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Life is more than an engineering problem

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Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#191

Post by timewizard »

bmitc wrote: post #82
emtel wrote: post #70

I like Chiang’s stories, but he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to LLMs. Forget the philosophical points - he claims that LLMs are strictly worse than search engines for information retrieval. This is just obviously false, I can give you dozens of conversations from my ChatGPT history over the past two months which would have been impossible to get answers to on Google.

What are the examples? I've had several LLM search result summaries contain flat out mistakes and incorrect statements.

I've had several summaries that are just 80% duplications of pages found in the 4th to 5th position in the search results.

It seriously looks like google is deranking actually useful and informative sites and then passing their content through an "LLM" to slightly reorganize it and then pass it off as it's own.

It's a copyright laundering machine put together by advertising companies so you never leave their properties. I genuinely think it's a criminal conspiracy at this point.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#192

Post by slibhb »

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…

I agree with Chiang. Reminds me of Searle and The Chinese Room (I agree with Searle too).

I do think that at some point everyone is just arguing semantics. Chiang is arguing that "actual reasoning" is, by definition, not something that an LLM can do. And I do think he's right. But the real story is not "LLMs can't do X special thing that only biological life can do," the real story is "X special thing that only biological life can do isn't necessary to build incredibe AI that in many ways surpasses biological life".

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#193

Post by pixl97 »

daveguy wrote: post #177
kmmlng wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like the classic shifting of goalposts to determine when AI has actually become intelligent. Is the ability to communicate not a form of intelligence? We don't have to pretend like these models are super intelligent, but to deny them any intelligence seems too far for me.

AI certainly won't be intelligent while it has episodic responses to queries with no ability to learn from or even remember the conversation without it being fed back through as context. This is the current case for LLM models. Token prediction != Intelligence no matter how intelligent it may seem. I would say adaptability is a fundamental requirement of intelligence.

I mean humans have short term and long term memory, short term memory is just our context window.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#194

Post by digbybk »

daveguy wrote: post #182
munksbeer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chiang has it exactly right with his doubts, and the notion that pattern recognition is little different from the deeply complex navigation of reality we living things do is the badly misguided notion. How do you know this?

The same way that we know interpolation of a linear regression is not the same as the deeply complex navigation of reality we do as living things.

I notice that often in these debates someone will make the comparison between a low level mechanism driving LLMs, and a high level emergent behavior of the human mind. I don't think it's deliberate - we don't fully understand how the brain works so we only have emergent behaviors - but how can you be so certain that deeply complex navigation of reality can't emerge from interpolation of a linear regression?

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#195

Post by teleforce »

mantas wrote: post #32
teleforce wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Islamic tradition it's the language of the heavens. The bottom line is that the best and/or perfect language there is, should be able to create the best and/or perfect literature either in the form of book/oration/etc. Mind you Quran is not originally in the form of book it's actually oral tradition and Muhammad is a well known illiterate person. In fact (I'm not making this up) currently there are many…

According to my tradition, my language is the best of the best. Get off my lawn with your language.

I don't speak Arabic but I wish I can perhaps later when I can get around and learning it.

If you say that your language is the best or perfect then present your case with examples and proof. Don't run from good arguments and justifications.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#196

Post by mkoubaa »

7thaccount wrote: post #189
mkoubaa wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I found that story fantastic

My wife and I both thought the pacing was glacial. The subject matter was also pretty depressing (not unusual with his stories) and I didn't think the payoff was that great tbh. Overall, it's a fantastic book though.

That could be the case. I read it on vacation so I was more willing to indulge in a slower story

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#197

Post by daveguy »

digbybk wrote: post #194
daveguy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way that we know interpolation of a linear regression is not the same as the deeply complex navigation of reality we do as living things.

I notice that often in these debates someone will make the comparison between a low level mechanism driving LLMs, and a high level emergent behavior of the human mind. I don't think it's deliberate - we don't fully understand how the brain works so we only have emergent behaviors - but how can you be so certain that deeply complex navigation of reality can't emerge from interpolation of a linear regression?

That's a good question. With sufficient dimensionality, interaction terms, and enough linear regressions, I suppose it's possible. But dynamic and reactive coordination of many multiple linear regressions wouldn't be just a linear regression. The output of a linear regression is simplistic just like LLM token prediction is simplistic. Saying something might be a component of eventual intelligence is far from it being intelligence. LLMs are episodic responses to a fixed context by a fixed model that is programmed to predict tokens. Even the CoT models, while more complex, still use a static model with a recursive feed of model outputs back to the model. I think Dr. Chollet does an excellent job of identifying the fundamental difference between a potential AGI and static models in his ARC-AGI papers and presentations.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#198

Post by notjoemama »

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…

> how an intelligent person can still think this

Cognitive neuroscience

“qualia”

Ray Kurzweil

I’ll take “things OP doesn’t know about that an intelligent person does” for 800 Alex.

If you’re enamored with LLMs and can’t see the inherent problems, you don’t actually know about AI and machine learning.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#199

Post by teleforce »

bee_rider wrote: post #55
teleforce wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Islamic tradition it's the language of the heavens. The bottom line is that the best and/or perfect language there is, should be able to create the best and/or perfect literature either in the form of book/oration/etc. Mind you Quran is not originally in the form of book it's actually oral tradition and Muhammad is a well known illiterate person. In fact (I'm not making this up) currently there are many…

This point of view was basically covered in the interview. > I grew up in a French household, and I often feel that there are French words and expressions that better capture what I want to express than any English word or expression could. > Eco writes that when European scholars were arguing about what language Adam and Eve spoke, each one typically argued in favor of the language he himself spoke. So Flemish schol…

> So Flemish scholars said that Adam and Eve obviously must have spoken Flemish

Obviously the Flemish scholars are blindly biased that's why it's very popular all over the world /s

Seriously, any great book or literature using Flemish that is considered a golden standard in Flemish as the Quran is? The book that's read every minutes around the world and memorized entirely, continously generations after generations? Fun facts, even the Pope do not memorized the entire Gospel let alone the entire Bible including the Old Testaments.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#200

Post by x-complexity »

BrenBarn wrote: post #167
sukruh wrote: post #34

I agreed with almost all of it until: >My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich. What's…

> What's wrong with people getting rich by producing goods and services, and selling these to willing buyers? If you take this sentence and change "people getting rich" to something else (like "fomenting drug addiction" or "polluting the environment"), does anything change? Whether the inequality is a result of "selling goods to willing buyers" is a complete red herring. If that consequence is bad, it doesn't really…

> If you take this sentence and change "people getting rich" to something else (like "fomenting drug addiction" or "polluting the environment"), does anything change?

False equivalency. It is possible to gain wealth without performing any of the listed/possible negative global effects. Furthermore, it is a backdoor towards injecting ideas of poverty being a morally positive position.

> Even if markets were free, there's nothing inherently good about a free market. What's good is a free society, where people in aggregate have substantive freedom to do what makes them happy.

Having a free society implies the freedom to exchange with each other with minimal restrictions. Not allowing people to do so runs opposite to the ideals of the stated intention.

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All that being said, that *doesn't* mean that the current market's working as intended. What has been inherited is a complex tangled ball of national ideals, personal & corporate persuasions to governments for their own reasons/goals, & consistent global coordination failures when circumstances change.

But the outright banning of markets is equivalent to the banning of hammers, just because hammers are sometimes used to bludgeon people to death. It is ultimately a tool, and a very useful one in terms of signaling demand & supply.

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