I find the emphasis on the combination of big data, powerful computing, and advances in machine learning to be a compelling argument for the current AI momentum. The idea that these factors are creating a synergy that propels AI development forward and contributes to tangible progress in various fields is really encouraging.
Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
221–230 of 231 posts
Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
#222Earlier 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.
And which measurable, enumerable qualities of those things set them apart from not having experiences or not paying attention so that I can determine whether or not an AI, or a camera, or an animal, or another human, is "having experiences" or "paying attention"?
Because it's still equally nebulous.
Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's a good point. We appear to have no way (and probably can't have) to discern passage of time from a static experience of a single infinitesimally short moment, as our only experience of time is through memory that we can't know whether is a static snapshot or dynamic.
Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AI-latry Nice neologism! But wouldn't "AI-dolatry" be even better?
AI-dolatry is 100% better sounding and the proximity to idolatry is almost surreal. Asking for permission to use this going forward :-)
Permission granted. Let's split the royalties 50:50!
Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's really just a temporary bandaid as the whole goal of these spam sites is to rank on search and the goal of LLMs is to appear to be human generated. You're stuck in an arms race against you're own improving performance if you're counting on filtering to keep your own output out of your inputs as an LLM company/trainer.
Also there's not a singular search rank for a site it's rank depends on the search query so I'm not even sure how you'd apply that metric.
Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're having experiences right now. It's that. You're paying attention to these words. It's that.
And which measurable, enumerable qualities of those things set them apart from not having experiences or not paying attention so that I can determine whether or not an AI, or a camera, or an animal, or another human, is "having experiences" or "paying attention"? Because it's still equally nebulous.
That wasn't the question - we don't know how to determine whether an AI or camera has it. But it's not nebulous - it's what you're experiencing right now. That's simply what we mean by the word - that's it - no nebulosity to it. Figuring out whether a computer has it is a separate question, and difficult.
Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Since we don't understand its nature, we actually have no idea whatsoever whether it's a continuous stream or not. I mean obviously we sleep, but I take it you didn't mean that kind of interruption, which is beside the point. But either way, it doesn't matter, because "stream" can simply mean "the quick succession of experiences that seem to be continuous to the experiencer". And none of this really matters at all for the discussion at hand, the answer is the same either way.
Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
And which measurable, enumerable qualities of those things set them apart from not having experiences or not paying attention so that I can determine whether or not an AI, or a camera, or an animal, or another human, is "having experiences" or "paying attention"? Because it's still equally nebulous.
That wasn't the question - we don't know how to determine whether an AI or camera has it. But it's not nebulous - it's what you're experiencing right now. That's simply what we mean by the word - that's it - no nebulosity to it. Figuring out whether a computer has it is a separate question, and difficult.
> it’s what you’re experiencing right now.
No, its not.
Its the quality of “experiencing”.
Which is impossible to define in objective terms; it is the essence of subjectivity on which all other subjectivity rests. It’s not merely “we don’t know how to determine whether an AI or camera has it”, it is categorically impossible to determine if something has it. The popular narrative about which things in the natural world have it has evolved radically over time, but in no case has there been, or could there be, any empirical basis for this; its all just vibes.
Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Since we don't understand its nature, we actually have no idea whatsoever whether it's a continuous stream or not. I mean obviously we sleep, but I take it you didn't mean that kind of interruption, which is beside the point. But either way, it doesn't matter, because "stream" can simply mean "the quick succession of experiences that seem to be continuous to the experiencer". And none of this really matters at all fo…
Consciousness is not a continuous stream at all, the fact you fall asleep or can be given medication to turn it off is an obvious example.
Nova/PBS recently did a number of episodes on the number of tricks your brain is playing on your at anytime. Once you start seeing the shortcuts the brain takes in action the entire process is far less magical.
Re: Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
And which measurable, enumerable qualities of those things set them apart from not having experiences or not paying attention so that I can determine whether or not an AI, or a camera, or an animal, or another human, is "having experiences" or "paying attention"? Because it's still equally nebulous.
That wasn't the question - we don't know how to determine whether an AI or camera has it. But it's not nebulous - it's what you're experiencing right now. That's simply what we mean by the word - that's it - no nebulosity to it. Figuring out whether a computer has it is a separate question, and difficult.
It became the question when you tried to define the original terms that way, because a definition that can not be used to discriminate what it defines from what ot does not define is inherently nebulous.
And your definition is now circular and can not be used that way.
Hence the claim that the original definitions were nebulous.