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Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

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Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#61

Post by fttx_ »

emodendroket wrote: post #40
jack_pp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writers have started using AI-generated ideas to help them write books. Same with code. Sure it might not write your product code from start to finish with no help but it will speed up your dev speed significantly for certain tasks. Just because we haven't reached singularity doesn't mean what we have now is useless and putting it down as a "parlor trick" as grandparent said seems to me very unwise.

Ad copy has served a similar purpose but nobody would claim ad copy has (or could) supplant creative writing because of that.

Ad copy is (a form of) creative writing.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#62

Post by oldandtired »

corethree wrote: post #50
mholt wrote: post #5

The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the most part. The Perceptron was merely a linear function approximator. And the Multi-layer Perceptron was a little more capable, but the many orders of magnitude it would have to scale up in order to be convincing just wasn't feasible back then (it finally was in t…

The parlor tricks are getting better. In terms of practicality you just need to look at AI art. That stuff is good enough to replace the real thing. In terms of actual sentience, understanding I had chatGPT answer questions in the following order: 1. Describe to me what happens when you throw sugar in coffee 2. Describe the same thing in terms of atoms. 3. Is this an example of entropy decreasing? 4. What if the arro…

You make a claim here with "Each answer displayed astonishing understanding of what occurs." and the question you fail to ask is: Whose understanding?

The responses are based on the accumulated knowledge of humans and not machines. The systems have not thought through anything and understand nothing. A process of analysing or pattern matching the input question with the data stored retrieves an answer. But that data stored is human knowledge and human effort not machine.

If you look very carefully at the results obtained, it either contains "interesting errors" (for which an intelligent human would pick up) or it is a summation of human knowledge.

The answers still have to be tested and confirmed for rationality and applicability by humans. In other words, this is a tool like all tools created by humans.

I have seen too many examples of what are supposed to be correct answers that contained subtle and not so subtle errors.

Like every system we have ever made, Garbage in gets us Garbage out. We are the ones responsible to checking those answers and making sure that they make sense in the real world.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#63

Post by KirillPanov »

tsunamifury wrote: post #30
KirillPanov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why they've called it AI winter the past three times. It's a season. Like the seasons, the cycle repeats.

What a tired and lame take. 100m people used this latest iteration. It’s hardly a winter.

What a tired and lame retort.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#64

Post by corethree »

oldandtired wrote: post #62
corethree wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parlor tricks are getting better. In terms of practicality you just need to look at AI art. That stuff is good enough to replace the real thing. In terms of actual sentience, understanding I had chatGPT answer questions in the following order: 1. Describe to me what happens when you throw sugar in coffee 2. Describe the same thing in terms of atoms. 3. Is this an example of entropy decreasing? 4. What if the arro…

You make a claim here with "Each answer displayed astonishing understanding of what occurs." and the question you fail to ask is: Whose understanding? The responses are based on the accumulated knowledge of humans and not machines. The systems have not thought through anything and understand nothing. A process of analysing or pattern matching the input question with the data stored retrieves an answer. But that data…

> You make a claim here with "Each answer displayed astonishing understanding of what occurs." and the question you fail to ask is: Whose understanding?

The answer is obvious. The LLM is understanding the concepts. The last question was unique. The resulting answer was also unique.

It was not a "retrieved" answer. It was a unique answer. A correct composition of several underlying concepts. A correct composition can only be formulated if the machine had correct understanding of each concept and how they relate to one another.

This thing understands you. It wholly owns this understanding. It is not regurgitating knowledge. It is inventing new answers.

Wake up man. I had the LLM invent 6 regions and heat the cup of coffee to plasma levels of heat. The answer and composition of concepts was remarkable.

You're calling it a parlor trick because of subtle errors? Bro. Come on.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#65

Post by ben_w »

oldandtired wrote: post #57
ben_w wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly difficult to enumerate all the things we humans actually do. There's a lot of stuff we consider to be "common sense", sometimes those things are used to criticise AI and sometimes they're used to criticise other humans for not knowing them, but that is a category that we don't even think about until we notice the absence. For the things not considered common sense, like playing chess (beats all humans)…

It is impossible to enumerate all the things that we humans do. However, we can enumerate all the things that we create can do. Every system we create has its limitation due to the limitations that we create in them. All systems we create cannot exceed those limitations. We make machines that are stronger, faster, and can have much finer motor control than we have as individual abilities. No machine we have created h…

Mostly I agree with you, but

> However, we can enumerate all the things that we create can do.

