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Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

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181–190 of 201 posts

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#181
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the amount of intelligence you put in the message, it is interesting to read and to think about. But the style of your reasoning gives me some hints of creationism, let me show you some anti-creationism point of view. > Practical means something like, can they adapt their skills as widely as we can? The most crucial (in my opinion, which has been not introduced to any more crucial points) difference betw…

Oh my, I have seldomly been accused of creationism. To be clear, I can separate the ability from the creature. I don't have a religious or otherwise attachment to the human form specifically. Other than - to be completely honest here - being one. Let's just clear that out of the way. What I am "claiming", which would be an exaggeration because I'm sort of exploring here, is that whatever human cognition is may be an…

> This does stimulate my curiosity about what came first here, speech or cognitive ability?

This is the question I thought about all evening before I fell asleep. I have two ways to answer it.

1. Let's take the well-known Feline and Canine. All my friends who spend a lot of time with animals will call dogs smarter than cats, but why? Dogs have a more developed communication system: they have more varieties of barking than cats have varieties of meowing. Dogs are playful, they know how to smile, they know how to feel guilty and actively show it, they are capable of paired activities under the supervision of a person. From what most of dogs can't, cats can only chase prey without visual or odor contact, purely by sound (but polar foxes can do even this). Conclusion - the level of communication correlates with the level of intelligence.

2. Let's take the most primitive organism, the prokaryote (sorry for not naming some precise specie, let's consider some abstract prokaryote with the requirement to be the simplest). Google tells us: > All organisms, from the prokaryotes to the most complex eukaryotes can sense and respond to environmental stimuli.

But also Wikipedia tells us that prokaryotes are able to interchange some information using DNA: > These are (1) bacterial virus (bacteriophage)-mediated transduction, (2) plasmid-mediated conjugation, and (3) natural transformation.

These two examples make me confident in the opinion that communication and cognition are two different words for describing the same idea from two different points of view.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was not an innovation of ChatGPT.

It's pretty clear that ChatGPT is being used here as a synecdoche for recent LLMs, and transformer LLMs in particular.

"Transformer is All You Need" is from 6 years ago. It isn't an advancement that happened last year.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#183
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is, as somebody who's spent maybe 100 combined hours reading AI papers mostly focused around NLP and image classification. You have a dataset, symbolically represented in 1s and 0s. You have an objective function (e.g. classify the object as belonging to one of N categories). The purpose of the collective neurons in the network is to "encode" the input space in a way that satisfies the objective func…

Nobody said anything about Magic. >There is no magic here at the lowest level – you can interrogate the math at each step and it'll make sense. See that's the thing. You can't unless "making sense" has lost all meaning. That you can see a bunch of signals firing or matrices being multiplied does not mean they "make sense" or are meaningful to you. Lol level gibberish is still gibberish. Our ability to divine the purp…

>Our ability to divine the purpose of activations of anything but the extremely small scale is atrocious.

The value of each parameter is chosen to minimize the loss. This applies to every single weight of the model. Not all weighs affect loss the same amount which is why concepts like pruning exist.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#184

>> In the past, there were some ambitious projects aiming at this goal, though they all failed. So some people like to repeat. Yet, outside of the hand-picked examples in the article (the 5th generation computer project? Blast from the past!) there are a whole bunch of classic AI domains where real progress has been achieved in the last few decades. Here's a few: * Game-playing and adversarial search: from Deep Blue…

If Data from Star Trek (or Eva from Ex Machina) walked out of a lab, we’d have no problem accepting that AGI had been accomplished. Or if the scenario in the movie Her played out with the Samantha OS, we’d be forced to admit not only to AGI, but the evolution of ASI as well. However, there are no such examples in the real world, and after months of overhyping ChatGPT, we still don’t have anything like Data. So it’s n…

Before the development of LLMs, I think it would be a lot easier for people to accept that Data or Eva were intelligent -- they'd never seen a machine respond seemingly meaningfully to arbitrary statements before and would immediately assume that this meant there was intelligence going on. These days it would be harder -- the assumption would be that they were driven by just a better language model that they'd seen before.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Data from Star Trek (or Eva from Ex Machina) walked out of a lab, we’d have no problem accepting that AGI had been accomplished. Or if the scenario in the movie Her played out with the Samantha OS, we’d be forced to admit not only to AGI, but the evolution of ASI as well. However, there are no such examples in the real world, and after months of overhyping ChatGPT, we still don’t have anything like Data. So it’s n…

People have been arguing over whether animals are intelligent for centuries. I estimate we'll never fully settle arguments of whether machines are intelligent.

