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AI is just someone else's intelligence

zdziarski.com

121–130 of 170 posts

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (But you don't, so I suspect you're not good at logical reasoning) Perhaps I'm not, but at least I'm good enough at it to be able to have a discussion without resorting to insulting the person I'm talking with.

Do you take any criticism with this attitude? Everyone is stupid at times, question is if we are willing to learn from mistakes. Like denying many years of research with good predictive qualities, which you could probably also see personally, should have made you suspect about your point of view.

The vast, vast majority of people you interact with will take a comment like that as an ad-hominem attack. At best, they'll forgive you for the logical fallacy. More often, they'll feel you have inappropriate conversation patterns and that further interaction with you is risky ... as in, you might be some type of dangerous-crazy, because a lot of "appropriate" vs. "inappropriate" social mores are tools (litmus tests) to determine how anti-social[0] someone is in general.

Generally, the "overly emotional" push-back from the other party after one violates social norms is a cue to accomplish two things:

1) Alert others nearby that this was in fact a violation of social norms, and prepare them to potentially side against the violator.

2) Check to see if the offending party is generally in control of their social behavior, and this was just a transient "slip-up", or if the offending party is stuck in their anti-social modes and unable to recover negative social interactions. This acts to provide a stronger signal both to the offended party as well as to others nearby.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#122

This logic only applies to generative pre-training, behavior cloning, and other training methods which rely on learning to mimic well-structured content from the real world. It does not apply to intelligence gathered through methods like RL. How does the author think about the intelligence of AlphaGo, for instance, which was trained entirely by self-play?

Good point. This calls to mind LeCun's recent argument about missing models that can learn from raw experience or "self-play". When we have a ChatGPT that understands language strictly from audio / video inputs, then we can start to talk about human-like intelligence. As for AlphaGo, I would put it the same category of intelligence as a calculator. It does one thing well -- approximate a Monte Carlo Tree Search.

isn't HuggingGPT and Jarvis able todo some of that.

https://github.com/microsoft/JARVIS

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#123
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not that AI is sentient, but that we aren't. Anything presenting such a ridiculous conclusion is so wrong as to not be taken seriously. The only thing that is for certain in this life is that we are sentient, everything else is derived from that. Same with things proposing we don't have freewill, we do.

You make decisions subconsciously before your conscious mind is aware of it. It's been experimentally demonstrated and at least calls into question the perception of free will. Each hemisphere of our brain is its own intelligence, but only one hemisphere (for 95% of humans the left hemisphere) controls speech. This only became apparent in some seizure patients during the 21st century when doctors might sever the corp…

It seems off to me to suggest symbolic, associative, abstract thought "subconscious". Active thought comes in many forms, if I'm thinking hard about something there is certainly nothing at all like an inner monologue doing the actual work or reaching conclusions, nor is the process itself describable - though the result is, what with my brain not being severed in two. Vocalizing thoughts - whether silently or out loud - is mostly to make the more efficient means stay on track.

I wouldn't say that means most of my consciousness in such a state is subconscious, or that failing to reach a useful result means there wasn't "aware" computation.

An anology would be two co-processors, where one is responsible for IO. Your idea of two entities simply doesn't apply if the interconnect is intact. Unity isn't an illusion just because the entire inner process isn't fully shared across.

And isn't the part about the subconscious making decisions and the conscious merely catching on or rationalizing mostly about basic ones that _by definition_ don't require much thought?

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#124
post #47

I feel that the big hidden implication that these kinds of articles are trying to say is "AI is not real intelligence", further implying something along the lines of "AI will never be conscious" (as it's hard to come up with another definition of "real" intelligence except the-human-kind). I'd like to propose a counterargument: Assumptions: Theory of evolution is true. The primordial single-cell organism from which w…

Yes, yes, this is where we need to be heading, because it could arrive at my favorite (and scariest) conclusion (that others here have hinted at): not that AI is sentient, but that we aren't.

Or, that you are the only one.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking machines, like ChatGPT, do not have any intelligence because they cannot choose their own thoughts. We give them thoughts to think by our inputs and commands. Therefore _we_ give them intelligence by our inputs. Any measure of (textual) intelligence we have can be output by these machines. For example, we can ask it to do 4th grade arithmetic or graduate level mathematics. But you are correct, eventually we…

Whose thought comes first depends entirely on where you draw the starting line. You could just as well say ChatGPT has already chosen to ask you for a command, and it's you who are just following along. Of course ChatGPT was designed and trained to do that. But then we're also designed (by evolutionary forces) and trained (by parents and teachers) to do what we do.

