Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

thenewatlantis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 231 posts

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#211

Post by [deleted] »

goatlover wrote: post #164
amoss wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Curb-stomping is used in many sorts of competitions to denote being beaten badly. Also they got their ass beat, whipped-up on, wrecked, etc. No reason to make it an issue, people just like using those metaphors.

[deleted]

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#212

Post by balnaphone »

notahacker wrote: post #205
balnaphone wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "who was the president when JFK was born?", the answer is clearly not JFK 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 t…

> 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. References that are later clarified is exactly how we arrive at "the president when JFK was born " as defining Woodrow Wilson as the object of the sentence…

I wrote:

> "Was the president strong at writing essays when JFK was a high school freshman? Read this essay to find out!"

You write:

> "when the president was a high school freshman"

These are very different circumstances, of course.

If the original sentence had "reigning" before the word "president", then I would absolutely agree with the given interpretation.

I've noticed that Americans call ex-presidents "president", and ex-governors "governor", so that merely adds to the confusion. English is not my native language, and I'm not American, so perhaps I fall into the "lack fluency" category. Conferring with other native speakers nearby, every American immediately reads it as intended, whereas Brits and Canadians do not.

I conclude that the original sentence is poorly written, and that I misread it.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#213

Post by ChainOfFools »

vidarh wrote: post #199
TaupeRanger wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are - they are AS non-nebulous as you can possibly get - totally black and white obvious. "Is there a stream of experiences?" is very straightforward, black and white. It's what you have when you're awake, and what you lose when you're in dreamless sleep. Not nebulous in any way. "Can you pay attention to this part of your experience?" is a very black-and-white, non-nebulous question with an easy yes or no a…

What is an experience? What does "pay attention" mean?

Dualism, or at any rate the version of it that can be described as operating on the (possibly unconscious) assumption that a world "outside" of this world exists, is the secret ingredient at work here, smuggled in along with the kinds of notions expressed by the person you're replying to. We just can't seem to fully disentangle very old deep-seated animist instincts, even sophisticated formulations of them, like the soul or consciousness, from our reasoning and descriptions of dynamic systems. I'm not sure this is a bad thing even though I recognize that it is a crutch. completely materialist interpretation of phenomena would probably lead us to the realization that we are not alive at all, and that what I call "my life" is just a kind of curling strand of causality frozen in the Parmenides block universe.

I've come to suspect that a habit of using the passive voice when discussing these phenomna contributes immensely to their ongoing currency. Steering away from this by asking questions like, "_who_ or _what_ is attending to/experiencing the stream?" may be a useful way to ground these statements in material terms.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#214

Post by jasfi »

rtkwe wrote: post #58
jasfi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ranking algorithms should help with this, working on human feedback. Pages that spew badly generated text likely won't rank well on the top search engines. The big LLM names, such as OpenAI, would probably partner (e.g. with Microsoft), to tap into this if they needed to. They may have their own ranking algorithms anyway.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#215

Post by bombolo »

Analemma_ wrote: post #130
bombolo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have to manually input the scores for the various board positions, feels much less exciting.

Again, your information is tremendously out of date. AlphaZero crushes grandmasters and had no human training whatsoever as to board evaluation functions.

Again? When else?

Also, we were talking about deep blue. Perhaps trying to not go OT would be beneficial to a productive discussion.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#216

Post by __loam »

gmerc wrote: post #208
__loam wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another flaw is trying to anthropomorphize the tech

What does that even mean in this context?

It means we need to stop bringing up neuroscience in contexts where it has absolutely no relationship with what we're talking about.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#217

Post by vidarh »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #213
vidarh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an experience? What does "pay attention" mean?

Dualism, or at any rate the version of it that can be described as operating on the (possibly unconscious) assumption that a world "outside" of this world exists, is the secret ingredient at work here, smuggled in along with the kinds of notions expressed by the person you're replying to. We just can't seem to fully disentangle very old deep-seated animist instincts, even sophisticated formulations of them, like the…

I see dualism vs. consciousness as separate. Dualism is often used as an explanation for how (real, not compatibilist) free will can exist in an otherwise materialist world, but it'd still require the "outside" to be "magic" in the sense that it'd require a class of logic that is neither deterministic, nor random, nor just any form of combination of the two (e.g. not stochastic).

Consciousness, on the other hand, boils down to what gives rise to the sensation of self-awareness, and what that sensation actually is, and it's not a given that requires any form of dualism (or that any form of dualism would solve the question at all) or that a strict materialist world can't involve self awareness.

For what we know, self-awareness could be a property of matter itself, and the only thing different between "conscious" and "non-conscious" is getting to a level of sufficient reasoning-ability to actually be able to express it.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#218

Post by TaupeRanger »

vidarh wrote: post #199
TaupeRanger wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are - they are AS non-nebulous as you can possibly get - totally black and white obvious. "Is there a stream of experiences?" is very straightforward, black and white. It's what you have when you're awake, and what you lose when you're in dreamless sleep. Not nebulous in any way. "Can you pay attention to this part of your experience?" is a very black-and-white, non-nebulous question with an easy yes or no a…

What is an experience? What does "pay attention" mean?

You're having experiences right now. It's that. You're paying attention to these words. It's that.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#219

Post by pixl97 »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #218
vidarh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an experience? What does "pay attention" mean?

You're having experiences right now. It's that. You're paying attention to these words. It's that.

You keep saying stream of experience, but you don't actually have a stream in the sense of a continuous uninterrupted experience. Your mind let's you believe that though.

Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

#220

Post by agentultra »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #138
curiousllama wrote: post #63

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

No, the mysticism is from those who think we need something more than the correct sort of information dynamics to have consciousness/sentience/intelligence.

Right now we don’t have any system that has the correct sort of “information dynamics.”

There is no specification available for sentience/intelligence. So people who want to believe an LLM is sentient can jump to any conclusion they want and they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But they’re not right either.

I think it’s highly reductionist to compare an LLM to an intelligent, sentient being and claim it’s basically the same thing. We know how model training works, how transformers work, and we know what the expected results are. Not so for consciousness, sentience, or intelligence. Scientists have been making breakthroughs in our understanding of these phenomena but it’s still incomplete.

LLM’s are useful for one thing. They’re algorithms that run on a machine to perform work for us.

Post reply on HN