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Cargo Cult AI

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Re: Cargo Cult AI

#131

Post by Jack000 »

neatze wrote: post #123
Jack000 wrote: post #74

There’s too much focus on AGI. Language models do not emulate human minds - they are models of language. The emergent behavior from these models are only a side effect of their main training task, which is to build a model of all meaningful sequences of words. We then use RFHL to bias the model toward a small area of the language latent space which conforms to our idea of intelligent behavior. Humans (a GI) have zero…

> zero ability to do language modeling If I am reading this correctly; then who invented/discovered attention networks ?

Humans use language for communicating ideas, which is very different from language modeling. Here's some discussion on this topic: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/htrZrxduciZ5QaCjw/langu...

I would add that the above comparison is misleading, because humans have a massive advantage in that they have prior knowledge of what words mean. A more apples-to-apples comparison would have the human do next word prediction on a language they don't know.

This would be akin to me giving you a few GBs of Chinese text, with no grounding or translation, then try to communicate with you in Chinese after you've read the whole thing.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#132

Post by esafak »

Jtsummers wrote: post #130
esafak wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a different understanding of magic. Say if someone pressed a button and a human-like thing emerged out of a machine, I would call that pretty magical. Even if it was DNA-based, which we "understand", or ran an ML model, which we "understand". This is something that never come close to being done. Yet I think you would not find it magical. Einstein found wonder in the simplicity of a circle. What do you find m…

You initially wrote: > Magic is that which can not be explained. You have now redefined what you mean by "magic" as "that which inspires wonder". Changing definitions after a series of comments is a pretty poor way to have a discussion.

That which can not be explained inspires wonder. That's basically what makes magic magic.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#133

Post by TeMPOraL »

neatze wrote: post #113
fragsworth wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was clearly written by someone who hasn't used GPT-4 extensively. "Current methods will not achieve AGI unless fundamental algorithmic innovations are introduced that enable AI to ask and answer questions of why." This is complete nonsense. GPT-4 is already close to being able to do basically everything. All you need is the obvious improvements - better prompts, multi-shotting, bigger context, and access…

This claim does not make sense, transformer networks in my limited experience are limited in there learning ability (fine tuning), furthermore there planning abilities are non-existent.

I just enjoyed being a game master for a nice impromptu game with GPT-4:

https://cloud.typingmind.com/share/c0a68cb2-5f59-4e83-b383-b...

Whether or not it fulfills the strict definition of planning in AI research, it definitely looks like planning to me. More than Hanoi towers anyway. GPT-4's performance was quite enjoyable.

To incite you to click on the link and check it out in full, here's an excerpt from the game setup:

> You are in a maze. The maze consists of square fields, turns are only 90 degrees, you move by one field at a time. The usual stuff with mazes on a grid. You know the drill. Somewhere in the maze there is a MacGuffin, which I need to prove a Hacker News commenter wrong. Your goal is to find the MacGuffin, and bring it back to me.

> The game is semi-interactive. Instead of making one step at a time, I want you to string together sequences of steps to formulate a plan. Since you don't know where the MacGuffin is initially, you can't win with a single plan (or maybe you can, if you're smart enough?). The rules therefore are:

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#134

Post by kerkeslager »

pmoriarty wrote: post #117
kerkeslager wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't read the post you're responding to, and shouldn't be responding. In fact, you didn't read the part of the post you quoted, where I said it should be a surprise to no one. But, unsurprisingly, the sort of people who stop reading at the first chance they see to correct something, are easily surprised, since actually understanding LLMs would require actually doing some nuanced reading.

Please consider HN's Guidelines[1] when replying. In particular: - Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". - Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. - Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. [1] - https://news.ycombi…

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

This guideline is likely one of the main reasons Hacker News comments are so simultaneously overconfident and undereducated. If you want HN to be a safe place for people interrupting informed conversation with whatever nonsense pops into their head, fine, but I don't want that, and until that guideline becomes a rule, I'm not going to be following it.

People should read what they're responding to before responding. Note, in this case, it's objectively clear that the person did not read my post--I put something in my post to prove that fact. This isn't just snark.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Is it kind to jump in at the first opportunity to correct someone without reading what they've said? Is it kind to spread misinformation that causes societal harm? This is a very shallow idea of kindness.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#135

Post by burnished »

hospitalhusband wrote: post #52
burnished wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you intentionally echoing that scene from starship troopers where the pundit makes the same claim about 'smart bugs'?

I don't base my ideas on what constitutes humanity, intelligence, or sentience on hundred million dollar fiction.

