At https://www.categoricaldata.net we claim that symbolic AI is also generative, when eg used in data warehousing. Instead of eg new images, the generatively gives you new primary and foreign keys, new ontologies, contradiction detection, etc.
Ask HN: What is the current state of "logical" AI?
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Re: Ask HN: What is the current state of "logical" AI?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't animals trained to do all of those things through evolution? Similarly how GPT is trained. Also how do you prove that GPT is worse at counting? Because GPT can currently count both apples and oranges.
> Aren't animals trained to do all of those things through evolution? Similarly how GPT is trained. No. Animals evolved and are able to do those things. Evolution is not training, and evolution has approximately zero to do with how transformers work.
What's the difference here?
Both seem to have adaptive neural networks where those networks change as time goes on due to a reward - for animals, mutated genes being more likely to be given forward if the change was good. Over millions of generations it's statistically likely that more good genes that caused the neural networks to be in a state that is better able to solve problems within the environment get passed on, eventually resulting in an emerging intelligence. For training you similarly change the state of the neural network depending on whether the answer is good or bad.
Re: Ask HN: What is the current state of "logical" AI?
#23At https://www.categoricaldata.net we claim that symbolic AI is also generative, when eg used in data warehousing. Instead of eg new images, the generatively gives you new primary and foreign keys, new ontologies, contradiction detection, etc.
Is there a conceptual difference between the categorical database and hypergraph database?
Re: Ask HN: What is the current state of "logical" AI?
#24At https://www.categoricaldata.net we claim that symbolic AI is also generative, when eg used in data warehousing. Instead of eg new images, the generatively gives you new primary and foreign keys, new ontologies, contradiction detection, etc.
Is there a conceptual difference between the categorical database and hypergraph database?
Yes; categories extend traditional graphs with systems of equations. Hypergraphs extend traditional graphs by allowing edges to be between multiple nodes. Most operations on categories are formally undecidable because of the systems of equations; most operations on graphs/hypergraphs are decidable. This makes working with categorical databases a lot like doing computer algebra in e.g. Mathematica and provides a huge increase in expressive power (you can e.g. encode Turing machines with equations.)
Re: Ask HN: What is the current state of "logical" AI?
#25AI is not even close to having true logical reasoning, that's probably decades away. The issue is that cognitive scientists are clueless. Scientists have a good model for associative reasoning , which is the basis of modern neural networks, but we don't have a clue how abstract reasoning actually works. All birds and mammals have advanced abstract reasoning and are far more intelligent than GPT-4: - birds and mammals…
Evidently pigeons can count to 9. When I asked ChatGPT-4 to identify the irrational statements in this comment, it said there were 9, and I'm pretty sure pigeons can't tell if something is irrational or not.
Re: Ask HN: What is the current state of "logical" AI?
#26AI is not even close to having true logical reasoning, that's probably decades away. The issue is that cognitive scientists are clueless. Scientists have a good model for associative reasoning , which is the basis of modern neural networks, but we don't have a clue how abstract reasoning actually works. All birds and mammals have advanced abstract reasoning and are far more intelligent than GPT-4: - birds and mammals…
As a current researcher in the field I am perpetually annoyed by the overeagerness of AI research to make fantastical claims. Reading and extracting information from papers is a minefield, and we've learned to always at least A/B test the conclusions of any technique that is supposedly proven to be useful. Even foundational papers about basic concepts in LLMs, for example, can sometimes boil down to "this worked well on our cherrypicked tests"
Re: Ask HN: What is the current state of "logical" AI?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Aren't animals trained to do all of those things through evolution? Similarly how GPT is trained. No. Animals evolved and are able to do those things. Evolution is not training, and evolution has approximately zero to do with how transformers work.
What's the difference here? Both seem to have adaptive neural networks where those networks change as time goes on due to a reward - for animals, mutated genes being more likely to be given forward if the change was good. Over millions of generations it's statistically likely that more good genes that caused the neural networks to be in a state that is better able to solve problems within the environment get passed o…
Evolution operates on genes, which do not encode synaptic connections for one thing. The analogy you're making here is so stretched it's hard to begin to say what's wrong with it. Backpropagation and natural selection are about as different as two things can be. About the only thing you can say they have in common is that both can be modeled as optimization processes.
What's the difference between a star and a bonfire? Both use fuel and produce heat and light.
Re: Ask HN: What is the current state of "logical" AI?
