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There is no A.I.

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Re: There is no A.I.

#161

Post by runarberg »

nyolfen wrote: post #144
rootusrootus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition, we shouldn't draw false equivalence between not knowing how brains work and not knowing how LLMs work, and concluding they must be similar.

there are currently two things we are aware of in the universe that can reason abstractly. i don't think this is a coincidence.

Only in a very anthropocentric sense. How do we know an ant colony doesn’t reason abstractly (or a human town for that matter)? What about slime mold or ameba? Both can solve a maze as well as humans. What makes you think a forest ecosystem isn’t capable of abstract though?

It is only if we narrow thought to mean precisely human-like thought when humans and human creations are uniquely capable of something. To that extent, our models of intelligence is very much in the pre-copernican era.

Re: There is no A.I.

#162

Post by coldtea »

jstummbillig wrote: post #120
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.

>There is no soul, creativity or inspiration. There's only (very complex) agency.

That's highly debatable. For starters, who said there's no creativity or inspiration in humans, or for that matter, that there can't be in a complex A.I.?

How we achieve that creativity or inspiration is irreleant, as long the entity (human or AI) showcases creativity and inspiration.

Nor is it much clear why all being "only (a very complex) agency" would preclude creativity and inspiration.

That's like a worse version of "a human can't be creative or have feelings because it's all a bunch of molecules".

There is such a thing as emergent properties.

>And that's completely fine.

That's also highly debatable. I mean, that it would be "completely fine" if you were right and there wasn't "creativity of inspiration".

Re: There is no A.I.

#163

Post by coldtea »

vimax wrote: post #146
jstummbillig wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me it shows how fundamental language is to intelligence. Not just that LLMs are very capable by themselves, but significantly improve speech and image models. We’ll need to break out of the Chomsky hierarchies and develop some new theories of language. Vocal communication isn’t unique to humans, a new theory should be more broadly applicable to non human and non vocal languages. I’m excited to see what big questio…

>We’ll need to break out of the Chomsky hierarchies and develop some new theories of language.

We might need to develop some "new theories of language", covering other areas, but why exactly do you think we'd need to "break out of the Chomsky hierarchies"?

Nothing about LLMs challenges Chomsky hierarchies.

They do challenge Chomsky's ideas about language being an innate human quality, but that's about it. Besides that's not related to the Chomsky hierarchy of language, e.g. regular, context-free and so on. Those will continue to remain a hierarchy describing languages based on capability levels, whether there's AI, and AGI, or not.

Re: There is no A.I.

#164

Post by rubslopes »

rootusrootus wrote: post #86
ethanbond wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we just don't know how brains work very well and we shouldn't act like we do.

In addition, we shouldn't draw false equivalence between not knowing how brains work and not knowing how LLMs work, and concluding they must be similar.

Also, it's always funny to notice how the brain, throughout history, has always been compared to the latest technology available. For a long time people said "the brain must be similar to a clock".

Re: There is no A.I.

#165

Post by 6510 »

throwaway8503 wrote: post #75
Swizec wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels more like smarter automation to me. Yep. Elevators used to be proof that machines can think. Then compilers, and chess, and go, and search, and … The problem with AI is that as soon as it works, we stop thinking about it as “artificial intelligence” and it becomes “just automation”. Then AI moves to the next goalpost.

The problem seems to be with defining good tests for intelligence. FWIW, because GPT4 answers have a detectable pattern, they should presumably fail the Turing test. At some level, intelligence requires logic, rationality, and conceptualization, all of which are topics which have evaded clear definition despite millennia of philosophy directly addressing the issues.

I just imagined we could look at the oldest example of intelligence in human history. In contrast with AI, our chauvinism has us tend to pretend even the earliest monkey had it, fish?, insects? etc If it can rub 2 sticks together it gets the diploma.

Turing test is easy, I had 2 chat bots talk about other users in the channel while besides some trigger words ignoring what those other users had to say. The human subjects got angry successfully which means it was important to them.

Re: There is no A.I.

#166

Post by dmix »

marban wrote: post #124
LambdaComplex wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once AI systems can outperform CEOs, investors and boards will insist they be in charge. I doubt it. You know who sits on those boards? The executives of other companies.

The problem isn't A-players, but B-players who have no insight over the complexity of C-players' jobs so they think they can replace them with AI.

Even temporarily imitating D players for longer than a few unsourced articles on the internet might be a start until we start getting hand wavy about B players being threatened.

I'm honestly not even sure what world we are debating. Some hypothetical one in the future when AI fills some ideal trajectory we aren't even close to being capable of predicting in some near-term measurable timeframe?

I'm as pro-exponential tech trajectories as they come but I sometimes wonder whether we get lost in scifi novel thought experiments disconnected from reality because we want that to be real rather than having some tangible connection to today (and today's political implications).

"As for AIs taking over, that will come via the corporate route." What does this even mean practically in 2030 given what we know exists in 2023?

Re: There is no A.I.

#167

Post by coldtea »

mrjin wrote: post #89
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…

To me, the reason is rather simply: you cannot solve a problem you don't understand. And we don't understand how we understand, period.

Assuming you're talking about AGI/consciousness/intelligence, then whether you're right depends on what you mean above by saying that "you cannot solve the problem".

- If you mean "you cannot EXPLAIN AGI/consciousness/intelligence if you don't understand it", then that's true, but it's a trivial tautology.

- If you mean "you cannot DEVELOP AGI/consciousness/intelligence if you don't understand it" then that's very debatable.

Historically we have been able to develop all kinds of things, despite not knowing how they work. Tinkering and trial and error is often enough.

After all that's how evolution solved the problem of creating consciousness/intelligence. There wasn't some entity that "understood" intelligence that created it.

Re: There is no A.I.

#168

Post by browningstreet »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #96
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…

> Once AI systems can outperform CEOs, investors and boards will insist they be in charge. I doubt it. You know who sits on those boards? The executives of other companies.

CEOs are often a problem for Boards.

Re: There is no A.I.

#169

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

kazinator wrote: post #38

GPT4 appears very intelligent when you discuss program code with it. It simply crazy; it can write SNOBOL4 code to extract a field from /etc/passwd. When you discuss other things, it goes off the rails a lot more. For instance, I have had it quote some passages of classic English poetry to me, stating blankly that those passages contain certain words. The passages did not contain any traces of those words or even rem…

> It solves complex problems of symbol manipulation and logic

no, it solves the assumed-to-be complex problem of constructing probable and believable text given a prompt.

Re: There is no A.I.

#170

Post by cjbprime »

> This gargantuan tabulation causes the system to intrinsically approximate many grammar patterns, along with aspects of what might be called authorial style.

Yet another super disappointing article from an "AI luminary" being too lazy and incurious to engage with the ample published evidence of emergent (but unreliable) reasoning ability beyond the training data in models like GPT-4.

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