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Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

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Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#11

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

haolez wrote: post #2

I don't agree with his take on LLMs. There is something about them that feels very similar to the way my own brain works. Like, for example, when I perceive a smell that, somehow, activates a very old and almost forgotten visual memory. Sometimes, when talking to a LLM, it feels like one or two words in my prompt is having a similar effect on it.

>> I don't agree with his take on LLMs.

His take may be a bit jaded from his own experience.

He worked as a Lisp hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab when AI research was peaking in the 1970s.

The commercialization of Lisp and early AI effectively destroyed the hacker paradise he worked in and the following "AI Winter" devastated the research and its funding.

These experiences lead him to start the GNU project, so the net result was good for software, but definitely colored his perspective.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Harvard_Unive... for more details.

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#12

Post by varelse »

visarga wrote: post #4

> “As I see it, ‘intelligence’ needs something like the ability to know or understand some area,” he said. “If something can’t actually understand things we shouldn’t say it’s intelligent, not even a little intelligent, but people are using the term artificial intelligence for bullshit generators.” I wouldn't go as far in blaming AI. It is certainly error prone and has very short autonomy. It's not better than subjec…

[dead]

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#14

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

vidarh wrote: post #10
visarga wrote: post #4

> “As I see it, ‘intelligence’ needs something like the ability to know or understand some area,” he said. “If something can’t actually understand things we shouldn’t say it’s intelligent, not even a little intelligent, but people are using the term artificial intelligence for bullshit generators.” I wouldn't go as far in blaming AI. It is certainly error prone and has very short autonomy. It's not better than subjec…

His thinking here leans on assuming that there's a qualitative difference between LLM's "understanding" and our "understanding" that justifies using the term for us, but not for LLMs. Maybe there is, but their reasoning ability is sufficient that I don't think is at all a given, and at a minimum an assertion that should make you ask someone how they define "understanding", because defining that in a way that is focus…

I don't know that his argument is based on essentialism since he goes on to describe algorithms which he considers artificially intelligent: "There are programs that can look at a photo of some magnified cells and tell you, with greater likelihood of being right than any human doctor, whether it’s cancerous or not,”. And he puts it in contrast to his previous statement about LLMs not being artifically intelligent.

It seems to me he wants people to look past the impressive facade of correct grammar and see that a lot of the LLMs often spew out bullshit. Personally I've seen them perform intelligence tasks, generate correct code and so forth. But I think many people ascribe to them a general intelligence that they don't have, which is why you see them quoted increasingly often online as if they were knowledgeable or correct-by-default.

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#17

Post by ta988 »

crabbone wrote: post #9
visarga wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe his perspective on AI is colored by the fact that he's not going to get to see it fully developed so he has nothing to gain.

I doubt that. As someone who was enthusiastic about AI before neural networks rose to prominence, I only shake my head when I hear people ascribe all sorts of properties of intelligence to the particular trend in AI that is in vogue today. The ultimate quest of AI was to understand how to make good decisions. The idea was that maybe if we emulate human activity that humans call "intelligence", but remove all the rand…

You don't seem to understand how thise systems are trained if you believe it is by asking a lot of people and averaging answers. Plus there is a ton of work to now combine LLMs with their excellent language abilities to more formal systems based on rules, ontologies and (fuzzy) logic. LLMs showed that this type of networks can likely solve one aspect if intelligence, the ability to handle language, that previous approaches were all extremely bad at. Doesn't mean that this approach is good for all other aspects of intelligence, but it turns out it is not too bad at information retrieval as well and a few other things. And other kind of networks also showed excellent abilities in other aspects like vision.

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#18

Post by circuit10 »

crabbone wrote: post #9
visarga wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe his perspective on AI is colored by the fact that he's not going to get to see it fully developed so he has nothing to gain.

I doubt that. As someone who was enthusiastic about AI before neural networks rose to prominence, I only shake my head when I hear people ascribe all sorts of properties of intelligence to the particular trend in AI that is in vogue today. The ultimate quest of AI was to understand how to make good decisions. The idea was that maybe if we emulate human activity that humans call "intelligence", but remove all the rand…

We don’t fully understand how human intelligence works, yet that doesn’t mean we aren’t intelligent

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#19

Post by sph »

visarga wrote: post #5
haolez wrote: post #2

I don't agree with his take on LLMs. There is something about them that feels very similar to the way my own brain works. Like, for example, when I perceive a smell that, somehow, activates a very old and almost forgotten visual memory. Sometimes, when talking to a LLM, it feels like one or two words in my prompt is having a similar effect on it.

Maybe his perspective on AI is colored by the fact that he's not going to get to see it fully developed so he has nothing to gain.

You got it the wrong way round. The perspective of people that stand to gain from AI is colored, rather than the one on the sidelines being biased.
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