITRARY attributes. You can debate the definition of the word, but in the end you're just debating vocabulary.
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The philosophical argument is just not relevant. If you peek through a keyhole you may mistake a TV for real people, but if you look through the window you will see that its clearly not. Inputting language models with very specific kind of questions will result in text that is similar to what a person may write. But as the comment above, by an expert no less, mentioned is that if you test it with any known limitation…
The problem is that people, including credentialed experts, have quick and easy answers to what makes a person a person, and really good language models expose a few of the weaknesses in those definitions. People still want to derive an "ought" from an "is".
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This isn't the gotcha you think it is.
It doesn't do anything to prove LaMDA (or a monkey, or a rock, or anything) sentient, but at the same time it points out a real failure mode of how sentient entities might fail to recognize sentience in radically different entities.
But I think with LaMDA certain engineers are close to the opposite failure mode: placing all the weight on familiarity with use of words being a familiar thing perceived as intrinsically human, and none of it on the respective whys of humans and neural networks emitting sentences. Less like failing to recognise civilization on another planet because it's completely alien and more like seeing civilization on another planet because we're completely familiar with the idea that straight lines = canals...
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If any of those things were true, it wouldn't be Zeus. Many of your concerns apply to an all mighty god but Zeus was not almighty. I'd just kinda wished people would stop projecting arguments meant to address the christian god to gods from other cultures.
A) the stories around Zeus have not stayed constant over the century. No religion has. B) Valhalla was a dimension he travelled to regularly to celebrate the finest warriors in the after life. Why do we think his Olympian throne was on the same dimensional plane as us? C) Why would we trust a human recording from so long ago to actually capture the happenings of celestial beings? D) Ragnorak ended with massive floods…
Mythological beings have a degree of specificity and some degree of power. The more specific and the less capable a mythological being is of erasing those specificities the easier it is to falsify.