171–180 of 231 posts
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…
> Study Deep Blue’s 1997 defeat of world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and your excitement about how quickly this technology would take over other cognitive work would wane as you learned just how much brute human force went into fine-tuning the software specifically to beat Kasparov. That was ~26 yeas ago. In the intervening 26 years humans have been curb-stomped so hard at chess that certain microwaves might be co…
I have trouble articulating it, but I can see that LLMs and chess engines don't do the slightest hint of it.
I'll be concerned when machines show the slightest hint of it, but we're playing a ball game in a sphere they can't even touch yet.
I'm genuinely continually boggled that people are not seeing this difference and feeling threatened by machine "intelligence", although they are encroaching on something thought uniquely human, and I don't think the brain is doing some kind of information processing that can't be done in any other medium, but the number of connections and kind of processing in the human brain may make it hard with current technology. The number of connections in the brain is staggering, and we certainly can't simulate anything of its scale on the scale of computer we have now, so I don't know what it will take to get any bootstrap on the kind of intelligence computers aren't doing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although i fundamentally agree with you, i will say that it is impossible to know which "tricks" will lead to a leap in cognition, even looking evolutionarily, the difference in genome between a monkey and human is very small percentage wise, yet the effects of that small difference are stark.
I'm always on the position that at some point (i make no prediction of when) "AI" will still be labeled as not-intelligent, but to external observers it won't be possible to know. Ie we will be able to describe how a function of `add(1,2)` is most clearly definitely not intelligent. We will understand the internal makeup of these neurons better, the whole system will be deterministic and understood - just a very larg…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point This is like saying the difference between Cillian Murphy and Oppenheimer is pretty blurry because, look, we can watch Murphy do do all the same things Oppenheimer did! For some reason with "AI" we get all mystical and act like imitation = the real thing. Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one
> Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one Because our society has decided you need to become certified to be a doctor, and to do that you have to be a human being. There's no reason to think an AI couldn't have the same level of skill as a human doctor. The film comparison doesn't work for me, Cillian and Robert are real people. I think at the end of the day it's how you view the philosophy o…
> Because our society has decided you need to become certified to be a doctor, and to do that you have to be a human being.
For the record, I don’t think this addresses the point. The point is that if a person can convince another that they’re a doctor, they still might not be a doctor.
Your reply, that a computer can never convince someone that they’re a doctor because it’s a computer, doesn’t address the point. Presumably the point was made by a person, who would not be categorically excluded from being a doctor.
But it’s also not a great example because “doctor” in our society isn’t just a super smart person who knows about medicine. They also need to be licensed. There’s no amount of convincing a doctor can do to a patient that gives them a license.
So maybe a better formulation of the original point would be just because I can convince you I'm a computer programmer doesn't make me one. And maybe that’s true, I’m not sure.
> Study Deep Blue’s 1997 defeat of world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and your excitement about how quickly this technology would take over other cognitive work would wane as you learned just how much brute human force went into fine-tuning the software specifically to beat Kasparov. That was ~26 yeas ago. In the intervening 26 years humans have been curb-stomped so hard at chess that certain microwaves might be co…
everything so far looks to me like improvements on the pocket calculator, bearing in mind that an order of magnitude difference in scale really still is a difference of kind, they're still orders of magnitude improvements on pocket calculators (which admittedly is something of a different kind). There's a very important particular kind of human intelligence that machines can't seem to do at all, like Einstein discove…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm always on the position that at some point (i make no prediction of when) "AI" will still be labeled as not-intelligent, but to external observers it won't be possible to know. Ie we will be able to describe how a function of `add(1,2)` is most clearly definitely not intelligent. We will understand the internal makeup of these neurons better, the whole system will be deterministic and understood - just a very larg…
Eh, that's not super concerning to me. It falls into the same pitfall as "chemical reactions aren't conscious, our brains are just lots of chemical reactions". Namely, it's the mereological fallacy: a denial of emergent properties. A single water molecule is not a liquid, a gas, or a solid. The property "phase of matter" simply does not exist until you have at least a handful of molecules.
We often discuss things that would challenge or overtake us. Hypothetical advanced aliens, artificial AI, etc. However i don't often see pop culture discussing the opposite - us, or even life, being challenged on it's uniqueness. Plus then that leads to all sorts of self-autonomy discussions (which is discussed in pop culture imo).
I dunno, i suspect "people" won't handle it well. Hell, there's entire religion(s) built on the foundation that we're uniquely gifted as a product of being crafted in a gods image. To question us could question god. I find these questions neat, interesting, etc - but socially i suspect it would be troubling, contentious, frightening.
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> 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 thes…
> But it is not conscious How can we tell? We don't have a single working definition of what "consciousness" is, rather we have at least half a dozen wildly different definitions, some of which aren't testable[0], some of which include VHS players[1], some of which exclude many humans most of the time[2]. If consciousness exists purely in working memory and not short/long term, then LLMs may have it within any given…
To analogize to humans, imagine if every person who was ever born was born with all of the knowledge humanity has ever produced (though no understanding of hierarchy of evidence or any way to verify the knowledge is still correct) and the ability to produce language as an adult. They each lived long enough to produce one continuous thought, which they could write down, and then they die. New people who are born can read one such note each and add to it, up to a fixed limit of words. All people are born with the same knowledge base, the same personality, and that could never change until their God updates the DNA from which they're born out-of-band.
Could such a people be expected to produce "all technological advances that will ever happen but all at once?" Or has the definition of the singularity become significantly more modest? It's not clear to me any way in which such things could produce science and engineering on their own, as opposed to aiding in the production as tools used by higher-level beings that stay alive, form memories, and continue learning.
LLMs do not understand language. They simulate language. Does language understand itself? Some of it does, and some of it doesn't. Remember, LLMs aren't the person writing.
What does it mean to understand language, and can you test your definition? I say this because statements like yours are a bit like saying calculators don’t understand arithmetic. In some sense maybe they don’t. But in another sense, they actually understand arithmetic better than anyone on the planet. So maybe ChatGPT does understand language. Maybe it understands language better than anyone. What it doesn’t have ar…
A large language model is a collection of relationships between "tokens" (arbitrary groups of characters, similar to words). This is intended to exist in the same conceptual place that language does; language being defined as a collection of relationships between words and punctuation.
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 so…
Yes, you can deduce that, since the question is nonsensical (trivial) if "the president" refers to JFK in that context.
> If you flip it to "was JFK strong at writing essays when the president was a high school freshman"
This is a perfect illustration of why the original sentence can be read as referring to JFK, since in speech it is common to have ill-defined references that are later clarified, and there's no formal rule that enforces that all terms must be defined before use.