Exceptionally unconvinced that it's more than statistics, and frankly unhappy that pop Sci media is being this uncritical of claims it's emergent intelligence.
Wait, who is exceptionally unconvinced? And who is unhappy? I’m confused.
I am.
How AI knows things no one told it
51–60 of 140 posts
Re: How AI knows things no one told it
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
We just had this discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35868065 . It does appear to be a case of mis-used measurements rather than true emergence.
This is a misunderstanding of the researchers' claim, for which I blame them rather than you. You are using their study to claim that LLMs can not learn and reason about novel tasks. Their study doesn't make any claims about what LLMs can and can't do. The study says that when it appears that LLMs suddenly became able to reason about novel tasks, what actually happened is that the ability of the LLM to perform reason…
> Do you see?
Emergence can only be discontinuous.
Re: How AI knows things no one told it
#53A missing part that AI needs is a experimental way to verify its results. In some contexts, like math, this is entirely possible because it does not involve manipulation of real world objects. For example, i asked GTP-4, In the context of optimization, does the generalized assignment problem satisfy total unimodularity. Then experimental way would be to look up the formulas of the integer program on the internet or i…
This is the answer I got. with this system prompt "You are an intelligent PhD processor explaining topics to your PhD students." In the context of optimization, does the generalized assignment problem satisfy total unimodularity? Assistant: The generalized assignment problem (GAP) is an NP-hard optimization problem that can be formulated as an integer linear program. The problem involves assigning a set of tasks to a…
That is interesting, but i still think the reasoning is weak as it is not mentioning the range of values that the a_ij and b_i are allowed to take on.
Re: How AI knows things no one told it
#54Exceptionally unconvinced that it's more than statistics, and frankly unhappy that pop Sci media is being this uncritical of claims it's emergent intelligence.
If you invent/introduce made up concepts and rules on the spot ("let shmerple be ..."), which can't possibly be found in its training data, then, from my experience, when queried, LLMs are able to correctly reason most of the time... So it's not just Markov chains regurgitating sentences verbatim from their dataset. Even if this kind of intelligence is just statistics, does it really matter? If it quacks like a duck,…
does it really matter? If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck
I think it absolutely matters if by only quacking we also want to know is it possibly wanting, feeling, experiencing, having an ego etc.
You say LLMs are able to reason, but https://youtu.be/QO2BvVq_fWU?t=663 here is a proponent of the more simplistic explanation of how they work. On one hand I saw pretty convincing arguments for it having the ability to reason, on the other hand how do we even conclude anything if we can't really know what's in the training data.
Re: How AI knows things no one told it
#55I think it's a bit of hubris to demand we explain how LLMs can be as intelligent as they are when we barely understand how the ball of meat inside our skulls can be either. We know that neural networks can simulate any function, given enough parameters. Maybe we've simply found the number of parameters needed to simulate the function of "human level intelligence". That should humble us, to know that there is some num…
The physical human brain has 86 billion neurons with up to 10,000 connections each. However they are somewhat structured (e.g. the seven layers of the cerebral cortex segregated into vertical silos a few hundred cells wide) reducing the arbitrariness of connections. So say the connectome has 100 trillion parameters.
The brain also has a bunch of other cells that dont appear to encode information. They may supply structural scaffolding and chemicals to mediate neuron function.
Re: How AI knows things no one told it
#56Exceptionally unconvinced that it's more than statistics, and frankly unhappy that pop Sci media is being this uncritical of claims it's emergent intelligence.
The article isn't doing anything more then quoting experts in the field. From the article: “It is certainly much more than a stochastic parrot, and it certainly builds some representation of the world—although I do not think that it is quite like how humans build an internal world model,” says Yoshua Bengio, an AI researcher at the University of Montreal. If you remain unconvinced then the only conclusion I can make…
"you know that what these experts say have merit"
No, we don't know that at all.
Re: How AI knows things no one told it
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you invent/introduce made up concepts and rules on the spot ("let shmerple be ..."), which can't possibly be found in its training data, then, from my experience, when queried, LLMs are able to correctly reason most of the time... So it's not just Markov chains regurgitating sentences verbatim from their dataset. Even if this kind of intelligence is just statistics, does it really matter? If it quacks like a duck,…
Yeah, it's bizarre. Are we not simply employing statistics when we deduce that yes, if we release our grip, the smartphone will fall to the floor? You wouldn't have to ever see a phone drop in order to know that, and neither would you have to study or know of the terminology of gravity. It comes from the statistical knowledge that all things fall when not blocked.
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Re: How AI knows things no one told it
#58Let for the sake of argument, assume that the LLM is truly sapience. Then this would be the first alien intelligence we have ever encountered. All life and intelligence we have seen before were organic, carbon-based life, including the most distant and unintuitive ones like the cephalopods, cetaceans, and primates. Even now we are still arguing whether these creatures are intelligent or they are just "not there" yet.…
I would hazard a guess that if we first encountered a ChatGPT-4 level LLM* as radio signals from Mars we would baseline assume it was "intelligent alien life".
* assuming its instruction tuned:
- in terms of self-disclosure (no "I'm made by openAI on earth" statements!)
- sans its relatively schematic "guard rail" responses.
It would be hard to imagine intelligent life being more obviously intelligent to us: ChatGPT literally speaks our language, and has learned patterns of "thought" derived from our own.
None of this necessarily implies sapience, but I think the "alien intelligence" framing reverses the default assumption (we'd probably be freaking about alien intelligent life if we got a radio signal from mars delineating the prime numbers :-D ) in interesting ways, thanks for sharing!
Re: How AI knows things no one told it
#59Exceptionally unconvinced that it's more than statistics, and frankly unhappy that pop Sci media is being this uncritical of claims it's emergent intelligence.
Of course it's just statistics, but so are we. Define intelligence. Say you took a human brain and kept it alive in a mad scientist's pickle jar. Let's assume the brain's wired up so it can hear and speak, it's got an idiot savant's memory, and someone has just read it the internet. What do you think the most impressive things are that the brain could do, that GPT-4 couldn't ?
We can describe ourselves with statistics, that does not mean we are statistics. This is called the "Fallacy of the Map" where a symbol is falsely equated with the entity it represents. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mistaking_the_map_for_the_terr...
Statistics is collecting and analyzing numerical data. But what is the numerical data quantifying? It's quantifying a second thing. If everything were "just statistics" then there would be nothing left to take statistics of. This would constitute "infinite regress" or a "turtles all the way down" argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
>What do you think the most impressive things are that the brain could do, that GPT-4 couldn't ?
This depends on what we consider "impressive." The human brain can control an entire human body, for one. Even if we take away the body, GPT-4 fails all sorts of basic arithmetic and reasoning problems. Additionally, the human brain is organic, analog, holographic, and reacts to external electromagnetic stimulation.
Re: How AI knows things no one told it
#60I think it's a bit of hubris to demand we explain how LLMs can be as intelligent as they are when we barely understand how the ball of meat inside our skulls can be either. We know that neural networks can simulate any function, given enough parameters. Maybe we've simply found the number of parameters needed to simulate the function of "human level intelligence". That should humble us, to know that there is some num…
> there is some number which we are no more complex than I bet that number is 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000
For people who, like me, didn't recognize the number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group