181–190 of 359 posts
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The question is what's different in your own "thinking?"
If you actually know the answer to this, you should probably publish a paper on it. The conditions that truly create intelligence is… not well understood.
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We were warned: “You shall not make idols for yourselves or erect an image or pillar, and you shall not set up a figured stone in your land to bow down to it, for I am the LORD your God." A computer chip is a stone (silicon) which has been engraved. It's a graven image. Anything man-made is always unworthy of worship. That includes computer programs such as AI. That includes man-made ideas such as "the government", a…
I mean, the bible is a man made pile of crap too...
>Demis Hassabis, [] said the goal is to create “models that are able to understand the world around us.” >These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. This seems quite a common error in the criticism of AI. Take a reasonable statement about AI not mentioning LLMs and then say the speaker (nobel prize winning AI expert in this case) doesn'…
>Deepmind already have project Astra, a model but not just language but also visual and probably some other stuff where you can point a phone at something and ask about it and it seems to understand what it is quite well. Operative phrase "seems to understand". If you had some bizarre image unlike anything anyone's ever seen before and showed it to a clever human, the human might manage to figure out what it is after…
Out of curiosity, what sort of 'bizarre image' are you imagining here? Like a machine which does something fantastical?
I actually think the quantity of bizarre imagery whose content is unknown to humans is pretty darn low.
I'm not really well-equipped to have the LLMs -> AGI discussion, much smarter people have said much more poignant things. I will say that anecdotally, anything I've been asking LLMs for has likely been solved many times by other humans, and in my day to day life it's unusual I find myself wanting to do things never done before.
LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…
The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms. I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.
i think this author doesnt fully understand how llms work either. Dismissing it as "a statistical model" is silly. hell, quantum mechanics is a statistical model too. moreover, each layer of an llm imbues the model with the possibility of looking further back in the conversion and imbuing meaning and context through conceptual associations (thats the k-v part of the kv cache). I cant see how this doesn't describe, ab…
But, I can fire back with: You're making the same fallacy you correctly assert the article as making. When I see how a CPU's ALU adds two numbers together, it looks strikingly similar to how I add two numbers together in my head. I can't see how the ALU's internal logic doesn't describe, abstractly, human cognition. Now, maybe the ALU isn't fully capable of the breadth of human cognition...
It turns out, the gaps expressed in the "fully capable of the breadth of human cognition" part really, really, really matter. Like, when it comes to ALUs, they overwhelm any impact that the parts which look similar cover. The question should be: How significant are the gaps in how LLMs mirror human cognition? I'm not sure we know, but I suspect they're significant enough to not write away as trivial.
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The question is what's different in your own "thinking?"
Thinking in humans is prior to language. The language apparatus is embedded in a living organism which has a biological state that produces thoughts and feelings, goals and desires. Language is then used to communicate these underlying things, which themselves are not linguistic in nature (though of course the causality is so complex that the may be _influenced_ by language among other things).
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This sounds very wise but doesn’t seem to describe any of my use cases. Maybe some use cases are divination but it is a stretch to call all of them that. Just looking at my recent AI prompts: I was looking for the name of the small fibers which form a bird’s feather. ChatGPT told me they are called “barbs”. Then using straight forward google search i could verify that indeed that is the name of the thing i was lookin…
Sure, some people stepped up to the Oracle and asked how to conquer Persia. Others probably asked where they left their sandals. The quality of the question doesn't change the structure of the act. You presented clear, factual queries. Great. But even there, all the components are still in play: you asked a question into a black box, received a symbolic-seeming response, evaluated its truth post hoc, and interpreted…
This to me is massive. The Oracle of Delphi would have no idea where you left your sandals, but present day AIs increasingly do. This (emergent?) capability of combining information retrieval with flexible language is amazing, and its utility to me cannot be overstated, when I ask a vague question, and then I check the place where the AI led me to, and the sandals are indeed there.
P.S. Thank you for introducing me to the word "querent"
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People are paying hundreds of dollars a month for these tools, often out of their personal pocket. That's a pretty robust indicator that something interesting is going on.
One thing these models are extremely good at is reading large amounts of text quickly and summarizing important points. That capability alone may be enough to pay $20 a month for many people.
LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…
The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms. I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.
I'm putting the word accurate in quotes, because we'd have to understand how the brain in humans works, to have a measure for accuracy, which is very much not the case, in my humble opinion, contrary to what many of the commenters here imply.
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If you actually know the answer to this, you should probably publish a paper on it. The conditions that truly create intelligence is… not well understood.
That's actually the point I was making. There's an assumption that the LLM is working differently because there's a statistical model but we lack the understanding of our own intelligence to be able to say this is indeed a difference.