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Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

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Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#101

Post by c_crank »

mercurialsolo wrote: post #99
c_crank wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If we can't tell it apart from us.. and if we know it is most definitely not alive or even mysterious.. what does that say about us? Less than people think. We know that being a biological system differentiates us. If intelligent systems tend to converge where language is concerned, so be it. It doesn't mean the AI warrants any special consideration. It's still a tool.

While life is typically associated with biological systems, intelligence doesn't necessarily need proof of life. A hive, swarm or network can be intelligent as long as it shows self-awareness and has agency.

I'm not disputing that. I just think that intelligence or 'sapience' is not something that requires reverence on our part.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#102

Post by pessimizer »

danaris wrote: post #68
DebtDeflation wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Two things: 1) They may feel like a red herring to you, but they are a big part of what a lot of people are talking about, and coming into a discussion that is clearly talking about whether an AI is conscious or how we could decide if it was and saying "that's all pointless, you shouldn't even be having this discussion" is kind of rude. 2) I am deeply skeptical that it is possible to have anything we could reasonably…

> They may feel like a red herring to you, but they are a big part of what a lot of people are talking about, and coming into a discussion that is clearly talking about whether an AI is conscious or how we could decide if it was and saying "that's all pointless, you shouldn't even be having this discussion" is kind of rude.

Don't silence people, answer them. Say why it's actually important. Don't say that by saying "when you say it's not important, you're disrespecting the people who say it's important." That kind of thinking will take us back to the middle ages.

> I am deeply skeptical that it is possible to have anything we could reasonably deem an "AGI" without it demonstrating at least what appears to be consciousness.

The meaning of the word "AGI" is not an interesting thing to talk about. Call it what you want. If there's a conventional meaning to the word AGI that you're using, explain it and explain why an algorithm that isn't constantly running fails that. If you do this using the word "consciousness," you're passing the buck. You might as well be talking about souls for all the precision that the word "consciousness" has.

> seems impossible without an AGI that can self-analyze and self-improve

Thought experiment. What if you yourself aren't an AGI that can self-analyze and improve? What if you are two not-AGIs (by your definition):

1) a learner that improves the other based on new information, and

2) a controller that produces output,

And that they switch roles between 1 and 30 times per second, based on the intensity of the input. Would that mean you weren't conscious?

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#103

Post by SonicScrub »

guhidalg wrote: post #71
ZiiS wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The are microwaves fully in on the curb-stomping https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ges-kitchen-hub-is-the-smarte... My back of the envelope suggests most digital microwaves with a smart defrost but no connectivity are probably more in the 2000 ELO range (i.e. can beat most players but not grandmasters). Mainly due to not having enough storage for large opening/endgame books.

I for one welcome measuring compute power in chess ELO over FLOPS. Let's me know which devices I can trounce and which ones to pay respect to.

Agreed. Although my ego might not be able to take it if it turns out I can be outplayed by my IKEA smart lamp.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#104

Post by nologic01 »

I wish people would stop with the bizarre AI-latry that has gripped them en masse and realize that if its a "moment" at all, its a human moment.

The impressive feat is the ability of researchers to manipulate a generic statistical model paradigm to fit large amounts data and be reused for something apparently useful.

Whether that path has a future depends not on AI bootstraping itself but on said researchers to keep building on this paradigm.

The black box and inscrutable nature of these algorithms works against them. I.e. reaching the next level in some purposeful manner requires more understanding. Human understanding.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#105

Post by aarong11 »

indigo945 wrote: post #89
mercurialsolo wrote: post #62

It's not combining an LLM with data/memory recollection and infinite agency that will lead to leaps in cognition. Complex systems still can do that and still not have self-awareness / cognition. We will need to take some more fundamental leaps to synthesize memory, agency and prediction to operate within a single system where self-awareness resides in the entity and not in the building blocks. LLM's represent a build…

I am an absolute layman when it comes to AI topics, but I have been wondering about this lately. A lot of the hopes in regard to AGI in LLMs seem to focus on just making the models bigger, or feeding them even more information. On the other hand, some researchers in the AGI space seem to move in a completely different direction, trying to use neural networks to simulate different parts of a brain, moving away from la…

According to several sources, GPT-4 is already doing this (It's called "Mixture of experts"). I agree though, it's still useful on an application level. You can build out even higher on that and have the LLM decide which is the most appropriate "hats" to wear for a given task.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#106

Post by pessimizer »

adrianN wrote: post #78
danaris wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows you to recognize it.

People rarely even offer a definition of consciousness that stays consistent between both premises of a syllogism.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#107

Post by notahacker »

balnaphone wrote: post #80

Am I misreading this? > How tall was the president when JFK was born? I infer that "JFK" is being referred to as "the president", regardless of what stage of life he's at. Therefore the correct answer would be the length of his body as a newborn, with nothing to do with who was the president at the moment of his birth. For example, given the headline: "Was the president strong at writing essays when JFK was a high sc…

Yes, you're misreading it. "the president" is not a label that applies solely to JFK, or one that applies at all to JFK in the context "when JFK was born".

If someone gave me the question "who was the president when JFK was born?", the answer is clearly not JFK, so it isn't correct to infer that JFK is the president whose height, party affiliation or essay writing skill is being asked about "when JFK was born".

If someone gave me the headline "was the president strong at writing essays when JFK was a high school freshman?" I would assume that either they were trying to trick me or that they were a non-native English speaker or computer program that didn't understand how English syntax or the concept of presidency worked. If you flip it to "was JFK strong at writing essays when the president was a high school freshman" then yes, I'd consider both to refer to JFK because "the president"can't be identified as anyone else, but I'd also consider it to be bad writing by someone cargo-culting the idea of elegant variation...

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#108

Post by danaris »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #98
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.

Consider for a moment that the language generation neural network in your brain may not have continuity, and that it may exist elsewhere in your brain.

I don't find that particularly relevant to the questions at hand.

Even if it's true, then at best it means that the LLMs that we've created are only a small part of what's necessary for an AGI that functions as an "artificial brain": that not only are they not conscious, they are fundamentally incapable of it, and in order to create artificial consciousness, we have now gone as far along that particular path as we can (roughly speaking), and need to be looking into how to create the other parts of the "artificial brain", and how to hook them together.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#109

Post by Thoeu388 »

notahacker wrote: post #86
Kbelicius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far "nigerian email spam" was easy to recognize. Grammar mistakes, bad translation, very bad wording... But now every fringe group, can generate gigabytes of text and arguments that make sense! "nigerian email spam" contains grammar mistakes, bad translation, vary bad wording... by design. To weed out those unlikely to end up sending money. I don't know how you can make an argument that makes sense about being c…

> "nigerian email spam" contains grammar mistakes, bad translation, vary bad wording... by design. To weed out those unlikely to end up sending money this theory is popular, but ignores the simple fact that mostly it weeds out the 90% of people whose email provider offers spam filters which are entirely uncorrelated with gullibility, as well as how low-risk, high reward email exchanges with the tiny fraction of peopl…

> mostly it weeds out the 90% of people whose email provider offers spam filters

Do you thing it weeds out 90% of politicians who talk total gibberish?

At end, it will enforce people who are in your social network. Some random celebrity will be ignored. Dude who lives 1 km from your location will be boosted.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#110

Post by gmerc »

danaris wrote: post #52
gmerc wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. There’s multiple companies working on exactly that. Nothing stops you from preprocessing the data and augmenting it which is my entire point.
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