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Life is more than an engineering problem

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Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#141

Post by abecedarius »

rcxdude wrote: post #136
weego wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

It's more that if you actually work with LLMs they will display reasoning. It's not particularly good or deep reasoning (I would generally say they have a superhuman amount of knowledge but are really quite unintelligent), but it is more than simply recall.

Yes, my judgement too from messing with Claude and (previously) ChatGPT. 'Ridiculous' and 'cultish' are overton-window enforcement more than they are justified.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#142

Post by d4mi3n »

rcxdude wrote: post #136
weego wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

It's more that if you actually work with LLMs they will display reasoning. It's not particularly good or deep reasoning (I would generally say they have a superhuman amount of knowledge but are really quite unintelligent), but it is more than simply recall.

Waters are often muddied here by our own psychology. We (as a species) tend to ascribe intelligence to things that can speak. Even more so when someone (or thing in this case) can not just speak, but articulate well.

We know these are algorithms, but how many people fall in love or make friends over nothing but a letter or text message?

Capabilities for reasoning aside, we should all be very careful of our perceptions of intelligence based solely on a machines or algorithms apparent ability to communicate.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#143

Post by pif »

abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

Please, wake me up when artificial so-called intelligence will have proved a new theorem.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#144

Post by whatshisface »

rcxdude wrote: post #136
weego wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

It's more that if you actually work with LLMs they will display reasoning. It's not particularly good or deep reasoning (I would generally say they have a superhuman amount of knowledge but are really quite unintelligent), but it is more than simply recall.

I don't think any of us are qualified to tell the difference between exhibiting reasoning and mixing examples taken from the entire internet. Maybe if the training data was small enough to comprehend in its entirety, we could say one way or the other, but as it stands none of us have read the enitre internet, and we have no way of finding the stackoverflow or Reddit conversation that most closely resembles a given chain of thought.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#145

Post by wholinator2 »

weego wrote: post #125
abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

I think it's really up to the highly nebulous definition. Even in your comment is implied that reasoning and consciousness are two names of the same thing but i'd argue one is here and one will never be provable ever. Reason is working through logical steps, much like a program. It's a set of conditions that get checked and a logical structure that uses that information to reach a conclusion. That's what sets it apart from gut feelings or emotional thinking, it's a traceable structure with "reasons". I can watch the LLM speak base facts out loud, then begin to synthesize them giving _reasons_ for the choices it's making, culminating in a final conclusion. It's already doing that. That is what i call reason. It doesn't mean it's human, it doesn't mean it's "aware of itself", it just means it's thinking a train of thought with concrete steps between each car. Consciousness is completely undefinable and useless as a metric and will never be probably achieved.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#146

Post by Barrin92 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #118

> “It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words ‘Baby don’t hurt me’ on them." Problem: the human brain has no pain receptors, no nociceptors. It just takes in messages from remote nerves and 'prints a bumper sticker' that tells higher cognitive centers 'you're feeling pain!'. What's the difference? > "LLMs are like a search engine that rephrases info…

>What's the difference?

The pain receptors. The human brain doesn't just "have" pain receptors. Your entire body, including your brain, is one system. Your brain isn't piloting your body like a mech. This brain body dualism is a misconception of how biological organisms work. You are your pain receptors just like you are your brain, and removing any part would alter your perception of the world.

>How does this differ from human learning?

It differs from human beings in every respect. Humans don't do linear algebra in their head, biochemical systems are much too slow for that. Humans don't inhabit some static model of the world learned at some fixed point t, you're a living being. Your brain wasn't trained four months ago and was done at that point. Humans learn with a fraction of the information and through self play, they don't decohere, and so on.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#147

Post by gcanyon »

mkoubaa wrote: post #39
gcanyon wrote: post #9

I'll take this as my chance to recommend Ted Chiang -- he is among the very best short story writers working in science fiction (I say confidently, not having done an extensive survey...). His works are remarkably clever, from Understand, which does a credible job of portraying human superintelligence, to Exhalation, which explores the concept of entropy in a fascinating way. And of course Story of Your Life, on whic…

I read the Exhalation collection last year and plan to read it once every two or three years for the rest of my life

I have stories on permanent rotation like this.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#148

Post by SkiFire13 »

abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

In theory you can prove a theorem just by enumerating all the possible proofs until you find the one for the theorem you want. This is extremely slow, but do you think there's any reasoning in doing this?

Of course we don't know whether an LLM is doing something like this or actually reasoning. But this is also the point, we don't know.

If you ask a question to a person you can be confident to some degree that they didn't memorize the answer beforehand, so you can evaluate their ability to "reason" and come up with an answer for it. With an LLM however this is increadibly hard to do, because they could have memorized it.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#149

Post by SkiFire13 »

fragmede wrote: post #84
ustad wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has an AI “proven” a theorem?

Leading mathematician Terence Tao says yes, with a lot of guidance. https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113132503432772494

I don't see Tao claiming ChatGPT proved a theorem. Moreover most questions seemed to be about something already talked about online, so it seems plausible that it was included in the training data. This is IMO a big issue with evaluating LLMs, you can't keep asking the same questions because you can't be sure they will eventually answer by memory or actually reason.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#150

Post by abdullahkhalids »

weego wrote: post #125
abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

> No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X.

This is not a good argument. Natural systems, the subject of neuroscience/psychology, are much harder to analyze than artificial systems. For example, it's really difficult to study atmospheric gases and figure out Boyle's/Charles law. But put a gas in a closed chamber and change pressure or temperature and these laws are trivially apparent.

LLMs are much more legible systems than animal brains, and they are amenable to experiment. So, it is much more likely that we will be able to identify what "reasoning" is by studying these systems than animal brains.

P.S. Don't think we are there yet, as much as internet commentators might assert.

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