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Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

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Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#181

Post by galaxyLogic »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #84
galaxyLogic wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> burden on other side to providing a definition of terms The skeptics are really not making any claims are they? If not then there's no burden of proof on them, is there? Whoever says or implies that ChatBots are or are "becoming" "sentient" are the ones making a claim. They should prove it if they make or imply such a claim. Skeptics are rightly skeptical, until they see a proof with clear definitions of terms from…

Guess I'm saying that is done. The problem is there are a dozen definitions of "Sentient", and many people have already written proofs on how AI can be "Sentient", and there are just as many people have written proofs on how AI can never be "Sentient". It comes around to definitions and understanding of the definitions. To just toss out the "AI can be sentient" side because they have the burden, is just the same "It'…

> toss out the "AI can be sentient" side

There are no two "sides" making claims about AI. There is one side, making claims such as "AI can be/is/may be sentient".

If somebody makes such claims they have the "burden of proof" because they are the ones making the claim. It's not a moral obligation to prove it. "Burden of proof" simply means if you don't provide a proof, nobody (I would hope) will believe you.

Note the skeptics are not making any counter-claims, they are simply saying if you make such fantastic claims about current AI, please show us the proof, else we rationally cannot trust your judgment.

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#182

Post by aastronaut »

jrsdav wrote: post #81
caddemon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone very language-focused, it has actually done the opposite for me: challenged some of my beliefs about how language enables intelligence. It's obviously skilled at language use, but most of its outputs where it has to make any sort of arguments or inferences read as incredibly stupid to me (even the ones that "tricked" people early on, some of them tricked me but in a way where I was about to write a respons…

Are you familiar with Pinker’s research presented in book The Language Instinct? > language enables intelligence In his research, he argues that it’s the other way around; we have an innate intelligence for acquiring language. To put it another way, language has made us more knowledgeable (because it’s a great mechanism for building and transferring context), but intelligence or aptitude for language was present befo…

i think

> language enables intelligence

was just a poor choice of words here. i understood GP as "the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language"[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#183

Post by Ambix »

ndriscoll wrote: post #156
staunton wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a cursory search suggests it provides the expected speedup What do you mean? Processing a CNN layer takes an amount of time that does not depend on the input data, only the input/output sizes. Fourier transform is just a change of basis. Why should anything speed up?

Because convolution is an O(N^2) operation, but a Fourier transform (and its inverse) can be done in O(NlogN) and turns convolution into O(N) multiplication. So if you do FFT, multiply, Inverse FFT, you get convolution in O(NlogN). I would guess that you don't even need to do the inverse FFT and can just learn in frequency space instead, but maybe there's some reason why that doesn't work out.

Could you point to some actual examples of using FFT for NNs in real projects / GitHub codebases? Would like to dig more into the thing.

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#184

Post by Gooblebrai »

hyperbovine wrote: post #161
jebarker wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "come over to science", where are you thinking? My impression is that industry -> academia is an almost impossible jump to make. Do you mean industry doing science?

I'm talking about working in a lab as a staff programmer. Most PIs I know, myself included, would absolutely kill to be able to hire experienced people from industry to write high-quality scientific code for them. The problem is that a) traditionally, it has been hard to get funding for this, though that's slowly starting to change, and b) even when the money is there, it's always going to be a fraction (1/2, often l…

First time I heard about this "staff programmer" title working in labs.

Looking for it in UK job boards doesn't seem to bring many relevant results. What are other ways to find these roles?

The idea of working in a lab helping scientists, if not economically rewarding, may feel rewarding in terms of helping science to progress

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#185

Post by kalimanzaro »

revelio wrote: post #154
pronto-columnar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weirdly aggressive response. do you think technologies like gpt were developed without any academic input?

Well, the core transformers/attention paper came from Google and the DNN revolution was also kicked off by Jeff Dean at Google, no? Yes, some of the very original neural net theory was laid in academia and maybe the original GAN paper came from it, don't recall, but AI academics were complaining about being unable to keep up and having their departments be raided even 7 or 8 years ago. It's not a new complaint. So th…

The oddest thing about all these anti-academic takes is that OpenAI insiders and even some informed outsiders like John Carmack think of OpenAI (and google before that) as an extension of academia. The paper posted here is more akin to lower tier academics griping about R1 universities getting most of the funding (and using amoral tactics to get that funding). Seriously. OpenAI is just another R1 department (outsized corporate funding, together with an excellent devops and focussed PR team, explains all its shenanigans)

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#186

Post by anongraddebt »

pixl97 wrote: post #164
Version467 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given that it's quite plain it's an emergent property. This explains nothing. Stating it's an emergent phenomenon gives us just as much information as saying it's magic. Arguably even less, because it sounds like an explanation, whereas "magic" doesn't pretend to explain anything. > displaying emergent behaviours that couldn't have been predicted beforehand. Same problem here. You say "couldn't have been predicted"…

Some things will never be explained... for example what's the last digit of 22/7, and why out of all fractions around it that that particular number decides to extend towards infinity. Reality can be unsatisfying because it does not owe us explanations.

