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Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

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Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#271

Post by IshKebab »

slibhb wrote: post #220
xigency wrote: post #56

Regarding dismissals of LLM’s on ‘technical’ grounds: Consciousness is first a word and second a concept. And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better than billions of humans worldwide. The software folks have made even more progress than sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists to be able to create an artificial language cortex before we understand our biological mind comprehens…

With a simple computer, speaker, and accelerometer, you can build a device that says "ouch" when you drop it. Does it feel pain? My point is that there are good reasons to believe that a hypothetical LLM that can pass a Turing test is a philosophical zombie, i.e. it can mimic human behavior but doesn't have an internal life, feelings, emotions, and isn't conscious. Whether that distinction is important is another que…

> Does it feel pain?

In a sense, yes! But to understand that you will first have to precisely define "pain". Good luck.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#272

Post by intended »

xigency wrote: post #164
drew-y wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with the sentiment. I find the constant debates on "is AI conscious" or "can AI understand" exhausting. You can't have a sound argument when neither party even agrees on a concrete definition of consciousness or understanding. Regarding this line: > ChatGPT can already tell you a lot about itself (showing awareness) and will gladly walk you through its “thinking” if you ask politely. Is it actually walk…

> Is it actually walking you through its thinking? Or is it walking you through an imagined line of thinking? You can prompt an LLM model to provide reasoning first and an answer second and it becomes one and the same. Worth keeping in mind that all of these points are orthogonal to the quality of reasoning, the bias, or the intentions of the system builders. And building something that emulates humans convincingly,…

why does performance improve after chain of thought prompting?

Because a human is measuring it unfairly.

The output without CoT is valid. It is syntactically valid. The observer is unhappy with the semantic validity, because the observer has seen syntactic validity and assumed that semantic validity is a given.

Like it would if the model was alive.

This is observer error, not model error.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#273

Post by lotsofcows »

hammock wrote: post #224
dools wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We taught both our kids to sign. My favourite moment was in March, my daughter was about to turn 2 and wasn't speaking yet. I asked her if she would like to hear some music. She made the sign for dog. I searched youtube for some songs about dogs and she shook her head. She made the sign for tree. I was like "dog, tree", she nodded. Hmmm... I was searching for "dog tree music" when one of the pictures that came up was…

This must have been what it was like when the settlers were trying to communicate with native Americans at first

The settlers were greeted by English speaking native Americans who had been working the shipping trade.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#274

Post by IshKebab »

xianshou wrote: post #33

Pour one out for the decline of human exceptionalism! Once you get material-reductionist enough and accept yourself as a pure function of genetics, environment, past experience, and chance, this conclusion becomes inevitable. I also expect it to be the standard within a decade, with AI-human parity of capabilities as the key driver.

The conclusion of the article is that the toddler is not a stochastic parrot. But only because it has a life in the real world. I think she's trying to say that the toddler is more than a stochastic parrot because of real life experiences.

But then I have no idea how she goes on to conclude:

> Human obsolescence is not here and never can be.

There's no fundamental reason why you can't put ChatGPT in the real world and give it a real life. The only things that probably will never be replaced by machines are things where our physical technology is likely never going to match biology - i.e. sex.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#275

Post by intended »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #39

Nice article, great presentation. However, it's a bit annoying that the focus of the AI anxiety is how AI is replacing us and the resolution is that we embrace our humanity. Fair enough, but at least to me the main focus in my AI anxiety is that it will take my job - honestly don't really care about it doing my shitty art.

I dont think that was the point of the article.

I think it was clear about how language is not thought.

That leads to the intrinsic realization that our physical existence, our observance of reality is what is critical.

Also, AI taking jobs at scale is unlikely, the only place its going to do anything is low level spam and content generation.

For anything which has to be factual, its going to need humans.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#276

Post by TeMPOraL »

mecsred wrote: post #123
martindbp wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh... Everyone knows artificial neurons are not like biological neurons. The network is the important part, which really is analogous to the brain, while what came before (SVMs and random forests) are nothing like it.

Sigh... Every man knows the mechanisms of the mind are yet unlike the cogs and pinions of clockwork. It remains the machinery, the relation of spring and escapement, that is most relevant. Hitherto in human history, I think, such structure has not been described.

If you build a neural network out of cogs and pinions, sure.

Comparing the brain to most complex machines in history wasn't a mistake, any more than refining laws of physics were. Successive approximations.

And we're no longer at the point where we're just comparing brain to most complex machines. We have information theory now. We figured out computation, in form independent of physical medium used. So we're really trying to determine the computational model behind the brain, and one of the ways to do it is to implement some computational models in whatever is most convenient (usually software running on silicon), and see if it's similar. Slowly but surely, we're mapping and matching computational aspects of the brain. LLMs are just one recent case where we got a spectacularly good match.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#277

Post by persnickety »

intended wrote: post #269
persnickety wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument got long in the tooth, but suffice to say that you can analyze a human in exactly the same way, breaking one down to the basic physics and chemistry (and what does "artificial" mean, anyway?). Then there's the concept of panpsychism.

I would very strongly urge people to actually work and build tools with LLMs. Its readily apparent after a point that the previous poster is correct, and that these are simply tools. They are impressive tools yes. But life they are not. At best, they are mimics.

I can't help but notice that you backed up your assertions with nothing objective at all.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#278

Post by omoide »

mempko wrote: post #204

LLMs are like human minds the same way airplanes are like birds. Both birds and airplanes can fly, but very differently. Birds can land on a dime, airplanes can't. Airplanes can carry a lot more weight and go faster. Similarly LLMs can do things humans can't. No human has as much knowledge about the world as a typical LLM model. However, an LLM model can't generalize outside it's training set well (recent Deep Mind r…

> We are building airplanes, not birds. That much is obvious.

It does to me as well, but reading the comments here, it doesn't seem that obvious to many people.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#279

Post by kqr »

hammock wrote: post #224
dools wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We taught both our kids to sign. My favourite moment was in March, my daughter was about to turn 2 and wasn't speaking yet. I asked her if she would like to hear some music. She made the sign for dog. I searched youtube for some songs about dogs and she shook her head. She made the sign for tree. I was like "dog, tree", she nodded. Hmmm... I was searching for "dog tree music" when one of the pictures that came up was…

This must have been what it was like when the settlers were trying to communicate with native Americans at first

The crazy thing about this happening with toddlers (at least in my experience) is that you're not really sure how complex their desires are until they manage to communicate them.

Settlers interacting with natives knew full well how complex their desires were – they lived side-by-side, traded, socialised, and learned from each other.[1] Any suggestion of a primitive native is self-comforting propaganda from the industrial complex that comes after the settlers.

[1]: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy; Usner; Omohundro Institute; 2014.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#280

Post by tsukurimashou »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #46
Mattasher wrote: post #8

Humans have a long history of comparing ourselves, and the universe, to our latest technological advancement. We used to be glorified clocks (as was the universe), then we were automatons, then computers, then NPC's, and now AI's (in particular LLM's). Which BTW I don't think is a completely absurd comparison, see https://mattasher.substack.com/p/ais-killer-app

Except LLM's are built on neural networks. That are based on how neurons work. The first tech that actually copies aspects of us.

I wish this myth would die
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