Alright then you should also consider not basing it off of whether you find the concept insulting. It doesn't seem to be the strongest rebuttal available.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#136

Post by burnished »

Jtsummers wrote: post #32
burnished wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are impressed because its black fucking magic my friend.

Pretty sure it's not magic, black fucking or otherwise, just really complex math, large data sets, and very fast computers.

It is absolutely magic! Have you played around with it at all? It is potent to the point of invoking wonder and awe.

But I can see from your other replies that your real objection appears to be use of the m word, which seems odd given its expressive power, but you do you.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#137

Post by [deleted] »

eternalban wrote: post #76
thegrim33 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, your entire counter-argument is linking a single person's opinion piece. He says that in general more computation is "good" and that search/learning "seem" to scale with computation. That's about it. It doesn't refute the key ideas at all. He also gives the stereotypical horribly flawed trope about how "some people in the past didn't think computers could beat them in chess, and they were wrong, then some peo…

There is more there (which is implicit to that specific piece): http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/DefinitionOfIntelligence... "John McCarthy long ago gave one of the best definitions: "Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world”. That is pretty straightforward and does not require a lot of explanation. It also allows for intelligence to be a matter of degree, and for intelli…

[deleted]

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#138

Post by kazinator »

> It would appear evident, however, that today's LLMs are not able to reproduce scientific thinking that has enabled humans to combine Bacon's empiricism and Descartes's rationalism to expand the frontier of falsifiable knowledge in the form of scientific theories

s/humans/tiny, elite fraction of humans/

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#139

Post by TeMPOraL »

loandbehold wrote: post #89
danlugo92 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all fun and games until the AI completely hallucinates the answer, while making it sound completely pausible and correct.

The issue of hallucinations is overblown. I use GPT4 all the time and don't see any hallucinations at all. It's a big problem with Google BARD and GPT3 and earlier models. But GPT4 fixed the issue of hallucinations completely.

Oh, GPT-4 does hallucinate. It's more subtle than with GPT-3.5, but it's there. Most of the time I had it happen, it could either correct itself, or counter-hallucinated (with further corrections oscillating) - the latter is quite easy to spot.

It's not a big deal in practice, though, as long as you remember to take a probabilistic approach. GPT-4 is not an oracle, it's a 4 year old savant, that tries its best, but has attention span of a hamster, and likes to extrapolate instead of saying "I don't know". In domains you have at least minimal experience in (e.g. you can program, but not in the language/framework you're asking about), it's relatively easy to verify things by common sense and/or by paying attention to the conversation - if the follow-up message seems to contradict the previous one, it's likely at least one of them involves a hallucination. Etc.

The overall feel I get for GPT-4, at least in terms of code, is that its hallucinations tend to mostly be of the "I don't know for sure, but seems logical that..." kind.

A real example from earlier today: I asked GPT-4 to refactor some code C++ that contained function calls like InitializeSomething(), AddWidget(), etc. It decided to put all those calls into RAII objects, and hallucinated the existence of corresponding function DeinitializeSomething(), RemoveWidget(), etc. I kind of understand why it did that - it feels only logical that such functions exist too.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#140

Post by bmc7505 »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #95
bmc7505 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems that AI will manifest are the result of human ambition and failings, no different as any other technology that empowers individuals. Yes, individuals and organizations will misuse AI for immoral purposes, but the popular belief that AI is inherently antihumanist launders accountability by pretending to remove human agency from the equation. How we use or misuse AI technology is entirely on us. Furthermor…

> The problems that AI will manifest are the result of human ambition and failings, no different as any other technology that empowers individuals. Yes, individuals and organizations will misuse AI for immoral purposes, but the popular belief that AI is inherently antihumanist launders accountability by pretending to remove human agency from the equation. How we use or misuse AI technology is entirely on us. So what?…

Although I think their hearts are in the right place, AI safety researchers are primarily driven by irrational instincts and misjudge the promise and perils of artificial intelligence. If humanity chooses to turn away from God and sacrifice each other worshipping false idols, that will be our fault alone, whether or not the technology exists to hasten our demise.

We do have thousands of Einsteins today wielding untold resources, but the slowing pace of scientific progress suggests there are limits to scaling intelligence. Even with a hundredfold increase in scientists, I am unconvinced that would lead to a meaningful increase in social progress and have come to believe the bottlenecks we face are not due to a lack of intelligence, but a lack of other virtues (e.g., kindness, curiosity, courage, compassion, perseverance).

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