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Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

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Re: Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

#91

Post by throw310822 »

inference-lord wrote: post #90
throw310822 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If for you the definition of "understanding" is "something that only humans can do" then your statement about AI is totally pointless: of course AI doesn't "understand", but at the same time it might do something that is perfectly equivalent and that "only machines can do".

I guess you understand wolves, do you think this video demonstrates understanding of how wolves work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jspYKxFY7Sc

Certainly. It demonstrates it knows how they look, how they move, what type of behaviour they show at a certain age, in what kind of environment you might see them. What it doesn't seem to have is enough persistence to remember how many there are. But the idea of an animate, acting wolf is there, no doubt about it.

Re: Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

#92

Post by gdubs »

I quote Zen Mind Beginner's Mind a lot: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

It's like, the smarter someone gets, the more it trips them up when it comes to questions like the one Yann is trying to address. Because, "world modeling" doesn't have to mean that the system understands advanced physics and calculus. Look at our own brains – only analogies, I'm aware – and think about how much a child can infer about what will happen when you throw a ball at them.

Are they 'calculating' trajectories? Not consciously. That would be too slow, regardless. Their brains have become wired through experience and evolution. Formally explaining why the ball will do what it does? Well, that takes years of math and physics education.

Bottom line: in the months and years after a model comes out, research tends to uncover all sorts of things happening inside them that are unexpected. Best thing is to approach it with a beginner's mind, and say, "hey, it's doing _something_ interesting – let's try and understand what that is," rather than just forcing everything to conform to our existing worldview.

Re: Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

#93

Post by Jensson »

throw310822 wrote: post #86
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something that is perfectly equivalent So go ahead and define it, in concrete terms, external to humans. It can't be equivalent unless there is a definite basis for equivalence. Cat videos don't cut it. My point is that understanding, as we know it, only exists in the human mind. If you want to define something that is functionally equivalent but implemented in a machine, that is absolutely fine, but don't point to…

Nope, sorry. You said you have no idea of what understanding is, except that by definition it can only be done by humans. Fine. Then I posit the existence of understanding-2, which is exactly identical to understanding, whatever it is, except for the fact that it can only be done by machines. And now I ask you to prove to me that AI doesn't have understanding-2. This is just to show you the absurdity of trying to cla…

> Nope, sorry. You said you have no idea of what understanding is, except that by definition it can only be done by humans.

He said understanding is what humans do, not that only humans can do it. Stop arguing against a strawman.

Nobody would define understanding as something only humans can do. But it makes sense to define understanding based on what humans do, since that is our main example of an intelligence. If you want to make another definition of understanding then you need to prove that such a definition doesn't include a lot of behaviors that fails to solve problems human understanding can solve, because then it isn't really the same level of as human understanding.

Re: Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

#94

Post by Jensson »

throw310822 wrote: post #78
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has no "understanding" of a cat. It's an associative store with soft edges that pulls out compressed cat representations when given the noun "cat". The key store includes nouns, adverbs, verbs, and adjectives, and style abstractions, and there are mappings into the store that link all of those. But they're very limited, and if you prompt with a relationship that isn't defined you get best-guess, which will either…

> It's an associative store with soft edges that pulls out compressed cat representations when given the noun "cat". And how do you know that this is not what "understanding" is? To me, understanding the concept of a cat is exactly to immediately recall (or have ready) all the associations, the possibilities, the consequences of the "cat" concept. If you can make up correct sentences about cats and conduct a reasonab…

> If you can make up correct sentences about cats and conduct a reasonable conversation about cats, it means that you understand cats.

No, plenty of humans can have reasonable conversations about things with zero understanding about them. We know they don't understand because when put in a situation in practice they fail to use the things they talked about. Understanding means you can apply what you know, not only talk about it.

Re: Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

#95

Post by makomk »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #84

It's a shame that Yann didn't explicitly say what the misunderstanding was or clear it up. I think he's claiming that the misunderstanding is that SORA understands the physical world. He goes on to say that generating the next frame conditional on some action is much harder than generating an entire plausible video. This just doesn't make sense to me. Every frame in a plausible video clearly needs to be conditioned o…

As I understand it, diffusion-based video generation models simply are not casual in this way. They work by modifying the previous frames in the video to be consistent with future frames just as much as they do later frames to be consistent with earlier ones. That's why Yann LeCun can argue that they do not have to be able to generate plausible continuations of a real video, just generate some arbitrary sample from the space of plausible-looking videos, and that the latter does not imply the ability to do the former. It's also why it's not possible to just generate videos of arbitrary length and lots of VRAM is required to create even a relatively short clip.

