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Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

thenewatlantis.com

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Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#51

Post by danaris »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #45
danaris wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. This is one of the questions far too few people seem to be paying attention to. "Thinking" in any way that we truly understand the term requires consciousness , and consciousness requires much more continuity than LLMs have. It would need continuity of input as well as continuity of learning in order to even be able to begin to approach something we might recognize as consciousness.

Why?

Well, "consciousness", at least as we recognize it, requires a mechanism by which the entity being measured can continuously form new "thoughts" and "memories" (which requires continuity of learning, and at the very least continuity of input being fed back from its own output), and some form of continuous external input of information about the world to at least be available, even if it is not always on.

A standard LLM is a static bundle of trained data that sits, inert, on a drive, with a process waiting for discrete input. When that input arrives, it does nothing to modify the trained data—the LLM's "memory"—it simply triggers a computational process that reads both the input and the trained data and produces an output based on them. This does not resemble in any way the structure of something that could be reasonably described as a conscious mind.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#52

Post by danaris »

gmerc wrote: post #48
TheRoque wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, because it would hit a moment where it runs out of context. It can't really learn anything for now.

Not really, hook up external sensors to keep shoveling data , feedback data into continuous lora and performance comparison,

How?

What kind of data?

You think you can just hook up a firehose of visual or auditory data to ChatGPT and have that produce anything meaningful? That's not even the basic format that ChatGPT operates in.

Furthermore, isn't part of the point of the dataset an LLM is trained on that it has to be at least moderately structured and tagged, or you end up with garbage in the output?

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#53

Post by amoss »

Plyphon_ wrote: post #43
ChatGTP wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious why you needed to inject the violent overtones in your comment, "curb stomped? We're building tools to help us augment our intelligence, I don't see anyone getting "curb stomped"? If intelligence leads to more violence, then I don't think it will be as useful as we'd have hoped.

It's just a turn of phrase that means you got 100% beaten without challenge.

It would be more accurate to say that some people use it as a simple turn of phrase without considering what it means. Language is made mostly of metaphor and analogy. Explaining something by comparison to something that is already understood is a technique that seems to fit our model of thought.

Over time the original meaning may fade or be forgotten, and the residual symbol in the language becomes the thing itself. Etymology is full of examples.

But that much history has not yet passed since the introduction of the term "curbstomping" and so using it is still a choice that conveys some meta-meaning about content and style.

As mentioned further up in the thread it is unnecessarily violent for conveying the meaning in the comment.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#54

Post by danaris »

ben_w wrote: post #40
optimalsolver wrote: post #10

What's a large language model doing when it's not being queried? Am I correct that they only compute information when dealing with a prompt? If so, that seems like a fundamental flaw. An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output.

> What's a large language model doing when it's not being queried? Nothing. > Am I correct that they only compute information when dealing with a prompt? Yes. > If so, that seems like a fundamental flaw. Flawed in what way? It clearly doesn't need to be like us to be useful, because it's useful and definitely not like us. > An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated exper…

> It clearly doesn't need to be like us to be useful, because it's useful and definitely not like us.

For many people, the question is not—and has never been—"is it useful?", but "is it conscious?", or "when will it bring the singularity?"

Yes, it is useful as it is. But it is not conscious, and if it is a step closer to the still-very-hypothetical singularity, then it is not a particularly large one, because of these very real fundamental limitations.

But engaging with people who are clearly talking about whether AI is conscious by responding as if they're talking about whether it is useful could very easily be seen as engaging in bad faith.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#55

Post by SoftTalker »

In case you were wondering (as I was) about the qualifications of the author to write about AI, here is what I found on the "New Atlantis" website:

Ari Schulman is editor of The New Atlantis, as well as editor of TheNewAtlantis.com and of the New Atlantis Books series.

His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Hedgehog Review, Commentary, First Things, and Slate. He has previously been a research assistant in the Opinion department at the New York Times, an ontological engineer at Cycorp, and has degrees in computer science and English from the University of Texas at Austin.

I'm still not certain. I have a degree in computer science, but it had no AI focus, and even if it had, it was so long ago as to be mostly irrelevant to what is currently called AI if I had not been keeping up independently in the field.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#56

Post by [deleted] »

542354234235 wrote: post #44
ChatGTP wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious why you needed to inject the violent overtones in your comment, "curb stomped? We're building tools to help us augment our intelligence, I don't see anyone getting "curb stomped"? If intelligence leads to more violence, then I don't think it will be as useful as we'd have hoped.

> brute human force > beat Kasparov So much violence everywhere

[deleted]

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#57

Post by DebtDeflation »

danaris wrote: post #20
optimalsolver wrote: post #10

What's a large language model doing when it's not being queried? Am I correct that they only compute information when dealing with a prompt? If so, that seems like a fundamental flaw. An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output.

Thank you. This is one of the questions far too few people seem to be paying attention to. "Thinking" in any way that we truly understand the term requires consciousness , and consciousness requires much more continuity than LLMs have. It would need continuity of input as well as continuity of learning in order to even be able to begin to approach something we might recognize as consciousness.

Imagine a hypothetical black box that could correctly answer any question you ask it and perform any task that you instruct it to perform. In terms of the impact such a thing would have on the world, would it matter if it were conscious? Would it even be desirable for it to be conscious? IMO, discussions of consciousness and self-awareness are a complete red herring when it comes to the topic of AGI.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#58

Post by rtkwe »

jasfi wrote: post #23
visarga wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, unfortunately it doesn't learn online. It forgets everything after each interaction. They can collect the data and retrain later, but the hard part is doing all the fine-tuning steps all over again and ensuring the new model has no regressions. GPT3.5 and 4 are years out of date, an unfortunate situation when generating code or asking about recent events. And now they removed the search plugin, probably they got…

The cost to compute these language models should eventually lower. Will OpenAI then release more frequently, or release larger LLMs? They'll probably to try achieve both goals in some proportion.

A big issue with constant retraining is going to be the self referential consumption of it's own generated material as training material. There's already been the studies that these models quickly break down when they're fed their own generated data as training data. It won't immediately degrade them as it's a small percentage but there's already a lot of people using these models to generated spam junk out there and it'll only get worse with time.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#59

Post by agentultra »

... ChatGPT is a bigger, fancier mechanical turk. It's still aligned by the manual labour of underpaid people given no benefits for their work. They get exposed to some of the most horrible content on the Internet every day as part of their job. It's trained on data mined from other humans. It regurgitates that content and if it's too close to verbatim with the training data we have manual labour fixing that. There's an army of people that are trying to make it look like they're keeping SkyNET in a box... just don't look in the box.

See God in it if you want. Believe that it has feelings. Believe that it can think for itself and develop agency over it's future... one day. People believe all kinds of things about the natural universe that make no sense but it makes them feel something.

LLM's are what they are. No more, no less. Don't believe the hype, stick to the science.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#60

Post by Andrex »

agentultra wrote: post #59

... ChatGPT is a bigger, fancier mechanical turk. It's still aligned by the manual labour of underpaid people given no benefits for their work. They get exposed to some of the most horrible content on the Internet every day as part of their job. It's trained on data mined from other humans. It regurgitates that content and if it's too close to verbatim with the training data we have manual labour fixing that. There's…

Combine an LLM with long-term memory formation/recollection and a protracted (~18 year?) incubation period where it interacts with the outside world, and... the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point.
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