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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#161

Post by chemicalnovae »

fnbr wrote: post #43
vostok wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similarly I also asked someone I know who wants to a do a PhD in economics what he thought about the current macroeconomic situation in the US and he had no thoughts at all. I understand your friend very well. I love meaningless speculation about topics that are unrelated to my area of expertise, but topics that are remotely close to my area of knowledge are off limits for me. I know exactly how much I don't know a…

And getting a PhD in Economics teaches you quickly how little macroeconomics you understand.

The essence of this is true of basically every PhD in a quantitative field. I think its one of the things that makes people walk away after starting.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#162

Post by gregdek »

Lemoine is just saying in a breathless and credulous way many of the same things that Google VP and Research Fellow Blaise Agüera y Arcas said in an Economist article 4 days ago:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia...

Instead of reading Lemoine's blog post in isolation, go read this piece in the Economist. It's far more realistic, and more insightful, and comes to a similar conclusion: LaMDA feels like it's approaching real intelligence.

Seriously, go read it.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#163

Post by ALittleLight »

rlue wrote: post #129
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…

Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before. Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what? Silence. It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of lone…

The program can't generate more text without a prompt from you. That's how it was programmed. If sentient birds were judging you it would be unfair for them to determine you insentient because you couldn't fly. You are physically incapable of flight just as the chatbot is physically incapable of producing text unprompted.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#164

Post by wruza »

cycomanic wrote: post #41
delusional wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. That's just not true. It's been discussed many times in literary theory how communication is a two way cooperative game. That's FAR removed from picking the statistically most likely option. The difference is that the AI has nothing to say, it just mimics what you're saying.

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…

it can be used to declare anyone/everything non-sentient

So what? My concern in this thread is that we collectively are holding on to the thread of terms of vague binary phenomena, which were never stressed before and are most likely a randomly emerged self-petting.

All of that only has meaning in a context of our species. If you’re fine with something begging for help or expressing fear etc by knowing it has no underlying mechanism like yours to do that, that’s it. We rate things by implied similarity (in case someone still hasn’t figure it out) and if something is much different, that’s the matter of agreement, not of absolute meaning.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#165

Post by ALittleLight »

I'm imagining a metric "Number of defecting engineers who think your AI is sentient." One or two engineers are probably wrong. But if this metric is trending up over time I think that tells us something.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#166

Post by rendall »

What if, and bear with me here, LaMDA is sentient, and Marcus' vociferously angry response is due to horror and revulsion that sentience is unexpectedly unremarkable and easy to produce?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#167

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

vostok wrote: post #32
mhh__ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming they even did them why would programming tests "catch" this? I know people who would probably ace quite a few rounds (basically until they get asked some soft questions about architecture) who really don't know much about the fuzzy boundary between the algorithm textbooks and actual practice or even just having thoughts about the field full-stop. Curiosity is not a given. Similarly I also asked someone I kno…

> Similarly I also asked someone I know who wants to a do a PhD in economics what he thought about the current macroeconomic situation in the US and he had no thoughts at all. I understand your friend very well. I love meaningless speculation about topics that are unrelated to my area of expertise, but topics that are remotely close to my area of knowledge are off limits for me. I know exactly how much I don't know a…

> I know exactly how much I don't know and feel uncomfortable speculating without inserting caveats between every other word.

This reminds me of people with a scientific background who take a very measured and cautious approach when talking about those topics ("the research suggests...", "it's likely that...", etc) which is interpreted by laymen as little more than a guess.

Contrast that to any drongo with a blog who feels fine unleashing an unfounded, agenda-driven diatribe of misinformation - but does so confidently - and you have an uphill battle to win the hearts and minds of those who don't have the foundational knowledge to understand the science themselves, or the critical thinking skills to evaluate the information and the people producing it.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#168

Post by extr »

skybrian wrote: post #149
extr wrote: post #25

I agree with the take that LaMDA is not sentient (not even close). But I think the excessive smack-down of excitement is a little patronizing of the public. Even if they don't know what to do with them, big language models now have internal states that correspond to high level human abstractions like "life" or "love" or "master plan". To be able to create a master plan, you must first be able to represent the concept…

The obvious milestone is the external behavior. The internal representations are not something the public knows anything about. Even machine learning researchers only have limited ways of doing visualization.

My point is that the external behavior is remarkable and breathtaking even if it doesn't show any actual "sentience" by scientific standards. The complexity of the replies show that large language models are not playing word association jumble, they can produce something that sounds like a coherent thought, even if there is no "thought" going on.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#170

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

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…

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