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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#131

Post by dane-pgp »

eecc wrote: post #50
chc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what we do when we talk, but that is not all we do when we talk. In composing this comment, I am not just stringing together words to create what I think constitutes a maximally appealing response to your comment. I am trying to convey an idea that I believe with the goal of helping others to understand something. These language AIs do not have the capability of believing anything and do not have any goal but…

Unless you’re a high-schooler trying to fit in ;)

so true bestie

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#132

Post by dr_dshiv »

probably_wrong wrote: post #80
dr_dshiv wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the present article to be very anti-intellectual. As in, it makes LaMDA an open-and-shut case, a priori. It does not seek to define intelligence nor sentience; it merely says “nothing to see here, people.” This refusal to consider has the effect of making me think there might be something really interesting going on.

Anti-intellectual? Interesting. I had the opposite thought: that the article aims at too high a level to be accessible for the common reader who doesn't know what "parametric functions in higher dimensions" are. But having said that, I think you are not being fair to both sides: you are taking some researcher's gut feeling at face value while requiring the rebuttal to start with a formal definition of what intelligen…

Yes, well, our brains have parametric functions in higher dimensions. Waving around big words and an a priori dismissal is precisely what makes this article anti-intellectual.

And don’t accuse me of being on a path to mass murder. I find that demeaning and impolite.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#133

Post by jcelerier »

mjburgess wrote: post #87
mpoteat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose a child was raised by a more advanced version of large scale language model, with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories. Further suppose that this child develops a deep emotional connection with the AI. Do you think that child would find your argument convincing that the AI is "not really a person"?

> with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories So an AI which is really an AI, is really an AI. Yes, well done. The issue is that finding coincidental statistical associations in character strings in 100mil historical documents isnt AI.

Honest question as someone entirely outside of any AI research: what's the I in AI then ? My life experience is very alike pattern matching the current situation to everything I've lived before sprinkled with chaotic emotional reactions due to outside events - heat, hunger, etc. I really don't feel like there's anything more than that when thinking, just the brain going through paths that one can recognize with time.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#134

Post by tsimionescu »

burrows wrote: post #120
raffraffraff wrote: post #110

I have a dog. She has a brain that can "feel" emotions like anger, fear, love. She's incapable of speech and not particularly good at following instructions. I can teach her some typical dog 'tricks' like sit, down, paw etc, but she has her own will, her own emotions and her own agenda, so whether or not she chooses to obey me is really up to her whims. She is alive , even without knowing how to act and respond "like…

You’re a fabric of stitched together organic molecules that selects the best response to electromagnetic and auditory stimulus.

> You’re a fabric of stitched together organic molecules that selects the best response to electromagnetic and auditory stimulus.

That's true in some sense, but definitely not if you apply it exclusively to language. The "response" you select is a step in a plan to achieve a goal. Part of that plan may be to utter a sentence, or it may be to stop, duck and roll.

If the plan is to utter a sentence, the way you generate the sentence is NOT to emit the most likely token to fit all of the speech input you ever heard before.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#135

Post by 24rf24r2f »

someweirdperson wrote: post #91
renewiltord wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, you'd think but they get it wrong often and they'll bend things for you. It's why I can pick up other people's prescriptions for controlled substances with nothing but my ID at pharmacies I've never been to before, why I've transformed a no-refill into a refill (they just read it wrong) while another person had to call the doctor for the same outcome, etc. People everywhere are not really bound by anything. The…

Are you Doctor WHO?

No post body was provided.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#136

Post by s1mon »

m8s wrote: post #101
s1mon wrote: post #11

It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…

The direct quote from Lemoine in the Washington Post is a little less insulting to his intelligence. > “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” said Lemoine, 41. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...

Yeah. I discovered that after sharing the text from the NYTimes. It's a bit odd. The NYTimes is describing what was said to "executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs", but without a direct quote. It's hard to say how emphatic Lemoine was internally, and where the NYTimes sourced that info, vs what he said when talking to the WaPo.

BTW, here's a link for the WaPo article: https://archive.ph/QiU2g

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#137

Post by eecc »

klohto wrote: post #74
eecc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing different positions are tested differently; any development role is heavily guarded by Indiana Jones temple traps while more “soft skills” roles are within reach of anyone eloquent enough to talk themselves into a community

Well, he was a software engineer

Really? I read the role was “AI Ethicists”… not something FizzBuzz worthy I presume. But I might be wrong on all counts :)

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#138

Post by upwardbound »

Cannabat wrote: post #102

My understanding of these AIs is that they are idle - nothing happening in the program's loop except waiting for input - unless being prompted with some input (e.g. a conversation). The AIs are purely reactive. Does sentience require self-reflection? How can it self-reflect if it cannot prompt itself? Am I wrong about these language models and other AIs being purely reactive? Perhaps humans are purely reactive.

I think the model does have short-term memory, but not long-term memory, if I'm understanding it correctly.

From https://aibusiness.com/document.asp?doc_id=777540 : "LaMDA2 was trained on Google’s Pathways Language Model (PaLM), which has 540 billion parameters."

And then looking at the PaLM paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.02311.pdf on page 5 we have: "PaLM uses a standard Transformer model architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017) in a decoder-only setup (i.e., each timestep can only attend to itself and past timesteps)"

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#139

Post by thomashop »

tsimionescu wrote: post #108
cycomanic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can not detect the difference between someone having something to say and mimicing what you are saying, is there a difference? That's essentially what the turing test is about is it not? Now if you are saying there is a difference no matter if you can detect it or not, I would argue you imply that sentience is an internal state that can not be tested. I don't consider that an acceptable outcome, because it can…

With LaMDA or GPT-3, the difference is easily visible. They don't have goals, so the sentences they generate don't express their goals. Simple tests can be done if you probe the model carefully - you can usually get a model to generate sentences like "I want to X" and "I don't want to X" in short succession, with decent prompts. Similarly, it can often generate sentences that would indicate obviously nonsensical goal…

You can also get a human to generate sentences like "I want to X" and "I don't want to X" in short succession, with decent prompts.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#140

Post by mjburgess »

mpoteat wrote: post #125
mjburgess wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories So an AI which is really an AI, is really an AI. Yes, well done. The issue is that finding coincidental statistical associations in character strings in 100mil historical documents isnt AI.

Why not? Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. Why should this agent not be considered intelligent? Does the method of computation matter? Perhaps only "biological computation" counts in your view?

Yes, the reason matters... that reason is intelligence.

If I ask, "What do you think about what i'm wearing?" and you say "it's nice" *because* you have seen it, compared it to your tastes, etc. and believe it to be nice -- then you've answered the question i've asked.

A lookup table cannot answer this question: it can only answer it "in quotes". Ie, really it answers: "given what everyone has said about this before, what is the on-average answer?"

You realise that we're not trying to answer questions right? That our interest in intelligence isnt having some useful output on occasion of some prepared input?

We're interested in intelligent agents being in the world with us. It as important they get answers wrong. We are interested in systems which act for the right reasons (ethical, intellectual, cognitive, athletic, emotional, etc.).

Perhaps the most important things animals do is act well when the answers arent right.

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