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Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

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Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#241
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not within our capacity on HN to ignore whatever the marketers say and speak to the underlying technology?

Given the context of the article, why would you ignore that? It's important to discuss the underlying technology in the context in which it's being sold to the public at large.

they are discussing it?

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are indeed many people trying to justify this magical thinking by seeking something, anything in the brain that is out of the ordinary. They've been unsuccessful so far. Penrose comes to mind, he will die on the hill that the brain involves quantum computations somehow, to explain his dualist position of "the soul being the entity responsible for deciding how the quantum states within the brain collapse, hence…

You wouldn't even need quantum computer neurons. We can simulate quantum nature on normal circuits, albeit not very efficiently. But for the experiment this wouldn't matter. The only important thing would be that you can measure it, which in turn would allow you to replicate it in some non-human circuit. And if you fundamentally can't measure this aspect for some weird reason, you will once again reach the same concl…

You can simulate it, but you usually use PRNG to decide how your simulated wave function "collapses". So in the spirit of the original thought experiment, I felt it more adequate to replace the quantum part (if it even exists) by another actually quantum part. But indeed, using fake quantum shouldn't change a thing.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#243

It's unfortunate that there's so little (none in the article, just 1 comment here as of this writing) mention of the Turing Test. The whole premise of the paper that introduced that was that "do machines think" is such a hard question to define that you have to frame the question differently. And it's ironic that we seem to talk about the Turing Test less than ever now that systems almost everyone can access can argu…

>And it's ironic that we seem to talk about the Turing Test less than ever now that systems almost everyone can access can arguably pass it now.

Has everyone hastily agreed that it has been passed? Do people argue that a human can't figure out it's talking to an LLM if the user is aware that LLMs exist in the world and is aware of their limitations and that the chat log is able to extend to infinity ( "infinity" is a proxy here for any sufficient time, it could be minutes, days, months, or years)?

In fact, it is blindly easy for these systems to fail the Turing test at the moment. No human would have the patience to continue a conversation indefinitely without telling the person on the other side to kindly fuck off.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#244

It's unfortunate that there's so little (none in the article, just 1 comment here as of this writing) mention of the Turing Test. The whole premise of the paper that introduced that was that "do machines think" is such a hard question to define that you have to frame the question differently. And it's ironic that we seem to talk about the Turing Test less than ever now that systems almost everyone can access can argu…

> “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra The point of the Turing Test is that if there is no extrinsic difference between a human and a machine the intrinsic difference is moot for practical purposes. That is not an argument to whether a machine (with linear algebra, machine learning, large language models, or any o…

The Chinese Room is a pretty useless thought exercise I think. It's an example which if you believe machines can't think seems like an utterly obvious result, and if you believe machines can think it's just obviously wrong.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#245
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"LLMs cannot think like brains" does not imply "no computer it will ever be possible to construct could think like a brain".

“LLMs cannot think like brains” is “X”.

That appears to be your own assumptions coming into play.

Everything I've seen says "LLMs cannot think like brains" is not dependent on an argument that "no computer can think like a brain", but rather on an understanding of just what LLMs are—and what they are not.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#246
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human brains and experiences seem to be constrained by the laws of quantum physics, which can be simulated to arbitrary fidelity on a computer. Nit sure where Godel’s incompleteness theory would even come in here…

how are we going to deduce/measure/know the initialization and rules for consciousness? do you see any systems as not encodable/simulatable by quantum?

I think you are asking whether consciousness might be a fundamentally different “thing” from physics and thus hard or impossible to simulate.

I think there is abundant evidence that the answer is ‘no’. The main reason is that consciousness doesn’t give you new physics, it follows the same rules and restrictions. It seems to be “part of” the standard natural universe, not something distinct.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#247

It's unfortunate that there's so little (none in the article, just 1 comment here as of this writing) mention of the Turing Test. The whole premise of the paper that introduced that was that "do machines think" is such a hard question to define that you have to frame the question differently. And it's ironic that we seem to talk about the Turing Test less than ever now that systems almost everyone can access can argu…

> “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra The point of the Turing Test is that if there is no extrinsic difference between a human and a machine the intrinsic difference is moot for practical purposes. That is not an argument to whether a machine (with linear algebra, machine learning, large language models, or any o…

I kind of agree but I think the point is what people mean by words is vague, so he said:

>Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

which is can you tell the AI answers from the humans ones in a test. It then becomes an experimental result rather than what you mean by 'think' or maybe by 'extrinsic difference'.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra The point of the Turing Test is that if there is no extrinsic difference between a human and a machine the intrinsic difference is moot for practical purposes. That is not an argument to whether a machine (with linear algebra, machine learning, large language models, or any o…

The Chinese Room is a pretty useless thought exercise I think. It's an example which if you believe machines can't think seems like an utterly obvious result, and if you believe machines can think it's just obviously wrong.

People used to take it surprisingly seriously. Now it's hard to make the argument that machines can't understand say Chinese when you can give a Chinese document to a machine and ask it questions about it and get pretty good answers.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#249

It's unfortunate that there's so little (none in the article, just 1 comment here as of this writing) mention of the Turing Test. The whole premise of the paper that introduced that was that "do machines think" is such a hard question to define that you have to frame the question differently. And it's ironic that we seem to talk about the Turing Test less than ever now that systems almost everyone can access can argu…

>And it's ironic that we seem to talk about the Turing Test less than ever now that systems almost everyone can access can arguably pass it now. Has everyone hastily agreed that it has been passed? Do people argue that a human can't figure out it's talking to an LLM if the user is aware that LLMs exist in the world and is aware of their limitations and that the chat log is able to extend to infinity ( "infinity" is a…

No, they haven't agreed because there was never a practical definition of the test. Turing had a game:

>It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B.

>We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?

(some bits removed)

It was done more as thought experiment. As a practical test it would probably be too easy to fake with ELIZA type programs to be a good test. So computers could probably pass but it's not really hard enough for most people's idea of AI.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#250

I wish I would've learned about ANNs in elementary school. It looks like a worthwhile and cool lesson package, if only they'd do away with the idiotic dogma...

People slag off kids using LLMs but they have the advantage that you can ask them about cutting edge stuff and get good answers. Elementary school teachers on the other hand probably generally aren't that up on machine learning.
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