Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday
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Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday
#2I don't agree with his take on LLMs. There is something about them that feels very similar to the way my own brain works. Like, for example, when I perceive a smell that, somehow, activates a very old and almost forgotten visual memory. Sometimes, when talking to a LLM, it feels like one or two words in my prompt is having a similar effect on it.
Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday
#3[flagged]
Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday
#4> “As I see it, ‘intelligence’ needs something like the ability to know or understand some area,” he said. “If something can’t actually understand things we shouldn’t say it’s intelligent, not even a little intelligent, but people are using the term artificial intelligence for bullshit generators.”
I wouldn't go as far in blaming AI. It is certainly error prone and has very short autonomy. It's not better than subject matter experts in any field. But it can solve multi-step problems even when they don't look very close to anything in the training set.
I thought that as a pioneer in the free software movement, he would fully support LLMs that democratize skills and make them universally applicable. LLMs benefit from the knowledge of some and extend that help to others, much like the principles of free software. In fact AI is much more radical in making skills free than software ever was.
Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday
#5I don't agree with his take on LLMs. There is something about them that feels very similar to the way my own brain works. Like, for example, when I perceive a smell that, somehow, activates a very old and almost forgotten visual memory. Sometimes, when talking to a LLM, it feels like one or two words in my prompt is having a similar effect on it.
Maybe his perspective on AI is colored by the fact that he's not going to get to see it fully developed so he has nothing to gain.
Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday
#6I don't agree with his take on LLMs. There is something about them that feels very similar to the way my own brain works. Like, for example, when I perceive a smell that, somehow, activates a very old and almost forgotten visual memory. Sometimes, when talking to a LLM, it feels like one or two words in my prompt is having a similar effect on it.
Maybe his perspective on AI is colored by the fact that he's not going to get to see it fully developed so he has nothing to gain.
Maybe he's looking at now, which he is on the mark on, and not some hypothetical destination that is being hyped that we may never get to.
Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday
#7[deleted]
Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday
#8I don't agree with his take on LLMs. There is something about them that feels very similar to the way my own brain works. Like, for example, when I perceive a smell that, somehow, activates a very old and almost forgotten visual memory. Sometimes, when talking to a LLM, it feels like one or two words in my prompt is having a similar effect on it.
Maybe his perspective on AI is colored by the fact that he's not going to get to see it fully developed so he has nothing to gain.
There are so many assumptions in your statement.
Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday
#9I don't agree with his take on LLMs. There is something about them that feels very similar to the way my own brain works. Like, for example, when I perceive a smell that, somehow, activates a very old and almost forgotten visual memory. Sometimes, when talking to a LLM, it feels like one or two words in my prompt is having a similar effect on it.
Maybe his perspective on AI is colored by the fact that he's not going to get to see it fully developed so he has nothing to gain.
I doubt that.
As someone who was enthusiastic about AI before neural networks rose to prominence, I only shake my head when I hear people ascribe all sorts of properties of intelligence to the particular trend in AI that is in vogue today.
The ultimate quest of AI was to understand how to make good decisions. The idea was that maybe if we emulate human activity that humans call "intelligence", but remove all the randomness, unintended errors etc, then we can understand what it means to be intelligent and subsequently will be able to attack hard problems where humans fail due to things like the size of the problem, or the lack of intuition for a particular domain etc.
The neural-net AI abandoned all hopes of understanding of how intelligence works and concentrated its efforts on mimicking a typical human response by asking a lot of people the same question, and then averaging the answers. It inspires no confidence that it will be able to apply to domains where humans themselves struggle (eg. multidimensional geometry) or that it will ever become an authoritative source for any kind of answers (i.e. would produce a proof why its answers are correct).
To anyone who wanted to know how intelligence works neural-net AI is worthless. That's not to say that such AI is worthless in general, clearly, it does very well predicting complex patterned behavior, or can sift through a lot of data with difficult to deterministically determine patterns, but it isn't even going in the direction anyone who wanted intelligence would be interested in.
I think that as with many historically vague terminology, we'll have to redefine what "intelligence" means. Split this concept into multiple concepts, and, maybe the neural-net group will win the right to call themselves "AI", while those who I describe above will switch to a different term, or maybe it will be the other way around. It's clear though that the modern in-vogue approach is simply a waste of time for a lot of people interested in AI.
Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday
#10> “As I see it, ‘intelligence’ needs something like the ability to know or understand some area,” he said. “If something can’t actually understand things we shouldn’t say it’s intelligent, not even a little intelligent, but people are using the term artificial intelligence for bullshit generators.” I wouldn't go as far in blaming AI. It is certainly error prone and has very short autonomy. It's not better than subjec…
His thinking here leans on assuming that there's a qualitative difference between LLM's "understanding" and our "understanding" that justifies using the term for us, but not for LLMs. Maybe there is, but their reasoning ability is sufficient that I don't think is at all a given, and at a minimum an assertion that should make you ask someone how they define "understanding", because defining that in a way that is focused on reasoning-ability that will exclude LLMs but not exclude some people seems tricky.