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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#211

Post by dwattttt »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #206
TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. No matter how much investors and tech companies want you to believe that they are on the verge of super intelligence, nothing I've seen to date can…

> The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesti…

> I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesting things than a lot of humans.

So does the Google search bar, but I don't ascribe intelligence to it.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#212

Post by rcxdude »

prophesi wrote: post #195
pyridines wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.

I'm guessing whether you believe it possesses intelligence or not depends on your answer to Searle's Chinese room thought experiment[0]. I'd also recommend checking out the Peter Watts' book, Blindsight. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

The Chinese room is a good Rorschach test for this kind of thing (but not a good thought experiment, IMO, because it's obviously correct or obviously wrong depending on where you're already coming from), but also it's not really about intelligence per se, but more abstractly awareness and more adjacent to consciousness than intelligence, and these are not the same thing (though it does seem like a lot of people have conflated them somehow, from the conversations around AI).

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#213

Post by FartyMcFarter »

dwattttt wrote: post #211
Quarrelsome wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesti…

> I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesting things than a lot of humans. So does the Google search bar, but I don't ascribe intelligence to it.

The Google search bar is not capable of generating original text though. LLMs definitely are - you can get pretty creative output easily.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#214

Post by thfuran »

tshaddox wrote: post #188
wongarsu wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We couldn't agree on what intelligence means before ChatGPT happened. Now, agreement on the term seems even further away If performing well on an IQ test or performing at a high level on knowledge work is intelligence to you, these models are intelligent. If intelligence requires sentience for you, then ... well, I don't think we really agree what that is either, never mind how to measure it. But LLMs certainly don't…

I don't think "intelligence" needs to carry all the intrigue and woo of related words like "consciousness" or "creative." If we just use "intelligence" to mean "the ability of a system to solve problems that are new to the system," that pretty much matches the dictionary definition and normal usage of the term. We don't need to touch messy questions like "is there something it's like to be a bat" to conclude that bat…

I'm not exactly that you mean by "new to the system", but it seems to me that that definition makes a calculator intelligent, which I can't agree with.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#215

Post by rcxdude »

fluoridation wrote: post #194
teekert wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they mean that intelligence is being able to hold models (compressed versions of reality) internally and use them to make predictions with a probability better than chance. That last part is the definition of information.

I find that highly questionable as a general description of what intelligence does. That's more like a description of a general knowledge base. When I think of someone intelligent, I think of someone who's able to draw unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated facts. In the broadest possible terms, I'd call it the ability to make abstractions and analogies. This is not just compression, but the ability to me…

Doing those things also contributes to compression. I do recommend reading up on it, it's perhaps a little overstated for what people intuitively consider the two concepts but it's been quite well explored and has held up pretty well in practice.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#216

Post by Quarrelsome »

dwattttt wrote: post #211
Quarrelsome wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesti…

> I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesting things than a lot of humans. So does the Google search bar, but I don't ascribe intelligence to it.

I mean I'm quite proud of some of my search queries in the same way I'm quite proud of some of the LLM output I get. I'm probably just very arrogant and enjoying myself via some LLM indirection.

Am I the only one that sometimes reads back particularly good emails they've written? I feel like its a similar thing :).

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#217

Post by resonious »

TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #59
causal wrote: post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. No matter how much investors and tech companies want you to believe that they are on the verge of super intelligence, nothing I've seen to date can…

Why is being statistics/algorithms wrong? What's wrong with that? The "A" means artificial so none of this seems surprising or weird or bad.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#218

Post by pessimizer »

causal wrote: post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

This is just a weird feeling that I've been coming closer to articulating lately, but I only think that you can get forward reasoning from what is basically word association; there's no mechanism for unwinding it because it has no real memory. By "it" I mean word association itself, not any context window. It predicts what could be in a position, and ignores what wasn't in a position.

People don't do that. People are constantly engaging with paths not chosen. Right after I choose to write one thing, I'm immediately engaging with what I chose not to write there - I'm explaining why I didn't write it, I'm realizing that my choice may seem unusual so I'm trying to make it memorable, I'm focusing on the distinctions between what I wrote and what I didn't.

LLMs don't currently do that. LLMs just ape a structure. When the structure resembles the sort of timid, clarifying fussing I just described, the LLMs just drift randomly because what they didn't say wasn't in the context.

I also think that's why they have such a serious problem backtracking. They're not taking into account the already eliminated possibilities. Often the thing that was so unlikely that you weren't going to waste time on it is the answer, and things you discover while going down an ultimately wrong (but initially far more promising) path remind you of the path not taken.

They're simply assembling a thing that resembles a valid argument, and happen to make sound choices because the plurality of input happened to contain sound choices. This is usually a very good bet because there are so many more ways to be wrong than to be right. But it doesn't account for attractive (common) wrong choices. You need a way to back out of those.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#219

Post by DoctorOetker »

TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #59
causal wrote: post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. No matter how much investors and tech companies want you to believe that they are on the verge of super intelligence, nothing I've seen to date can…

> ... including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection.

But that is precisely what human mathematicians do, prove new theorems by combining ones proven earlier.

I don't see any fundamental difference in functionality between human intellectual contributions vs performant ML ones (LLM or otherwise).

Whenever we listen or read text we are also predicting the near future content.

Just like LLM's we sometimes correctly predict the next token or word, and sometimes incorrectly.

> The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model [...]

Imagine someone could pause the universe with a remote control, scroll back in time a little, press play again, and ask a slightly different question, etc.

In such a thought experiment one could also collect the probabilities for a specific human predicting a next word. Implicitly the brain also has a corresponding statistical model, regardless of the construction being visible or hidden. I.e. human intelligence is also fundamentally a statistical model, so the only thing that remains from your claim is that machines for some unmentioned reason don't possess any "real" intelligence or critical thought...

Is it possible that our aversion is simply driven by educational systems collectively and deeply ingraining into populations the idea that intelligence deserves the high costs commanded. Well of course this justifies higher wages towards the higher leadership positions, etc. Now it turns out that intelligence can be dirt cheap. We discover that the fact that "intelligence must be costly so don't question the costs of leadership" was never fundamentally true, so the real anger is this discovery of mismatch between the old claims which served to explain how every society that claimed to order itself and fill positions accordingly with "naturally pre-ordained individuals". Now we are seeing robots exceed average workers, for effectively a grain of rice.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#220

Post by rcxdude »

tyromaniac wrote: post #170
rnd33 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence is compression, compression requires subtraction, and for some reason LLMs are not good at subtracting. To create a coherent model you kinda have to subtract correlations until only the essential parts are still there. What I don't understand is why LLMs haven't been able to do this yet, if it's the harness or some orchestration layer above the LLM that is needed. Because fundamentally if you can identif…

I've heard that expression before, but I don't think it can be presented and stated so matter of factly. Where does that put bzip?

bzip is not very intelligent, true, but it does develop some model of its input. It's not like there's a linear relationship between between compression ratio and IQ or anything.
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