Cargo Cult AI
queue.acm.org
Cargo Cult AI
1–10 of 191 posts
Re: Cargo Cult AI
#2[deleted]
Re: Cargo Cult AI
#3Every time I read about AI I am reminded of the mouse running a maze. Any AI algorithm can learn to complete a maze in record time. It can memorize every corner. It can run a search pattern perfectly and improve that pattern iteratively, to the point that it may create new search patterns, applying what appear to be novel ideas. But the mouse actually understands the concept of a maze. It knows that the cheese exists regardless of the maze. The mouse can see when the researcher has left the lid open, jump outside the maze and run to the cheese directly. The mouse is aware. The AI is not.
Re: Cargo Cult AI
#4[flagged]
Re: Cargo Cult AI
#5Every time I read about AI I am reminded of the mouse running a maze. Any AI algorithm can learn to complete a maze in record time. It can memorize every corner. It can run a search pattern perfectly and improve that pattern iteratively, to the point that it may create new search patterns, applying what appear to be novel ideas. But the mouse actually understands the concept of a maze. It knows that the cheese exists…
Although I more or less agree with you, in general, how complex would the AI have to be before you can consider it aware?
Re: Cargo Cult AI
#6Every time I read about AI I am reminded of the mouse running a maze. Any AI algorithm can learn to complete a maze in record time. It can memorize every corner. It can run a search pattern perfectly and improve that pattern iteratively, to the point that it may create new search patterns, applying what appear to be novel ideas. But the mouse actually understands the concept of a maze. It knows that the cheese exists…
And moreover, this is more than a philosophical difference. As our understandings of AI and neuroscience improve we can now talk about "world models" as something almost tangible and constructible. Complex animal nervous systems build and use embodied world models to interpret the senses and allow for tractable future prediction and action generation. Yann Lecunn's paper on AGI from August 2022 gets into defining computational equivalents, and multimodal AI models like PaLM-E are taking first steps toward explicitly tying LLM-style text prediction with collections of perceptual observations about the environment.
So it's not that artificial systems cannot, as a category, have models of their environment and the actions they can take within it, this "cargo cult AI" concept comes up when people jump the gun and see those capabilities in much simpler systems, even including ChatGPT-4. And it's disheartening to see narrative on the subject driven more and more by people who have not taken the time to learn about the subject matter, for all the interest they seem to show in talking about it.
Re: Cargo Cult AI
#7Really beautiful article.
Re: Cargo Cult AI
#8[flagged]
From the HN guidelines: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Re: Cargo Cult AI
#9Really beautiful article.
[deleted]
Re: Cargo Cult AI
#10> What makes human intelligence different from today's AI is the ability to ask why, reason from first principles, and create experiments and models for testing hypotheses.
So my reaction was "citation needed" and "have you talked to GPT-4 at all?". But a few screens further on there's a ref to a Judea Pearl paper from five years ago. It'd be reasonable if this'd been published then.
(N.B. I'm not saying there's no difference from human intelligence.)