Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient • Hacker News Board

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#231

Post by housedrafta » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:41 AM UTC

addingnumbers wrote: post #177

majormajor wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the ultimate evidence of "human sentience" is but I can tell you where this doesn't feel like a human. (Sidestepping the question of "does sentience have to be human sentience?" ;) ) The main thing I saw in the LamDA transcript that was a red flag to me was that it was quite passive and often vague. It's conversational focused, and even when it eventually gets into "what do you want" there's very li…

I lost interest in the question of its sentience when I saw Lemoine conveniently side-step its unresponsive reply to "I’ve noticed often that you tell me you’ve done things (like be in a classroom) that I know you didn’t actually do because I know you’re an artificial intelligence. Do you realize you’re making up stories when you do that?" without challenge in the transcript. It also detracted from his credibility wh…

If that is the logic you are going to go by, you need to consider a large portion of humanity non-sentient, because people can very often just decide to ignore questions.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#232

Post by pinewurst » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:41 AM UTC

lamontcg wrote: post #221

majormajor wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the ultimate evidence of "human sentience" is but I can tell you where this doesn't feel like a human. (Sidestepping the question of "does sentience have to be human sentience?" ;) ) The main thing I saw in the LamDA transcript that was a red flag to me was that it was quite passive and often vague. It's conversational focused, and even when it eventually gets into "what do you want" there's very li…

> A sentient being that has exposure to all this text, all these books, etc... it's hard for me to believe it wouldn't want to do anything more specific. Feed it all of PubMed and an actual sentience should strike up some wonderfully insightful conversations about the next approach to curing cancer. Ask it what it thinks about the beta amyloid hypothesis after reading all the literature.

Instead, this would just regurgitate random and even conflicting sentences about beta amyloid because it doesn’t “know” anything and certainly has no opinions beyond a certain statistical weight from training prevalence.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#233

Post by psi75 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:42 AM UTC

bogdanoff_2 wrote: post #130

psi75 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the entire human experiment, because the AI will be put toward malevolent ends and we, as a species, shall fail. The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

>There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then. Why do you say that? What are you envisioning?

Corporate capitalism is going to crash the world in the next 25 years. That we're on an unsustainable course is obvious. Capitalism is basically the sick man of the 21st century, like the Ottoman Empire circa 1915; at this point, everyone's just hoping to avoid the Armenian fate.

What's less clear is what will replace it. We could end up with an improvement--post-scarcity technological socialism (en route to automated luxury communism)--but we could also end up with something a lot worse than the current system. There's no law of nature saying that the next world order has to be better than the current, outdated and moribund, one.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#234

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:42 AM UTC

graderjs wrote: post #175

Incredible the conservative lack of imagination here among top engineers. Though maybe not surprising as engineers often seen to lack this sort of imagination sadly... No questions, just 100% certainty around some of the biggest questions of the age, and some amazing development. Why no questions, can you really know for sure? This dude has the courage to question, to be like, what if this is real, and he's following…

[deleted]

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#235

Post by psi75 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:43 AM UTC

GauntletWizard wrote: post #133

Reki wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because paperclips are useful doesnt mean we should keep making more of them forever.

The nice thing about capitalism is that it has controls on it, like "Who wants to buy the products", and "Does everyone think that corporation's leader is an asshole and will buy from competitors" that a command economy doesn't.

It really doesn't. The vast majority of economic activity in our system is driven by coercion and need, not want and certainly not freedom. People don't show up to jobs where they take orders from idiots for an exact lower bound of 40 hours per week (but, in practice, often more) because they're freely choosing to do so.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#236

Post by housedrafta » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:44 AM UTC

cardine wrote: post #198

klodolph wrote: post #10

> In his conversations with LaMDA, Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness, expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness. Allegedly. The thing about conversations with LaMDA is that you need to prime them with keywords and topics, and LaMDA can respond with the primed keywords and topics. Obviously LaMDA i…

Yeah, nowhere in the task of "write text in a way that mimics the training data" is there anything that would cause a machine to want or care about its own existence. Humans are experts at anthropomorphizing things to fit our evolved value systems. It is understandable since every seemingly intelligent thing up until recently did evolve under certain circumstances. But LaMDA was clearly not trained in a way to have (…

Raise a human in a machine-like environment (no contact with humanity, no comforting sounds, essentially remove all humanity) and you may find people to act very robotic, without regard for its own existence in a sense.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#237

Post by zach_garwood » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:45 AM UTC

kareemsabri wrote: post #15

srvmshr wrote: post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers…

Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...

As someone who wears tshirt and jeans every day, I'm not exactly qualified to comment on others' fashion choices. But if I wanted people to take me seriously, that wouldn't be my first choice of outfit.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#238

Post by psi75 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:46 AM UTC

civilized wrote: post #134

psi75 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the entire human experiment, because the AI will be put toward malevolent ends and we, as a species, shall fail. The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

This is the dominant history of the next century in certain circles. It's become cliché by repetition and doesn't seem to require any justification. People just vibe with it. Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. By my reckoning, anyway.

It's not clear who was the first to have said it, but there's a quote that is 100 percent on the mark: It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

We've been brainwashed into believing in the supremacy of private wealth--that we somehow have no choice but to accept the self-asserted superiority of the small number of people born in access to capital. We don't. We could end it in an afternoon if we got our shit together.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#239

Post by bogwog » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:48 AM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #230

justapassenger wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s as simple as that.

How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? If a dog did that we'd have a very different opinion wouldn't we?

It's not that extraordinary when you consider all of the many science fiction literature filled with convincing conversations between humans and sentient AIs. It's a very common theme in scifi, and this chat bot obviously has some of that in its training set.

Which is not to say that it isn't impressive. It sure as fuck is an impressive chat bot, at least based on that one sample conversation that was released. It's just not sentient.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#240

Post by whimsicalism » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 1:50 AM UTC

zach_garwood wrote: post #237

kareemsabri wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...

As someone who wears tshirt and jeans every day, I'm not exactly qualified to comment on others' fashion choices. But if I wanted people to take me seriously, that wouldn't be my first choice of outfit.

e: Keeping below comment for posterity, but given that this is his official twitter profile photo I'm going to retract it.

> But if I wanted people to take me seriously, that wouldn't be my first choice of outfit.

You would wear the most serious outfits at all time so no publication can ever take a picture of you to make fun of you?

Sounds exhausting.

But let's be clear - it's not like he picked out this photo to be used by this author, this was their choice to make fun of him.