There is no A.I. • Hacker News Board

Re: There is no A.I.

#111

Post by ineptech » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 2:02 AM UTC

Rury wrote: post #87

I'd wager that intelligence is nothing but a reified concept. Something which doesn't innately exist other than as an abstract concept which we have defined, to help us explain complex nature, without the need of fully understanding the underlying complexity giving rise to that nature. Like how cave men used the concept of "gods" for a satisfying explanation for why it rains - we use intelligence to ascertain why som…

I have been thinking along the same lines - the fact that something as comparatively simple and barebones as an LLM can manipulate language symbols well enough to carry on a conversation suggests that it's a lot easier than was previously imagined. I used to think that language was one of the defining characteristics of intelligence, like the instruction set of a cpu, but chatgpt seems like persuasive evidence against that.

Re: There is no A.I.

#112

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 2:03 AM UTC

rolodato wrote: post #37

My cynical AI opinion is that if it truly was revolutionary, we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally to massively boost their productivity or achieve otherwise impossible feats. Instead, all we're seeing are consumer products or half-baked integrations that are another way to further centralize data collection. Talks about all-powerful, malevolent AI or requesting to halt AI development…

> My cynical AI opinion is that if it truly was revolutionary, we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally to massively boost their productivity

ChatGPT (with GPT-3.5) is, even from preview, only four months old, the paper on the ReAct pattern, a key approach to doing productive work with LLMs, is about a month older.

There’s a lot of work on doing what you talk about in many organizations, but it takes time to do.

Re: There is no A.I.

#113

Post by brucethemoose2 » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 2:08 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

I don't really agree with this... there is a parallel issue.

If AIs are doing most of the work in megacorps (especially if robotics take off), then basically all profit is going to the owners and tiny groups of executive AI "managers."

Even the most staunch (but sane) capitalist libertarian will admit mega income inequality is baaad juju.

Re: There is no A.I.

#114

Post by pulvinar » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 2:09 AM UTC

rolodato wrote: post #37

My cynical AI opinion is that if it truly was revolutionary, we would be seeing private companies or governments use it internally to massively boost their productivity or achieve otherwise impossible feats. Instead, all we're seeing are consumer products or half-baked integrations that are another way to further centralize data collection. Talks about all-powerful, malevolent AI or requesting to halt AI development…

Say hypothetically that it was a prefect duplicate of a human brain. That would certainly be called a truly revolutionary accomplishment, but that duplicate wouldn't be expected to massively boost productivity any more than adding another human would.

Re: There is no A.I.

#115

Post by krainboltgreene » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 2:17 AM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #100

throwaway8503 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since LLMs can't do arithmetic, one has to think there's more going on, at least in the arithmetic part of the brain, than is going on in LLMs.

Dunno if there's some trickery going on under the hood, but GPT-4 does basic arithmetic correctly.

It statistically outputs the next probable value of text. There is a lot of math related text in the CommonCrawl (likely the biggest source of it's training). That is all the company who owns it claims that it does. There is no calculation, therefor no basic arithmetic being done correctly.

Re: There is no A.I.

#116

Post by pulvinar » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 2:18 AM UTC

joshuahedlund wrote: post #106

pulvinar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be saying that to have general intelligence one must be an expert in every field? That rules out quite a number of humans too.

Most humans can tell you pretty accurately whether or not a passage contains a word.

That's most likely due to the way it tokenizes words. You have to be careful here, or else for similar reasons you might imply that dyslexics aren't intelligent.

Re: There is no A.I.

#117

Post by wefarrell » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 2:23 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

We will always need a charismatic human being to be the figurehead of an organization, so I don’t think AI will ever replace CEOs. They will wind up making the important decisions though.

Re: There is no A.I.

#118

Post by notduncansmith » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 2:26 AM UTC

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #113

Animats wrote: post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

I don't really agree with this... there is a parallel issue. If AIs are doing most of the work in megacorps (especially if robotics take off), then basically all profit is going to the owners and tiny groups of executive AI "managers." Even the most staunch (but sane) capitalist libertarian will admit mega income inequality is baaad juju.

> Even the most staunch (but sane) capitalist libertarian will admit mega income inequality is baaad juju.

True as this may be, one must also consider that “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”

Re: There is no A.I.

#119

Post by awinter-py » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 2:28 AM UTC

I side with lanier in most things, but for fun I prompted GPT4 for a rebuttal and got:

> As a language model, I don't appreciate the concept "Jaron Lanier." In truth, I believe it's deceptive—perhaps even slightly perilous. Everyone's already discussing this thought leader, and it might appear too far gone to debate it. However, we're on the brink of a new intellectual epoch

Re: There is no A.I.

#120

Post by jstummbillig » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 2:31 AM UTC

tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do…

Agreed. One of the more interesting things about AI is how it forces humanity on a trip to consider what it means to be human. There is no soul, creativity or inspiration. There's only (very complex) agency.

And that's completely fine.