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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

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Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#231

Post by coldtea »

hliyan wrote: post #220
goku12 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence doesn't imply sentience, does it? Is there an issue in calling a non-sentient system intelligent?

Shifting goalposts of AI aside, intelligence as a general faculty does not require sentience, consciousness, awareness, qualia, valence or any of the things traditionally associated with a high level of biological intelligence. But what it does require: the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. An LLM does only this. Where as a human-like intelligence ha…

>Shifting goalposts of AI aside, intelligence as a general faculty does not require sentience, consciousness, awareness, qualia, valence or any of the things traditionally associated with a high level of biological intelligence

Citation needed would apply here. What if I say it doe require some or all of those things?

>But what it does require: the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. An LLM does only this. Where as a human-like intelligence has some form on internal randomness, plus an internal world model against which such randomized output could get validated.

What's the difference between human internal randomness and an random number generator hooked to the LLM? Could even use anything real world like a lava lamp for true randomness.

And what's the difference between "an internal world model" and a number of connections between concepts and tokens and their weights? How different is a human's world model?

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#232

Post by card_zero »

ACCount37 wrote: post #226
card_zero wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, fuck knows. However, that doesn't automatically make this a "no true Scotsman" argument. Sometimes we just don't know an answer. Here's a question for you, actually: what's the criterion for being non -intelligent?

"Fuck knows" is a wrong answer if I've ever seen one. If you don't have anything attached to your argument, then it's just "LLMs are not intelligent because I said so". I, for one, don't think that "intelligence" can be a binary distinction. Most AIs are incredibly narrow though - entirely constrained to specific tasks in narrow domains. LLMs are the first "general intelligence" systems - close to human in the breadt…

You must excuse me, it's well past my bedtime and I only entered into this to-and-fro by accident. But LLMs are very bad in some domains compared to humans, you say? Naturally I wonder which domains you have in mind.

Three things humans have that look to me like they matter to the question of what intelligence is, without wanting to chance my arm on formulating an actual definition, are ideas, creativity, and what I think of as the basic moral drive, which might also be called motivation or spontaneity or "the will" (rather 1930s that one) or curiosity. But those might all be one thing. This basic drive, the notion of what to do next, makes you create ideas - maybe. Here I'm inclined to repeat "fuck knows".

If you won't be drawn on a binary distinction, that seems to mean that everything is slightly intelligent, and the difference in quality of the intelligence of humans is a detail. But details interest me, you see.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#233

Post by coldtea »

barnacs wrote: post #228
hliyan wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shifting goalposts of AI aside, intelligence as a general faculty does not require sentience, consciousness, awareness, qualia, valence or any of the things traditionally associated with a high level of biological intelligence. But what it does require: the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. An LLM does only this. Where as a human-like intelligence ha…

> the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. Isn't that what mathematical extrapolation or statistical inference does? To me, that's not even close to intelligence.

>Isn't that what mathematical extrapolation or statistical inference does?

Obviously not, since those are just producing output based 100% on the "sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input" (i.e. the data set).

The parent's constraint is not just about the output merely reiterating parts of the dataset verbatim. It's also about not having the output be just a function of the dataset (which covers mathematical and statistical inference).

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#234

Post by coldtea »

ripped_britches wrote: post #197
MengerSponge wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI (and its peer companies) have deliberately muddied the waters of that language. AI is a marketing term that lets them use disparate systems' success to inflate confidence in their promised utility.

Nope they started an AI company and then started messing around with robotics and then landing on LLMs as a runway.

None of the above refutes or even addresses the parent's point.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#235

Post by coldtea »

lucumo wrote: post #198
MengerSponge wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI (and its peer companies) have deliberately muddied the waters of that language. AI is a marketing term that lets them use disparate systems' success to inflate confidence in their promised utility.

Meh. People have been calling much dumber algorithms "AI" for decades. You guys are just pedants.

And that was fine, since the algorithms being much dumber then, never made laymen think "this is intelligent in a human-like way". Plus few cared for AI or AI products per se for the most part.

Now that AI is a household term, and that has human-like output and discussion capabilities, and used by laymen for anything, from diet advice to psychotherapy, the connotation is more damaging since people understand LLMs being AI as having human agency and understanding of the world.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#236

Post by imtringued »

measurablefunc wrote: post #89
wvbdmp wrote: post #4

Okay, so AI isn’t exceptional, but I’m also not exceptional. I run on the same tech base as any old chimpanzee, but at one point our differences in degree turned into one of us remaining “normal” and the other burning the entire planet. Whether the particular current AI tech is it or not, I have yet to be convinced that the singularity is practically impossible, and as long as things develop in the opposite direction…

If you use non-constructive reasoning¹ then you can argue for basically any outcome & even convince yourself that it is inevitable. The basic example is as follows, there is no scientific or physical principle that can prevent the birth of someone much worse than Hitler & therefore if people keep having children one of those children will inevitably be someone who will cause unimaginable death & destruction. My recom…

This isn't just an AI thing. There are a lot of of non-constructive ideologies like communism where simply getting rid of "oppressors" will magically unleash the promised utopia. When you give these people a constructive way to accomplish their goals, they will refuse, call you names and show their true colors. Their criticism is inherently abstract and can never have a concrete form, which also makes it untouchable by outside criticism.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#237

Post by imtringued »

int_19h wrote: post #168
1c2adbc4 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize that magic was the goal. I'm just trying to process unstructured data. Who's here looking for magic?

Many humans like to think that their own intelligence is "magic" that cannot be reduced to physics.

Just play word games and have magic be a branch of physics.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#238

Post by Bendy »

johnnienaked wrote: post #195
tempodox wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ll manage to make our own survival on this planet less probable, even without the help of “AI”.

The cult of efficiency will end in the only perfectly efficient world--one without us.

I’m fed up of hearing that nonsense, no it won’t. Efficiency is a human-defined measure of observed outcomes versus desired outcomes. This is subject to change as much as we are. If we do optimize ourselves to death, it’ll be because it’s what we ultimately want to happen. That may be true for some people but certainly not everyone.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#239

Post by chpatrick »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #204
chpatrick wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes LLMs hallucinate or bullshit, sometimes they don't, sometimes humans hallucinate or bullshit, sometimes they don't. It's not like you can tell a human to stop being delusional on command either. I'm not really seeing the argument.

If a human hallucinates or bullshits in a way that harms you or your company you can take action against them That's the difference. AI cannot be held responsible for hallucinations that cause harm, therefore it cannot be incentivized to avoid that behavior, therefore it cannot be trusted Simple as that

The question wasn't can it be trusted, it was does it think.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#240

Post by chpatrick »

barnacs wrote: post #225
chpatrick wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Creativity is coming up with something out of the blue. Thinking is using what you know to come to a logical conclusion. LLMs so far are not very good at the former but getting pretty damn good at the latter.

> Thinking is using what you know to come to a logical conclusion What LLMs do is using what they have _seen_ to come to a _statistical_ conclusion. Just like a complex statistical weather forecasting model. I have never heard anyone argue that such models would "know" about weather phenomena and reason about the implications to come to a "logical" conclusion.

I think people misunderstand when they see that it's a "statistical model". That just means that out of a range of possible answers, it picks in a humanlike way. If the logical answer is the humanlike thing to say then it will be more likely to sample it.

In the same way a human might produce a range of answers to the same question, so humans are also drawing from a theoretical statistical distribution when you talk to them.

It's just a mathematical way to describe an agent, whether it's an LLM or human.

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