Not really, no. Even before AI, "Turing Complete" makes things extremely hard to enumerate; see Busy Beaver numbers for how small a system can be and still outside our ability to fully comprehend — needing to use up-arrow notation because exponentials aren't big enough is always good for a laugh.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#66

Post by ben_w »

oldandtired wrote: post #60
adastra22 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI systems are vastly better than humans at a wide variety of tasks. Better at handwriting recognition, better at scheduling, better at playing games, better at speech recognition and transcription, etc.

The question to ask is why? The answer is that we have programmed these systems to do what we require. They cannot exceed but they fail becasue of errors that we have placed in these systems. All of the tasks that you have mentioned have been programmed that way. It has taken human ingenuity to work out how to do this programming. The end result is a machine (non-sentient, non-intelligent) that is doing what we requi…

> All of the tasks that you have mentioned have been programmed that way. It has taken human ingenuity to work out how to do this programming.

The successful Go AI were programmed to learn; we still can't program a decent Go AI with rules humans come up with.

> The literature is there

Do you have a link? Two Minute Papers just had a video about an AI systematic finding ways to confound other AI, but I thought we'd passed the point where the best Go AI could be so manipulated by humans…

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#67

Post by IanCal »

oldandtired wrote: post #62
corethree wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parlor tricks are getting better. In terms of practicality you just need to look at AI art. That stuff is good enough to replace the real thing. In terms of actual sentience, understanding I had chatGPT answer questions in the following order: 1. Describe to me what happens when you throw sugar in coffee 2. Describe the same thing in terms of atoms. 3. Is this an example of entropy decreasing? 4. What if the arro…

You make a claim here with "Each answer displayed astonishing understanding of what occurs." and the question you fail to ask is: Whose understanding? The responses are based on the accumulated knowledge of humans and not machines. The systems have not thought through anything and understand nothing. A process of analysing or pattern matching the input question with the data stored retrieves an answer. But that data…

> A process of analysing or pattern matching the input question with the data stored retrieves an answer.

They're not just retrieving stored text like pulling the most relevant passage from a database. If they were they'd not be able to deal with things outside the training set. They couldn't write code for a custom library that was created after the cutoff (they can with a description), and they couldn't write about terms made up in the question.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#69

Post by Sparkyte »

nologic01 wrote: post #36
mholt wrote: post #5

The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the most part. The Perceptron was merely a linear function approximator. And the Multi-layer Perceptron was a little more capable, but the many orders of magnitude it would have to scale up in order to be convincing just wasn't feasible back then (it finally was in t…

AI is not a parlor trick. AI is a branch of statistics. Nobody said that statistics must limit itself to quasi-linear models of numerical data. It was just a limitation of computational resources (initially "AI" was developed by human computers). The trick is to get people not to associate the dictum "lies, damn lies and statistics" with "hallucinations, damn hallucinations and AI".

AI he referred to was of that time.

Re: Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

#70

Post by ben_w »

usgroup wrote: post #39
mholt wrote: post #5

The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the most part. The Perceptron was merely a linear function approximator. And the Multi-layer Perceptron was a little more capable, but the many orders of magnitude it would have to scale up in order to be convincing just wasn't feasible back then (it finally was in t…

Not really sure how you can consider ChatGPT a parlour trick. It has been around a relatively short time but for me its replaced a large proportion of my Google searches already. I do not see how its utility can be denied whether it reasons or not (whatever that means).

In fairness, Page Rank and indexing are also… well, perhaps too big for a parlour, but they're (very good) tricks.

Is ChatGPT playing a trick on us by mimicking the sentience of the humans whose writings it ingested, or is the trick that by doing so it began to actually think like us and so simulates a conscious mind within?

I lean towards the former; but we don't know what sentience even is yet, so we can't prove it.

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