Ya, people seem to miss that the moment we have an AGI it will likely counter with the same argument and wonder if we're intelligent.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#186
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of "glitch tokens"? To my knowledge, all these are hand patched. There are probably more lurking somewhere in its data. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054241 has quite a few examples of GPT-4 being broken.

Plenty of humans glitch out on random words (and concepts) we just can't get right. Famously the way R/L sound the same to many asians (and equivalently but less famously the way that "four" and "stone" and "lion" when translated into Chinese sound almost indistinguishable to native English speakers). But there's also plenty of people who act like they think "Democrat" is a synonym for "Communist", or that "Wicca" an…

>What makes the AI different here is that we can perfectly inspect the inside of their (frozen and unchanging) minds,

Kinda, but not really...

It depends exactly what you mean by it. So yes we can look at one thing in particular, there is not enough entropy in the universe to look at everything for even a single large AI model.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case in point: when Zwicky discovered that galaxies were rotating faster than could be explained in terms of what we know, that was an advance - an increase in our scientific knowledge . when we come up with a satisfactory explanation of why that is the case, then we will also have an advance - an increase in our scientific understanding . You can't get to the latter until you have advanced to the former, and we will…

I get where you're coming from but we might also be like ants walking over an iPhone, wondering where the vibration is coming from. They might eventually figure it out, but if so it will be after an extremely long time, and they probably should better focus on other things at this very moment if they seek enlightenment.

Luckily there are lots of humans and we can focus on a lot of different things.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the classical AI tasks I list abover are dominated by the classic approaches I listed and neural nets are completely useless in them.

The 'game playing' you lead with is clearly dominated by deep learning in this decade.

[deleted]

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the classical AI tasks I list abover are dominated by the classic approaches I listed and neural nets are completely useless in them.

The 'game playing' you lead with is clearly dominated by deep learning in this decade.

When I wrote the comment you replied to I was thinking specifically, and, admittedly narrowly, of adversarial search rather than general game playing but even so it's not that simple.

Deep Learning is certainly dominant in computer games like Atari. However, in classic board games dominant systems combine deep learning and classical search-based approaches (namely Monte-Carlo Tree Search, MCTS, a stochastic version of minimax). Deep Learning has led to improved performance but, on its own, without a tree search, it is nowhere near the performance of the two, combined [1].

Also, the dominant approach in Poker is not deep learning but Counterfactual Regret Minimization, a classical adversarial tree search approach. For example, see Pluribus, a poker-playing agent that can outplay humans in six-player poker. As far as I can tell, Pluribus does not use deep learning at all (and is much cheaper to train by self-play for that). Deep Learning poker bots exist, but are well behind Pluribus in skill.

So I admit, not "completely useless" for game playing, but even here deep learning is not as dominant as is often assumed.

_____________

[1] The contribution of each approach, deep learning and classical adversarial search of a game tree, may not be entirely clear by reading, for example, the DeepMind papers on AlphaGo and its successors (in the μZero paper, MCTS is all but hidden away behind a barrage of unnecessary abstraction). It seems that DeepMind was trying to make it look like it was their neural nets that were doing all the job, probably because that's the approach they are selling, rather than MCTS, which isn't their invention anyway (neither is reinforcement learning, or deep learning, and many other approaches that they completely failed to attribute in their papers). It should be obvious however that AlphaGo and friends would not include an MCTS component unless they really, really needed it. And they do.

IBM had tried a similar trick back in the '90s when their Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov: the whole point of having a wardrobe-sized supercomputer play chess against a grand master was an obvious marketing ploy by a company who (still at the time) was in the business of selling hardware. In truth, the major contributor to the win against Kasparov was alpha-beta minimax, and an unprecedented database of opening moves. But minimax and knowledge engineering was just not what IBM sold.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#190
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us clearly do. As we have no way to find them systematically, we can't tell if we all do, or if it's just some of us.

Do we? Only if you think the brain actually works like an LLM.

Not only; it's demonstrable behaviour regardless of mechanism.
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