#28AI is not even close to having true logical reasoning, that's probably decades away. The issue is that cognitive scientists are clueless. Scientists have a good model for associative reasoning , which is the basis of modern neural networks, but we don't have a clue how abstract reasoning actually works. All birds and mammals have advanced abstract reasoning and are far more intelligent than GPT-4: - birds and mammals…
Yeah, the "logical reasoning" in LLMs is mostly a marketing device to get products sold and papers published. One could hope that starting with reasoning instead of trying to get it "emerge" would do a better job. But if we have little idea of how abstract thinking actually works, this is a problem. What do you think about current logic-based AI approaches? Do they try to replicate the best ideas we've got from congn…
There's a distinction between "constrain the AI's output with logical rules to make it more reliable" and "build logical reasoning into the AI." The current strategies are trying to do the first task and I bet it'll lead to all sorts of cool technology. I strongly doubt these techniques will extend to the actual logical reasoning. Intuitively, it feels like throwing a bunch of logical rules onto AI is begging the question - I doubt bird/mammal brains actually have these logical rules baked in, I am sure it's far more sophisticated.
A trivial theorem in logic gives an example of what I mean:
If A then B If (not B) then (not A)
This is really not how humans think - I don't believe we have a "contrapositive calculator" in our brain that takes arbitrary situations in and computes a contrapositive. This contrapositive theorem is a fact of the world that humans used logical thinking to understand, and which can be applied to formal logical computations that human brains aren't necessarily good at.
Specifically, I don't think non-human animals have "logical" thinking at all, they have causal thinking, and human logic is a consequence of us having exceptionally good understanding of causality. Logic is itself a special case of causality, formalized in a "generic" fashion by human language and used as a tool to help us think through tricky cases.
The contrapositive theorem takes a bit of thought for me to unwind - "so if B is not true then of course A can't be true" - but the way contrapositives are reflected in the real world takes no thought whatsoever, even if the examples are more algebraically complicated than A->B (~B)->(~A):
- if the door is working and I have a key that can unlock the door, then if I can't unlock the door either I don't have the key or the door is broken. (AvB)->C (~C)->(~A ^ ~B)
- if having gas implies my car can drive, then if my car can't drive I don't have gas - or possibly I was incorrect and my car is broken. (A->B (~B)->(~A)) V (~)(A->B)
These cases are obvious to us because the brain has access to much fancier causal reasoning than what we can currently express in human language. For now, human language is stuck with "If a then not b" stuff. I don't think feeding this limited human language into a computer is going to burst past these limits. We need to figure out how bird/mammal brains actually model things causally.
Re: Ask HN: What is the current state of "logical" AI?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Aren't animals trained to do all of those things through evolution? Similarly how GPT is trained. No. Animals evolved and are able to do those things. Evolution is not training, and evolution has approximately zero to do with how transformers work.
What's the difference here? Both seem to have adaptive neural networks where those networks change as time goes on due to a reward - for animals, mutated genes being more likely to be given forward if the change was good. Over millions of generations it's statistically likely that more good genes that caused the neural networks to be in a state that is better able to solve problems within the environment get passed o…
The bigest difference is that training does not change the size or architecture of an artificial neural network, but biological evolution dramatically changes the size and architecture of animals' brains.
Your comparison is sincerely vacuous. It vaguely makes sense if you're talking about GPT-3 to GPT-4 (though I don't think it's helpful). It makes no sense if you're talking about training a single neural network.
Re: Ask HN: What is the current state of "logical" AI?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the difference here? Both seem to have adaptive neural networks where those networks change as time goes on due to a reward - for animals, mutated genes being more likely to be given forward if the change was good. Over millions of generations it's statistically likely that more good genes that caused the neural networks to be in a state that is better able to solve problems within the environment get passed o…
Evolution operates on genes, which do not encode synaptic connections for one thing. The analogy you're making here is so stretched it's hard to begin to say what's wrong with it. Backpropagation and natural selection are about as different as two things can be. About the only thing you can say they have in common is that both can be modeled as optimization processes. What's the difference between a star and a bonfir…
I mean the point was about LLMs not truly being problem solvers because they were trained to do so as opposed to having been evolved through evolution. I'm looking for what the difference is specifically within that dimension. Biological pigeons had their own process of evolution how they reached to have the type of neural networks and systems in themselves that gave them the ability to count - but not in all contexts for sure.
So yes, my point is that both have an optimisation process that through time lend them those emerging capabilities.