181–190 of 518 posts
It's worth keeping in mind that Stephen Wolfram likely didn't write this himself. I know people who work at the company, and they sign agreements that any intellectual property (including mathematical proofs) they generate are owned by Stephen Wolfram. Anything Wolfram puts out, like blog posts, scientific articles, and books, are likely to be partly or wholly ghost-written.
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Yann LeCun often argues that animals like cats and dogs are substantially more intelligent than current LLMs [0] and I'd have to agree. I don't see how/why to consider practical knowledge as only constituting a tiny fraction of our overall intelligence. Either way, it's not clear if the GPT-* models will someday produce emergent common sense or if they're going down an entirely wrong path. [0] https://twitter.com/yle…
LeCun misses the point by a mile, which is weird at his level. LLMs absolutely do perform problem solving, every time you feed them a prompt. The problem-solving doesn't happen on the output side of the model, it happens on the input side. Someone objected that a cat can't write a Python program, and LeCun points out that "Regurgitating Python code does not require any understanding of a complex world." No, but a) in…
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There is no rule that implies the explicit design dominates the emergent effect. Evolutionary biology strives to make us logical creatures to fulfill the singular goal of passing on genetic material. Your sentience and your humanity is a side effect of this singular goal. So what dominates the description of who YOU are? Human or vessel for genetic material? I'll say that YOU are human and therefore more then just a…
They really aren't more than just statistical word generators because we can and do build what are exactly statistical word generators and get the behavior of ChatGPT (because that is what ChatGPT is). For what it's worth, this isn't a knock on ChatGPT, but more just how amazing how far you can get with straightforward concepts.
No need to be worried about knocking chatGPT. I have no pride invested in the thing. But I do think that people who view it solely as statistical word generators are biased.
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It's clearly early technology, so it's not perfect. But what it is able to get right is clear proof it's more then what you think: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/ Read to the end. The beginning and middle doesn't show off anything too impressive. It's the very end where chatGPT displays a sort of self awareness. Also here's a scientific paper showing that LLMs are more then a chinese room…
I asked Google Home what the definition of self-awareness is, and it says "conscious knowledge of one's character s and feelings.". But me saying "ChatGPT surely doesn't have feelings, so it can't be self-aware!" would be a simple cop-out/gotcha response. I guess it's a Chinese Room, that when you ask about Chinese Rooms, can tell you what those things are. I almost said the word "aware" there, but the person in the…
But I do think it understands what you're saying. And it understand what itself is. The evidence is basically in the way it constructs it's answers. It must have a somewhat realistic model of reality in order to say certain things.
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I still don't see your point behind your first 4 paragraphs. How you decide to treat your fellow humans is up to you. Just as you can decide to view your fellow humans however you want. It's entirely possible to treat them like "humans" while still viewing them as nothing but jumbles of molecules and atoms. So again why does perspective matter here (particularly with ChatGPT being a statistical word generator)? Your…
> To me, it sounds like you're the fearful one. What do you think that fear may be?
All I can say is your OP, said "I think part of it is a subconscious fear ... I understand what I'm saying is dramatic". Why do you think it is a fear (you explained your thoughts so no need to re-explain), and why do you think what you say is dramatic? It appears to me you are projecting your thoughts and fears. I do though, find your last post dramatic, as you have capital words "ARE MORE" and "OBVIOUS" in your last paragraph, emphasizing emotion. So you must have strong emotions over this.
It's worth keeping in mind that Stephen Wolfram likely didn't write this himself. I know people who work at the company, and they sign agreements that any intellectual property (including mathematical proofs) they generate are owned by Stephen Wolfram. Anything Wolfram puts out, like blog posts, scientific articles, and books, are likely to be partly or wholly ghost-written.
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> Yeah I've been thinking along these lines. ChatGPT is telling us something about language or thought, we just havent got to the bottom of what it is yet. Something along the lines of 'with enough data its easier to model than we expected'. I’ve been thinking similarly, and am coming to understand and accept we’ll never get to the bottom of it :) The universe is fractal-like in nature. It shouldn’t be a surprise, th…
> 'with enough data its easier to model than we expected' > a self-similar process is ultimately responsible for granting us our own intelligence In my view, intelligence essentially resides within language, specifically in the corpus of language. Both humans and AIs can be effectively colonized by language, as there are innumerable concepts and observations that are transmitted from one mind to another, and now even…
(I of course recognize some of our intelligence is genetic or epigenetic or microbial.)
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I saw a great comment here, and I will repeat it without the attribution it deserves: We may have realized it's easier to build a brain than to understand one
But if you ever a have a conversation with it you know it isn't a brain. I'm not talking about detection here; its whole point is to generate credible text so it is going to evade detection well. But can't you just tell from talking to it that there is nothing there?
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Well you're just a jumble of electrons and protons interacting with each other. That's a 100% true interpretation is it not? It's also a view that misses the point that you are a molecular intelligence made of DNA that continually mutates and reconstructs it's physical form with generational copies to increase fitness in an ever changing environment. But that viewpoint also misses the point that you're a human with w…
> Because of fear. Because of bias. Care to expand a bit more on what you think those fears may be? Or that bias?
I don't think this means skynet apocalypse. I think this means most people will be out of a job.
A lot of people on HN take a lot of pride in thinking they have some sort of superior programming skills that places them on the top end of the programming spectrum. ChatGPT represents the possibility that they can be beaten easily. That their skills are entirely useless and generic in a world dominated by AI programmers.
It truly is a realistic possibility that AI can take over programming jobs in the future, no one can deny this. Does one plan for that future? Or do they live in denial? Most people choose to live in denial, because that AI inflection point happened so quickly that we can't adapt to the paradigm shift.
The human brain would rather shape logic and reality to fit an existing habit and lifestyle rather then acknowledge the cold hard truth. We saw it with global warming and oil execs and we're seeing it with programmers and AI.
Reading the examples, I am almost sorry that I quit my yearly subscription to Wolfram Desktop a few months ago. I really liked WD a lot, but I only had time to play with it once or twice a month and it is expensive for minimal use.
A little off topic, sorry, but I now have access to Microsoft’s ChatGPT + Bing search service. I am amazed at how many little things that annoyed me about ChatGPT are effectively “worked around” in the new combined search service. When the Chat Mode is active, it shows what realtime web searches are made to gather context data for ChatGPT to operate on.
Because Microsoft’s ChatGPT + Bing search service is so well engineered, I think that Google has an uphill battle to release something better.
When Wolfram started writing about GPT-3 and ChatGPT, I wondered if the Wolfram products would be somehow integrated with it, but now I think he is just intellectually curious.