I have no idea what argument you are making.

These machines, in our lifetime, as they are right now, cannot choose their thoughts. Literally, I want you to think of these machines as programs on the command line, because that's exactly what they are. You invoke them like this: ./chatgpt "Hello, what is 2+2?". You control what it thinks about because when it isn't thinking it is inactive, because it hasn't been ran. We control these machines, literally, and thus control what they think including the "level" at which they think -- their intelligence.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#126

I feel that the big hidden implication that these kinds of articles are trying to say is "AI is not real intelligence", further implying something along the lines of "AI will never be conscious" (as it's hard to come up with another definition of "real" intelligence except the-human-kind). I'd like to propose a counterargument: Assumptions: Theory of evolution is true. The primordial single-cell organism from which w…

Yes, and I conjecture that the necessary complexity can only be found in 'flesh and blood', i.e. analogue, as opposed to 'on/off' digital approximations. Mathematically the real numbers are unimaginably more numerous than the countable numbers (see Cantor), thus a system with a countable state space (i.e. digital computers) cannot embody the complete complexity of a similar real state space system (i.e. the human brain) regardless of how 'big' you make it. There just aren't enough whole numbers.

I term it the 'Cardinality Barrier', and thus sleep easily through this latest AI 'bloom'.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#127
post #39

I had a professor in grad school say that AI is just a search algorithm. I think that is an interesting way of framing things. Often times the model is just searching its training data for the right output. I don't think this diminishes the value of such models, recent advancements have shown how exciting "just a search algorithm" can be.

Yes, it just queries. I'm confused why people would confuse this with intelligence. It's like an upgraded Clippy.

[deleted]

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a book communicate intelligence?

Yes, but it has no intelligence. Communicating intelligence is different from having it.

Similarly to books, the large language models communicate information that comes from somewhere, from people. They use math (such as statistics, though I'd argue that's an oversimplification of ML applications) and computer programming to do this just like a book uses words and ink. Debating whether or not weights reflecting some word statistics can "contain intelligence" is similar to debating whether or not the pages of the book "contain knowledge".

Personally that strikes me as a kind of literalistic perspective. Articles like the one posted here remind us where the "intelligence" _really_ comes from, which as you say probably isn't the word statistics themselves, though maybe you'd accept that LLMs can "encode intelligences" just as books can "encode knowledge". Encodings are meaningless without a little decoding! Decoding is a process of meaning making, almost by definition.

A more interesting question along the same lines of the one of whether or not LLMs can "be intelligent" or "contain intelligence": Can LLMs be embodied by some being or beings? Personally I think the answer is very clearly yes, but in a super basic way that a lot of people would dismiss as dull... we embody them when we interact with them or build them, when they cause palpable effects to us, near or far, direct or indirect. That's the life force that lives "inside" of technology. It's the same life force that lives in us. Except it leaks everywhere, it's not contained. It flows through through inter-relation and interaction.

Are there "other" non-human beings that embody LLMs? Or books for that matter? At the very least the aggregate industrial forces that produced them would be good candidates for having some kind of beingness, and also for embodying these tools. So that's where to look if you want to find some "other" intelligence. These tools are quickly becoming vital parts of very large more-than-one-human organisms.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#129

I predict it'll all come crashing down once people start having skin in the game. (Right now, it's a toy, the source for a million overheated news articles and opinions.) ChatGPT can pass the Bar. Okay, have it draw up a contract and have the parties sign it—skin in the game. When an omitted comma can cost millions[1], what will an LLM's hallucinations wrought? [1] https://kagi.com/search?q=missing+comma+millions&r=u…

A first year in a law firm doesn't just draw up a contract and everyone blindly signs it. A first year at a law firm is an expensive GPT-4.

Re: AI is just someone else's intelligence

#130

I feel that the big hidden implication that these kinds of articles are trying to say is "AI is not real intelligence", further implying something along the lines of "AI will never be conscious" (as it's hard to come up with another definition of "real" intelligence except the-human-kind). I'd like to propose a counterargument: Assumptions: Theory of evolution is true. The primordial single-cell organism from which w…

Yes, and I conjecture that the necessary complexity can only be found in 'flesh and blood', i.e. analogue, as opposed to 'on/off' digital approximations. Mathematically the real numbers are unimaginably more numerous than the countable numbers (see Cantor), thus a system with a countable state space (i.e. digital computers) cannot embody the complete complexity of a similar real state space system (i.e. the human bra…

A computer could clearly emulate the neurons in the human brain right now if we could map the connections and their strengths accurately - the human brain has many less neurons than GPT4 has parameters.
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