61–70 of 96 posts
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I see no difference today between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War and the recent news from the middle east, ukraine, and even, korea. We fight to establish hierarchies of dominance called, "monopolies of violence", that we have social allegiance to. If a competing "dominance regime" is in our neighbourhood, we draw territorial boundaries -- and if these fail, riot, and if that fails, kill. The stra…
Yes, my recent comment history contains the explanation for why we have the potential for all of that but also to be true humanitarians. The short of it is that we can choose to learn how to be better by actually changing ourself, and then being a positive force in the world. It is the Way, but we must choose it, after first seeking to escape our natural ignorance to the possibility.
“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer
I can't believe this article is being published in Nature. The article is flawed, plagued with assumptions that I guess the author doesn't even notice (like what do we really mean by AGI, the epistemological problems/assumptions to intelligence, the real nature of thinking, the real functioning of the human brain). It is really curious that the philosophical community is addressing the debate on what AI really is and…
This is not a scientific paper that was published in nature by researchers, it is a news editorial written by an editor/journalist. Don't get fooled by the domain.
I have yet to speak to any actual expert who believes we will see any of the "I" in "AI" anytime soon, if ever.
You must be using a peculiar definition of expert because even generally conservative AI experts like LeCun now expect we could have human-level intelligence within 5 to 10 years.
General intelligence is an ability to cope, adapt and thrive in an ecology: to start from a limited set of capabilities, and via exploration, acquire a rich competence. To develop conceptualisations, techniques of coordination and control, to form novel goals and strategies to realise them, and so on. General intelligence is a strategy to defer the acquisition of abilities from the process of construction/blueprintin…
Maybe that would be a suitable working definition of general intelligence, and props to you for even giving a definition at all (in contrast to TFA). However your definition seems almost tailor-made to exclude present and near-future AI (and, I suspect, motivated thereby) . Current AI works by being trained on large amounts of existing data. If current AI would be real intelligence, we would be sad, therefore real in…
I think you can get to the core of it by considering the evolutionary benefit of intelligence - what beneficial behavioral capability has been optimized - which comes down to being able to utilize past experience to predict/plan future outcomes, rather than being locked into reactive behavior patterns like simpler animals.
LLMs, trained to predict based on past "experience", might (perhaps charitably) be considered to exhibit some intelligence, but where they notably fail is in situations where better prediction (utilization of prior experience) requires a process more similar to search with backtracking than a linear application of rules derived from the training data - i.e. in the areas of reasoning and planning.
You can try to put lipstick on the pig by adding RL-based post-training or wrapping the LLM in an agentic loop, trying to extract more value out of the training data and gain some semblance of reasoning, but at the end of the day it's still a pig - at heart just an expert system not a cognitive architecture.
Another obvious limitation of LLMs is that they are just a repository of canned knowledge/rules, with no ability to learn from "runtime" experience, and therefore lacking the ability to learn to handle novel problems by experimentation and adaptation to failure.
The limited intelligence of LLMs is firmly baked into their architecture - the transformer, being just as pass-thru model, as well as the way they are trained by SGD rather than an algorithm capable of continuous incremental learning.
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What redefinition? SVMs were part of AI and they're far simpler. The field of AI has covered basic algorithms for decades before LLMs.
Not really - machine learning, whether SVMs or ANNs, was called just that until relatively recently when the popular press started to first call ANNs AI, then LLMs. At first there was pushback from ML researchers, but particularly with LLMs they are now embracing it since investors want to invest in "AI". LLMs are really just fancy (deep) pattern recognizers/predictors, conceptually not so different than rule-based e…
That is absolutely not the case. These things have been in the field of AI for decades. Frighteningly it's nearing two decades since I started my degree in AI and it wasn't a new reference then.
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I've been annoyed by the redefinition of artificial intelligence since the LLM boom started. The term AI has no place being used to describe LLMs as far as I can tell, unless what goes on inside the black box of an LLM is drastically different than how they are described to function. Predicting the next token based on a compressed dataset of human generated content isn't intelligence in any meaningful definition of t…
> I've been annoyed by the redefinition of artificial intelligence since the LLM boom started If there's any redefinition, it's being pushed further out. AI was previously used to describe far simpler systems, like expert systems and Deep Blue's alpha–beta search. > Predicting the next token based on a compressed dataset of human generated content isn't intelligence in any meaningful definition of the word I'd claim…
1. What is knowledge?
2. How can knowledge be encoded in a machine?
LLMs say that knowledge is encoded in the relationships between words (and, in fact, has been by the corpus of human writing), and that's enough. Expert systems said that knowledge could be encoded in carefully-written rules, and that's enough.
I'm pretty sure that any actually intelligent[1] computer is going to have to have more than one flavor of knowledge representation, and be able to shift between them as the situation warrants.
[1] Whatever "actually intelligent" may mean. I don't have to know what it is, though, to recognize that what we have so far is inadequate.
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Yes, my recent comment history contains the explanation for why we have the potential for all of that but also to be true humanitarians. The short of it is that we can choose to learn how to be better by actually changing ourself, and then being a positive force in the world. It is the Way, but we must choose it, after first seeking to escape our natural ignorance to the possibility.
You're getting lost in the 'free-will' aspect and thinking you could 'choose' to be good. “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer
The fact is that you chose to write what you wrote, for good or ill. I spent all day yesterday explaining the truth of our moral existence to y'all here, conversing with a very fine fellow who has a bit of knowledge. It brought me a joy that no one else on this site has ever felt. It was electric, sans drugs of any kind, and only a couple of sips of coffee all day, which is very rare for me.
No, there's a force within you that will work its damnedest to get you to quit reading it before you get to the bottom. It starts in that post about Maria Konnakova's poetry article, but that's not the important part, or even my grand-reply (reply to my initial reply). Most people don't have the intellectual curiosity and bravery to read such utterly new information, but if you can read drivel from AS, you can make through one (rather long) page of mine.
I triple-dog dare ya ;-)
And remember, ignorance of the truth is a human vice that we must fight and defeat, in order to choose the better path, the Path of Love. Giving in to ignorance is a choice between good and evil, my friend. I hope you choose well, but you'll likely choose to rebel against the truth, and instead keep believing the lies that have been told to you, which is our body's monkey-inheritance.
Happy choosing! I truly wish you all success and happiness in this world, but that latter one is dependent upon our learning and manifesting the truth, my friend.
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I would say that consciousness is a necessary requirement in order to have moral compass. But I would not equate the two.
True, but our consciousness comes with an integral moral compass that we are completely free to utterly ignore or even act in opposition to. It's our gift and our responsibility, and our absolute choice, for good or ill.
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You're getting lost in the 'free-will' aspect and thinking you could 'choose' to be good. “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer
That sentence literally makes no sense, obviously coming from the spoiled mind of a coddled rich kid. The fact is that you chose to write what you wrote, for good or ill. I spent all day yesterday explaining the truth of our moral existence to y'all here, conversing with a very fine fellow who has a bit of knowledge. It brought me a joy that no one else on this site has ever felt. It was electric, sans drugs of any k…
I am a scientist. Truth has a specific meaning to me. I’m not sure we share the same definition. That does not make either of us “evil.”