Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
1–10 of 520 posts
Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
#2In GEB Hofstadter dismisses the idea that AI could understand / compose / feel music like a human. I thought about this a lot when I started using GPT, especially early on when it demonstrated an ability to explain why things were funny or sad, intrinsically human qualities hitherto insulated from machine
Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
#3Lets take someone, who is past their prime and interview them on a topic they have never worked on. Then we can mine it for quotes!
>"I never imagined that computers would rival, let alone surpass, human intelligence. And in principle, I thought they could rival human intelligence. I didn't see any reason that they couldn't."
Yeah, so he got fooled by LLMs and hasnt been burned by it failing to do the most basic logic.
I have an extremely basic question, that anyone in a (possibly mandatory) high school science class would answer correctly(although to be fair, it could be a 100 level college question). It still cannot answer it correctly because there is too many stay-at-home-parent blogs giving the wrong answer.
Its a language model and it fooled DH. It hasnt gotten smarter than us yet. Its just faster at repeating what other humans verbally said.
So what can we make of this interview? That we have someone spouting opinions, and everyone else laughs at their opinion since they are famous, old, and out of touch.
EDIT: I think LLMs are incredibly useful. I use it more than Google. It doesnt mean its smarter than humans, it means google is worse than LLMs. I can't even provide a list of all the uses, but it doesnt mean they are taking advantage of an old man out of their element.
Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
#4Lets take someone, who is past their prime and interview them on a topic they have never worked on. Then we can mine it for quotes! >"I never imagined that computers would rival, let alone surpass, human intelligence. And in principle, I thought they could rival human intelligence. I didn't see any reason that they couldn't." Yeah, so he got fooled by LLMs and hasnt been burned by it failing to do the most basic logi…
People overly impressed by LLMs haven't spent a lot of time trying to make them actually useful.
When you do, you learn that they're talented mimics but still quite limited.
Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
#5Do we really lack a good understanding of LLM's and deep nets that we need to be afraid of them? I would love to see this disproved with some open source work on the internals of these models and how they do inference and exactly reason.
And why they could possibly never realize an AGI with the current stream of models. Being able to display human level intelligence and creative in confined spaces (be it Chess or Go based models) is something we have been progressing on for a bit - now that the same is applied to writing, image or audio / speech generation we suddenly start developing a fear of AGI.
Is there a phrase for the fear of AI now building up?
Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
#6In GEB Hofstadter dismisses the idea that AI could understand / compose / feel music like a human. I thought about this a lot when I started using GPT, especially early on when it demonstrated an ability to explain why things were funny or sad, intrinsically human qualities hitherto insulated from machine
Repeating the words thousands of humans have written about emotion doesn’t meant it feels them. A sociopath could define empathy and still be missing the deeper experience behind the emotion.
Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
#7Lets take someone, who is past their prime and interview them on a topic they have never worked on. Then we can mine it for quotes! >"I never imagined that computers would rival, let alone surpass, human intelligence. And in principle, I thought they could rival human intelligence. I didn't see any reason that they couldn't." Yeah, so he got fooled by LLMs and hasnt been burned by it failing to do the most basic logi…
People overly impressed by LLMs haven't spent a lot of time trying to make them actually useful. When you do, you learn that they're talented mimics but still quite limited.
Part of me wonders, though, could we "just" connect up an inference engine and voila? We could really be on a cusp of general AI. (Or it could be a ways off) That's a bit frightening in several ways.
Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
#8Hofstadter makes the claim that "these LLMs and other systems like them are all feed-forward". That doesn't sound right to me, but I'm only a casual observer of LLM tech. Is his assertion accurate? FWIW, ChatGPT doesn't think so. :-)
Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
#9I read Hofstadter's GEB and Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe, and of course I developed a rather fond admiration of these brilliant minds. For some reason, both of them have developed a profound aversion and fear of what they consider an existential threat.
I have a solid theoretical understanding of these systems, and I spent 15 years studying, building, and deploying them at scale and for diverse use cases. The past 6 months, I spent my days pushing ChatGPT and GPT-4 to their limits. Yet, I don't share at all the fear of Hofstadter, Tegmark or Hinton.
A part of me thinks that they have one thing in common: they are old and somewhat recluse thinkers. No matter how brilliant they are, they might be misled by the _appearance_ of intelligence that LLMs project. Another part of me thinks that they are vastly wiser than I'll ever be, so I should also be worried...
Future will tell, I guess.
Re: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
#10Do we really lack a good understanding of LLM's and deep nets that we need to be afraid of them? I would love to see this disproved with some open source work on the internals of these models and how they do inference and exactly reason. And why they could possibly never realize an AGI with the current stream of models. Being able to display human level intelligence and creative in confined spaces (be it Chess or Go…
No one has ever been convinced to fly an airplane into a building by a chess board.
People have gotten convinced of that by words though.
The “attack surface” on human sensibility is just enormous if you’re able to use believably human language.