The cognitive bias in humans to believe higher intelligence is unique to humans and even supernatural is very, very strong.
My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
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Re: My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
#22The problem isn't the mental model of AI--it's the mental model of intelligence. If you think intelligence is some non-algorithmic, non-computable process then of course you won't believe that an AI can be intelligent.
But since Turing's time we've known that intelligence is just computation--it's not until recently that we've been able to come up with the specific algorithm.
Think back to Kasparov playing Deep Blue. Back then, some people (including Kasparov) believed that a computer would never beat a human. They felt that human creativity and ability to see the whole board would always beat brute-force computation.
I watched the pivotal game 5 live. There was a point where Deep Blue made a pawn move away from the main action. The commentators at the time, chess master all, almost cheered--it looked like the machine had blundered. "It's playing like a computer" they said. But one look at Kasparov told you they were wrong. Kasparov was worried. The main action resolved, but in the end, that one pawn move, 20 moves prior, left Deep Blue in a better position.
What modern LLMs do is apply brute-force computation to any domain expressible in language--not just a restricted chess domain. That's the algorithm.
Re: My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
#23> My belief system was shattered the day the proof was announced. I can't imagine having eyes and being able to hold the wrong belief regarding AI for so long. The fact that AI can surpass humans and make novel contributions to our civilization was obvious for me at least about a year earlier. You need to have pretty messianic view of humans to believe otherwise.
To me, as soon as it was obvious that training had distilled and connected abstract concepts of increasing generality, it was only a matter of time. Almost any "new" idea can be decomposed into a combination of old component concepts.
It was evident in GPT-3.5
Re: My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
#24This, despite the ongoing social litigation of if this is even real?
I believe AI is quite capable in the right circumstances, but I'm not convinced "this" is the watershed moment.
Re: My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
#25I think the author is not aware of how much the Millennium Prize proof was actually driven by a human working for years towards that problem. The AI did not solve this on its own. A world class mathematician prompted it towards the proof. In my view, this is still a human achievement, not an AI achievement. If I design a bulldozer to push a five ton rock, did I push the rock or the bulldozer? If the AI really did get…
You could say that about every scientific/mathematical breakthrough. Einstein's Special relativity depended heavily on Lorentz's work, the Michelson-Morley experiments, Maxwell's equations. Grigori Perelman, the only person to have solved a Millenium Prize problem, noted how his work was only possible due to Richard S. Hamilton's work on Ricci flow. Most scientific breakthroughs are just the completing the last 5% of…
Einstein literally stated he was not influenced by the Michelson-Morley experiments, but it's a common myth that he was.
"When Ι asked him how he had learned of the Michelson Morley experiment, he told me that he had become aware of it through writings of Η. Α. Lοrentz, but only after 1905 had it come to his attention! "Otherwise" he said, "I would have mentioned it in my paper!" indeed, Einstein's 1905 paper contains no mention of Μichelson's experiment or references to Lorentz's papers."
From https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/89375/did-einste...
Correcting a professor at MIT (head of the department alas) on this erroneous belief during a grad school interview cost me admission as he insisted otherwise and wouldn't back down. Ironically, one of my college professors was interviewed on NPR a week later and confirmed what I had stated.
Ask me what I think of checked out, tenured academics. Go ahead...
Re: My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
They still are parrots. Just properly trained with a lot of data. Doesn’t make them not useful. But that’s what they are though.
I interpret the word 'parrot' to mean incapable of creative or original thought. Solving a major maths problem that has resisted the best mathematicians for so long seems to prove otherwise (even if it were just a matter of remixing old ideas, which is not the case here). What do they need to do for you to consider them non parrots, and do you consider a lot of humans as parrots?
Did it create the path to the solution, or just grab it from conversations with a researcher working on the problem?
Re: My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
#27Are people paid to write this shite?
AI;dr
Re: My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is copium. Humans worked on it, but they didn't come close to actually solving it. Even if you do the whole "the AI looked at material in its training data" thing, modern AI can make their own math data to train on with RLVF. This new model is legitimately on a different plane of existence from modern mathematicians.
it should be able to solve some of the five left Millenium Prize problems then in a few weeks.
Why in weeks, not months or years?
Re: My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I interpret the word 'parrot' to mean incapable of creative or original thought. Solving a major maths problem that has resisted the best mathematicians for so long seems to prove otherwise (even if it were just a matter of remixing old ideas, which is not the case here). What do they need to do for you to consider them non parrots, and do you consider a lot of humans as parrots?
Did it create the path to the solution, or just grab it from conversations with a researcher working on the problem?
Good question. I think we will know very soon, perhaps not for this particular math problem, but they just need to solve another one independently and we'll know for sure. My bet is that they can.
Re: My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
#30For me it was a few years ago. I had seen a twitter comment referencing astrology in a spat with two black female musicians in the US. My preconception was to look up why that kind of superstition was prevalent in those circles. The answer I got from chapgpt was essentially that it has very little to do with superstition and all to do with being able to use a language to talk about stuff while still not move outside…
> even understand without putting some serious study into the subject.
Then how can you possibly know that it's true?