The degree of ‘needing’ to explain consciousness is basically the inverse of the degree of ‘needing’ to explain what the last digit of 22/7 is. Hardly anyone talks about or does anything with the latter, whereas the reality of the former pervades - quite literally - nearly everything humans do and think about.

I mean, you experienced the reality of consciousness while talking about the last digit of 22/7.

If there is anything in our world that needs explaining it’s consciousness.

Reality doesn’t owe us an explanation of consciousness (obviously). We owe it to ourselves though.

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#187

Post by bo1024 »

kalimanzaro wrote: post #185
revelio wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the core transformers/attention paper came from Google and the DNN revolution was also kicked off by Jeff Dean at Google, no? Yes, some of the very original neural net theory was laid in academia and maybe the original GAN paper came from it, don't recall, but AI academics were complaining about being unable to keep up and having their departments be raided even 7 or 8 years ago. It's not a new complaint. So th…

The oddest thing about all these anti-academic takes is that OpenAI insiders and even some informed outsiders like John Carmack think of OpenAI (and google before that) as an extension of academia. The paper posted here is more akin to lower tier academics griping about R1 universities getting most of the funding (and using amoral tactics to get that funding). Seriously. OpenAI is just another R1 department (outsized…

This is completely true from a personnel standpoint. But it's worth emphasizing the difference that they don't publish transparently their biggest findings, which makes them very different from e.g. Microsoft research.

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#188

Post by revelio »

kalimanzaro wrote: post #185
revelio wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the core transformers/attention paper came from Google and the DNN revolution was also kicked off by Jeff Dean at Google, no? Yes, some of the very original neural net theory was laid in academia and maybe the original GAN paper came from it, don't recall, but AI academics were complaining about being unable to keep up and having their departments be raided even 7 or 8 years ago. It's not a new complaint. So th…

The oddest thing about all these anti-academic takes is that OpenAI insiders and even some informed outsiders like John Carmack think of OpenAI (and google before that) as an extension of academia. The paper posted here is more akin to lower tier academics griping about R1 universities getting most of the funding (and using amoral tactics to get that funding). Seriously. OpenAI is just another R1 department (outsized…

But they are not academia. To pretend they are is disingenuous. Just because a group of people do research and write up their findings sometimes, does not make them academics.

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#189

Post by bheadmaster »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #167
bheadmaster wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love to get philosophical, so I'm gonna throw this thought experiment here: Let's say that there was a highly advanced civilization that existed way before the current civilized society. They performed scientific experiments and gained a lot of insight, but a catastrophical event erased them from the face of Earth together with all their knowledge. Did that civilization engage in science? If you think that they did…

> catastrophical event erased them from the face of Earth together with all their knowledge. This thought experiment seems to introduce a huge variable which eliminates what I think might be a key factor in what many readers believe to be the practice of science. > what is the difference between them and any other closed community that performs scientific experiments? That difference here, and the key factor, would b…

> The catastrophic event eliminates any meaning behind what they accomplished or practiced in regards to why they practiced science in the first place.

But if they didn't suffer a catastrophic event, we would call their activities "science"? So, because they did suffer a catastrophic event, what they did is not science (or is not relevant, since you avoided answering the question directly)?

And if our current society was destroyed tomorrow in a catastrophic event along with all our science, and a new society arisen from the ashes that performed scientific experiments, would that mean that what we did wasn't science? Or that what the new society is doing isn't science?

I know I'm streching things here, but words (should?) have meanings in all possible scenarios, and thought experiments are used to decide meanings in such edge cases.

> Practicing it behind closed doors may appear less like science for science's sake and more like, say, an economic pursuit that coincidentally involves the scientific method.

Does "not doing science for science's sake" include only monetary motivation? Would it also mean that someone who primarily wants to achieve status and fame as a scientist also isn't doing real science? Or are they exempt from the rule, since they would most likely release their knowledge into the public (which brings us back to the "science is only science if the current society benefits from it")?

Re: Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

#190

Post by southernplaces7 »

loandbehold wrote: post #170
mellosouls wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophers. That's why I used the word "philosophical" not "scientific". Dismissing serious ideas with thousands of years of philosophical history behind them as "magic thinking" is either a failure of imagination or education; you can rectify the latter by reading up on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

There are many things respectable scientists believed thousand years ago that we now know are not true. Vitalist views of life and consciousness are one of those things. As of 2023, believing that consciousness is a distinct phenomenon as fundamental as space or time is a crackpottery at the level of believing 5G causes COVID.

One doesn't have to believe that consciousness is a distinct phenomenon that's as fundamental as space or time to reasonably argue that ChatGPT is not in any way close to any known view of consciousness. Crackpottery is being brazenly, uncritically wide-eyed about these LLM systems just because they can convincingly simulate human activities such as conversation and art rendering.
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