Re: Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

#96

Post by throw310822 »

Jensson wrote: post #93
throw310822 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, sorry. You said you have no idea of what understanding is, except that by definition it can only be done by humans. Fine. Then I posit the existence of understanding-2, which is exactly identical to understanding, whatever it is, except for the fact that it can only be done by machines. And now I ask you to prove to me that AI doesn't have understanding-2. This is just to show you the absurdity of trying to cla…

> Nope, sorry. You said you have no idea of what understanding is, except that by definition it can only be done by humans. He said understanding is what humans do, not that only humans can do it. Stop arguing against a strawman. Nobody would define understanding as something only humans can do. But it makes sense to define understanding based on what humans do, since that is our main example of an intelligence. If y…

> He said understanding is what humans do, not that only humans can do it. Stop arguing against a strawman.

Ok, so his argument is:

> Humans understand, models are deterministic functions

> Until you have a concrete definition of what understanding is you can't apply it to anything else

> Informal definitions of understanding by those who experience it aren't very useful at all.

Basically he says: "I don't accept you using the term 'understanding' until you provide a formal definition of it, which none of us has. I don't need such definition when I talk about people, because... I assume that they understand".

Which means: given two agents, I decide that I can apply the word "understanding" only to the human one, for no other reason that it is human, and simply refuse to apply it to non-humans, just because.

Clearly there is absolutely nothing that can convince this person that an AI understands- precisely because it's a machine. Put in front of a computer terminal with a real person on the other side- but being told it's a machine- he would refuse to call "understanding" whatever the human on the other side does. Which makes the entire discussion rather pointless, don't you think?

Re: Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

#97

Post by gtirloni »

hackerlight wrote: post #70
gtirloni wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generative AI is already full of misunderstandings. From people claiming it "understands" to now that it "simulates". I'm no math wiz and my training in statistics is severely lacking but it feels like people need to review what they think it's possible with Generative AI because we are so far from understanding and AGI that my head hurts every time these words show up in a discussion.

Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio says it can understand and we are close to AGI. Maybe you can explain why they're wrong instead of just saying it.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I'm not the one making the claims.

Re: Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

#98

Post by Jensson »

inference-lord wrote: post #89
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something that is perfectly equivalent So go ahead and define it, in concrete terms, external to humans. It can't be equivalent unless there is a definite basis for equivalence. Cat videos don't cut it. My point is that understanding, as we know it, only exists in the human mind. If you want to define something that is functionally equivalent but implemented in a machine, that is absolutely fine, but don't point to…

...and measurable IMO :) We need a way to know how much something understands.

If we had that then education would be solved, but we still struggle to educate people and ensure fair testing that tests understanding instead of worthless things like effort or memorization.

Re: Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

#99

Post by fancyfredbot »

makomk wrote: post #95
fancyfredbot wrote: post #84

It's a shame that Yann didn't explicitly say what the misunderstanding was or clear it up. I think he's claiming that the misunderstanding is that SORA understands the physical world. He goes on to say that generating the next frame conditional on some action is much harder than generating an entire plausible video. This just doesn't make sense to me. Every frame in a plausible video clearly needs to be conditioned o…

As I understand it, diffusion-based video generation models simply are not casual in this way. They work by modifying the previous frames in the video to be consistent with future frames just as much as they do later frames to be consistent with earlier ones. That's why Yann LeCun can argue that they do not have to be able to generate plausible continuations of a real video, just generate some arbitrary sample from t…

Thank you. That would make sense. Perhaps Yann's target audience are supposed to know this already, but your explanation actually cleared up a misunderstanding for me.

Re: Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

#100

Post by badgersnake »

kibwen wrote: post #54
badgersnake wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given tweets are so short, just paste the whole tweet into the text. If it’s a whole thread though then just don’t bother. That approach to blogging is just dumb.

Microblogging is a failed experiment. What a detriment to humanity.

I agree with you in the sense that it isn’t a constructive form of communication in the sense that the short form prevents nuance and complexity which inevitably leads to conflict.

It made Trump president and gives Musk control of the media narrative though so it certainly works for some people.

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