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What happens when people don't understand how AI works

theatlantic.com

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Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#201

Post by elia_42 »

Totally agree with the content of the article. In part, AI is certainly able to simulate very well the behavior and operations of a "way of expressing itself" of our mind, that is, mathematical calculation, deductive reasoning and other similar things.

But our mind is extremely polymorphic and these operations represent only one side of a much more complex and difficult to explain whole. Even Alan Turing, in his writings on the possibility of building a mechanical intelligence, realized that it was impossible for a machine to completely imitate a human being: for this to be possible, the machine would have to "walk among other humans, scaring all the citizens of a small town" (Turing says more or less like this).

Therefore, he realized many years ago that he had to face this problem with a very cautious and limited approach, limiting the imitative capabilities of the machine to those human activities in which calculation, probability and arithmetic are main, such as playing chess, learning languages and mathematical calculation.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#202

Post by duxup »

dmos62 wrote: post #189
duxup wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would it be thinking if the brain was modeled in a more "accurate" way? Does this set of criteria for thinkingness come from whether or not the underlying machinery resembles what the corresponding machinery in humans looks like under the hood? 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…

IMO it would depend on what it is actually doing.

Right now the fact that it just string words together without knowing the meaning is painfully obvious when it fails. I'll ask a simple question and get a "Yes" back and then it lists all the reasons that indicate the answer is very clearly "No." But it is clear that the LLM doesn't "know" what it is saying.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#203

Post by sdenton4 »

falcor84 wrote: post #187
kelseyfrog wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Others probably asked where they left their sandals. 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 sandal…

The particularly amazing part is that both the Oracle and the LLM said 'Right where you left them,' but only the LLM was correct.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#204

Post by david-gpu »

th0ma5 wrote: post #74
david-gpu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just summarizing, but also being able to answer follow-up questions about what is in the text. And, like Wikipedia, they can be useful to find your bearing in a subject that you know nothing about. Unlike Wikipedia, you can ask it free-form questions and have it review your understanding.

I keep hearing anecdotes but the data, like a widely covered BBC study, say they only compress and shorten and routinely fail outside of testing on real world selection of only the most important content or topics.

You don't have to trust my word -- all you have to do is provide an LLM with a text that you are well familiar with and ask the LLM questions about it.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#205

Post by weatherlite »

duxup wrote: post #141
kelseyfrog wrote: post #7

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.

Thinking ...you're simply moving some chains of neurons right?

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#206

Post by BirAdam »

streb-lo wrote: post #166
carlosjobim wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Whether or not you are religious, channeling the human impulse to worship into something singular, immaterial, eternal, without form, and with very precise rules to not murder, lie, covet, etc… is quite useful for human organization.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#207

Post by Havoc »

We can debate about intelligence all day but there is also an element of “if it’s stupid but it works then it’s not stupid” here

A very large portion of tasks humans do don’t need all that much deep thinking. So on that basis it seems likely that it’ll be revolutionary.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#208

Post by pixl97 »

kenjackson wrote: post #171
jhedwards wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This is really over indexing on language for LLMs. It’s about taking input and generating output. Humans use different types of senses as their input, LLMs use text. What makes thinking an interesting form of output is that it processes the input in some non-trivial way to be able to do an assortment of different tasks. But that’s it. There may be other forms of intelligence that have other “senses” who deem our abil…

LLMs use tokens. Tokens don't have to be text, hence multimodal AI. Fee free to call them different senses if you want.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#209

Post by throwawaymaths »

827a wrote: post #185
throwawaymaths wrote: post #173

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…

> I cant see how this doesn't describe, abstractly, human cognition. now, maybe llms are not fully capable of the breadth of human cognition 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…

do they matter in a practical sense? an LLM can write a structured essay better than most undergrads. and as for measuring "smart", we throw that word around a lot. a dog is smart in a human way for being able to fetch one of 30 objects based on name or to drive a car (yes, dogs can drive), the bar for "smart" is pretty low, claiming llms are not smart is just prejudice.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#210

Post by rollcat »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #148
duxup wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question is what's different in your own "thinking?"

Ask a crow, or a parrot. (Really intelligent animals, by the way!)
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