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AI is just someone else's intelligence

zdziarski.com

81–90 of 170 posts

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#81
post #39

I had a professor in grad school say that AI is just a search algorithm. I think that is an interesting way of framing things. Often times the model is just searching its training data for the right output. I don't think this diminishes the value of such models, recent advancements have shown how exciting "just a search algorithm" can be.

Another way of thinking about this may be as a compressed field, where the "prompt" extracts knowledge along a given vector, along the lines of stored inter-token relations, which provide for the internal vectorization, thus reducing redundancy and enabling the compression in the first place.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#82
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have a good definition of consciousness or sentience. It needs to be specifically defined for every conversation. Generally we think we know approximately what version of "consciousness"/"sentience"/"intelligence" the other parties in a conversation mean by the context of their thesis, but sometimes confusion leads to people talking past each other.

For consciousness it is fairly easy to build a reasonable metric like IQ is for human intelligence. Simply take any game (turn based if you don't care about speed, and real-time if you do), and measure instantaneous skill level in that game. Then you'd see that common effects that lower consciousness would lower the metric like sleepiness or drunkenness, so it would have a decent predicting power. In fact almost any…

> a reasonable metric like IQ is for human intelligence

IQ is not a reasonable metric for human intelligence.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#83

I feel that the big hidden implication that these kinds of articles are trying to say is "AI is not real intelligence", further implying something along the lines of "AI will never be conscious" (as it's hard to come up with another definition of "real" intelligence except the-human-kind). I'd like to propose a counterargument: Assumptions: Theory of evolution is true. The primordial single-cell organism from which w…

I'm more convinced of the opposite. That humans aren't even conscious and are actually just obfuscated machines. Although I'm not fully convinced of either. There is probably some factor involving the material being used and biological matter could be just the right amount of imperfect and prone to failures to allow this illusion to occur.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#84
post #22

I feel that the big hidden implication that these kinds of articles are trying to say is "AI is not real intelligence", further implying something along the lines of "AI will never be conscious" (as it's hard to come up with another definition of "real" intelligence except the-human-kind). I'd like to propose a counterargument: Assumptions: Theory of evolution is true. The primordial single-cell organism from which w…

it's an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people because the idea that sapience/sentience is just a side effect of our brains being pattern matching machines with a giant knowledge graph of neurons means that we're not that special

I don't think it means that at all. Depending on what you mean by "special", I guess.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#85

This logic only applies to generative pre-training, behavior cloning, and other training methods which rely on learning to mimic well-structured content from the real world. It does not apply to intelligence gathered through methods like RL. How does the author think about the intelligence of AlphaGo, for instance, which was trained entirely by self-play?

Good point. This calls to mind LeCun's recent argument about missing models that can learn from raw experience or "self-play". When we have a ChatGPT that understands language strictly from audio / video inputs, then we can start to talk about human-like intelligence.

As for AlphaGo, I would put it the same category of intelligence as a calculator. It does one thing well -- approximate a Monte Carlo Tree Search.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#86

I predict it'll all come crashing down once people start having skin in the game. (Right now, it's a toy, the source for a million overheated news articles and opinions.) ChatGPT can pass the Bar. Okay, have it draw up a contract and have the parties sign it—skin in the game. When an omitted comma can cost millions[1], what will an LLM's hallucinations wrought? [1] https://kagi.com/search?q=missing+comma+millions&r=u…

If by "skin in the game" you mean not having any human oversight, then sure there will be problems. But we already are seeing ChatGPT used to deliver real value. For example, I've used it to help me take care of my parents-in-law. Help answer questions, interpret test results, etc... It's been great and paid for itself 100X (if not 1000X) already.

Also started using it to diagnose a car issue I had and it helped me go down a path, which I then had a follow up question -- and it nailed the issue. And I know nothing about cars.

And at work people are using to generate starts for various communications.

It doesn't have to go from toy to a task where a comma costs you millions. There's a lot in between that.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#87
post #39

I had a professor in grad school say that AI is just a search algorithm. I think that is an interesting way of framing things. Often times the model is just searching its training data for the right output. I don't think this diminishes the value of such models, recent advancements have shown how exciting "just a search algorithm" can be.

I'd say model training is a search for parameters that approximate a function.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#88

The article has a fundamental flaw, much like those who confuse copyright and trademark: intelligence is the algorithm; knowledge is the data set.

That doesn't quite work because almost all the algorithms humans and ai use are learned as data. IE Bayesian reasoning, long form multiplication and division, even the scientific method.

> That doesn't quite work

How exactly does the fundamental difference between knowledge and intelligence "not work"? Humans have the ability to learn algorithms, therefore the algorithm being used by an AI (i.e. its intelligence) to apply knowledge from its data set "doesn't work"? I'm having difficulty following your thought process here.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#89
"The danger of this type of ML is not that it will take jobs (it definitely will, and already is), but why it will take jobs. It will take jobs not because the computer is replacing the thinking of one worker. It will take jobs because the computer is using the thinking of a million other workers – how can any one worker compete with that?"

A question I see glossed over whenever the formative machine learning is discussed, How much of those "million other workers" thinking is accurate, effective and wise?

The author's point about copyright infringement makes it almost impossible for the creators of formative machine learning tech to publish their sources so how could you ever know.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#90

I feel that the big hidden implication that these kinds of articles are trying to say is "AI is not real intelligence", further implying something along the lines of "AI will never be conscious" (as it's hard to come up with another definition of "real" intelligence except the-human-kind). I'd like to propose a counterargument: Assumptions: Theory of evolution is true. The primordial single-cell organism from which w…

You have correctly identified the underlying assumption of this discussion. From someone who has the opposite view, that human consciousness did not arise from an evolutionary process, but was created by God -- I believe we will never fully create an artificial consciousness. I think a further assumption is that the human mind is a deterministic machine. If we could freeze whatever entropy is involved with human beha…

I completely disagree with you fundamentally as I don't believe in God, but I find your argument more coherent than most of the other arguments over why AI isn't (or even cannot be) conscious or sentient. If there is no supernatural, then consciousness must be created using natural laws and therefore something that ultimately it is possible, somehow, to recreate again using the natural laws.

I think determinism is another debate entirely, and I believe most scientists consider the universe not deterministic but instead probabilistic, but honestly the distinction doesn't seem that important to me for this discussion.

Further (and non-scientifically), if we can never quite crack an observably sentient AI, I'd probably start coming round more to the idea that maybe humans were created by a god. However, at this point, it seems like we're starting to climb up the sentience ladder without any obvious impassable rungs so far.

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