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Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

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Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#161

Post by krisoft »

sounds wrote: post #108
causal wrote: post #2

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of educating students on the math behind AI to demystify them. But I think it's a little weird to assert "AI is not magic and AI systems do not think. It’s just maths." Equivalent statements could be made about how human brains are not magic, just biology - yet I think we still think.

A college level approach could look at the line between Math/Science/Physics and Philosophy. One thing from the article that stood out to me was that the introduction to their approach started with a problem about classifying a traffic light. Is it red or green? But the accompanying XY plot showed samples that overlapped or at least were ambiguous. I immediately lost a lot of my interest in their approach, because tr…

> traffic lights by design are very clearly red, or green

I suspect you feel this because you are observing the output of a very sophisticated image processing pipeline in your own head. When you are dealing with raw matrixes of rgb values it all becomes a lot more fuzzy. Especially when you encounter different illuminations, exposures and the cropping of the traffic light has noise on it. Not saying it is some intractably hard machine vision problem, because it is not. But there is some variety and fuzzyness there in the raw sensor measurements.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#162

Post by CamperBob2 »

ablob wrote: post #81
CamperBob2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where these threads always end up. Someone asserts, almost violently, that AI does not and/or cannot "think." When asked how to falsify their assertion, perhaps by explaining what exactly is unique about the human brain that cannot and/or will not be possible to emulate, that's the last anyone ever hears from them. At least until the next "AI can't think" story gets posted. The same arguments that appeared in…

Usually it is the work of the one claiming something to prove it. So if you believe that AI does "think" you are expected to show me that it really does. Claiming it "thinks - prove otherwise" is just bad form and also opens the discussion up for moving the goalposts just as you did with your brain emulation statement. Or you could just not accept any argument made or circumvent it by stating the one trying to dispro…

So if you believe that AI does "think" you are expected to show me that it really does.

A lot of people seemingly haven't updated their priors after some of the more interesting results published lately, such as the performance of Google's and OpenAI's models at the 2025 Math Olympiad. Would you say that includes yourself?

If so, what do the models still have to do in order to establish that they are capable of all major forms of reasoning, and under what conditions will you accept such proof?

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#163

Post by Wowfunhappy »

frozenlettuce wrote: post #142
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://xkcd.com/505/ You can replicate the entire universe with pen and paper (or a bunch of rocks). It would take an unimaginably long time, and we haven't discovered all the calculations you'd need to do yet, but presumably they exist and this could be done. Does that actually make a universe? I don't know! The comic is meant to be a joke, I think, but I find myself thinking about it all the time!!!

Even worse, as we are part of the universe, we would need to simulate ourselves and the very simulation that we are creating. You would also need to replicate the simulation of the simulation, leading to an eternal loop that would demand infinite matter and time (and would still not be enough!). Probably, you can't simulate something while being part of it.

It doesn’t need to be our universe, just a universe.

The question is, are the people in the simulated universe real people? Do they think and feel like we do—are they conscious? Either answer seems like it can’t possibly be right!

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#166

Post by IgorPartola »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #159
IgorPartola wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like these conversations really miss the mark: whether an LLM thinks or not is not a relevant question. It is a bit like asking “what color is an Xray?” or “what does the number 7 taste like?” The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. It is a building block. Your brain thinks. Your prefrontal cortex however is not a complete syste…

Why do people call is "Artificial Intelligence" when it could be called "Statistical Model for Choosing Data"? "Intelligence" implies "thinking" for most people, just as "Learning" in machine learning implies "understanding" for most people. The algorithms created neither 'think' nor 'understand' and until you understand that, it may be difficult to accurately judge the value of the results produced by these systems.

How do you feel about Business Intelligence as a term?

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#167

Post by sublinear »

terminalshort wrote: post #67
jvanderbot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking is undefined so all statements about it are unverifiable.

Statements like "it is bound by the laws of physics" are not "verifiable" by your definition, and yet we safely assume it is true of everything. Everything except the human brain, that is, for which wild speculation that it may be supernatural is seemingly considered rational discussion so long as it satisfies people's needs to believe that they are somehow special in the universe.

I think what many are saying is that of all the things we know best, it's going to be the machines we build and their underlying principles.

We don't fully understand how brains work, but we know brains don't function like a computer. Why would a computer be assumed to function like a brain in any way, even in part, without evidence and just hopes based on marketing? And I don't just mean consumer marketing, but marketing within academia as well. For example, names like "neural networks" have always been considered metaphorical at best.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#168

Post by t23414321 »

dang wrote: post #190

[stub for offtopicness] (in this case, thinkiness)

Wouldn't 'thinking' need to be updating the model of reality (LLM is not yet that, just words) - at every step doing again all that extensive calculations as when/to creating/approximating that/better model (learning) ?

Expecting machines to think is.. like magical thinking (but they are good at calculations indeed).

I wish we didn't use the word intelligence in context of LLMs - shortly there is Essence and the rest.. is only slope - into all possible combinations of Markov Chains - may they have sense or not I don't see how part of some calculation could recognize it, or that to be possible from inside (of calculation, that doesn't even consider that).

Aside of artificial knowledge (out of senses, experience, context lengths.. - confabulating but not knowing that), I wish to see an intelligent knowledge - made in kind of semantic way - allowed to expand using not yet obvious (but existing - not random) connections. I wouldn't expect it to think (humans think, digitals calculate). But I would expect it to have a tendency to be coming closer (not further) in reflecting/modeling reality and expanding implications.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#169

Post by james_marks »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #159
IgorPartola wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like these conversations really miss the mark: whether an LLM thinks or not is not a relevant question. It is a bit like asking “what color is an Xray?” or “what does the number 7 taste like?” The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. It is a building block. Your brain thinks. Your prefrontal cortex however is not a complete syste…

Why do people call is "Artificial Intelligence" when it could be called "Statistical Model for Choosing Data"? "Intelligence" implies "thinking" for most people, just as "Learning" in machine learning implies "understanding" for most people. The algorithms created neither 'think' nor 'understand' and until you understand that, it may be difficult to accurately judge the value of the results produced by these systems.

If we say “artificial flavoring”, we have a sense that it is an emulation of something real, and often a poor one.

Why, when we use the term for AI, do we skip over this distinction and expect it to be as good as the original—- or better?

That wouldn’t be artificial intelligence, it would just be the original artifact: “intelligence”.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#170

Post by Kim_Bruning »

Provocative title with a much more reasoned lede.

I'm pretty sure a set of workshops isn't ACTUALLY going to solve a problem that philosophers have been at each other's throats for for the past half century.

But BOY does it get people talking!

Both sides of the debate have capital-O Opinions, and how else did you want to drum up interest for a set of mathematics workshops. O:-)

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