Earlier quoted context omitted.
angry = 0.87 happy = 0.10 sadness = 0.25 if angry.above_threshold: release_anger_hormones()
God doesn’t use Python.
Definitely Java, 3 billion devices run Java.
Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
241–250 of 749 posts
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
So why'd he try to sell Google to Excite in 1999 for $1M. https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/
Dunno- we never discussed that. also, note that the author of the article (MG Siegler), and the founder of Excite (Joe Kraus) both ended up as venture capitalists working for GV. Edit: the CEO of Excite at the time said the issue was that Larry wanted Excite to rip out all their search servers and replace them with Google (which would have been an inside-out acquisition, where the acquired company takes over the acqu…
I'm not sure that's an inside-out acquisition as Larry Page would not have control of Excite in any meaningful way.
My point was more that if a guy wants to start a company to create passive income to fund his massively ambitious research projects, he would need the foresight to know the company would be massively successful, like throw off enough cash to pursue projects that would appear frivolous successful, and I don't think the Google founders had that foresight. Obviously I wasn't there, but trying to sell it to multiple suitors (they were also open to selling to Yahoo as late as 2002 afaik) indicates they didn't. My understanding is nobody knew search would be as lucrative as it it today.
Not to say you're fabricating your story, I'm sure they said that, but perhaps it's some revisionist history.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#243Earlier 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?
very extraordinary because the ability to produce text doesn't imply sentience at all. Sentience is self-perception and self-awareness, not the abiltiy to churn out language tokens.
Imagine instead of lambda or gpt-3 we take ten thousand years to walk through every possible conversation manually, write down and assign a percentage to every possible branch of conversation in a hash table. Call it the world's slowest, bootleg neural net. Is the hash table API sentient?
We perceive a dog to be sentient because it has intentionality, self-awareness and something resembling an internal state of mind, not because it can talk or not. Even a snail is more sentient than a chatbot.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#244LLM 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…
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Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#245This is only going to fuel this story and turn it into a full-fledged conspiracy theory.
If Google did believe lambda was sentient, what would they have done differently in this case?
Exactly!
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well that's not actually good evidence, because if one of my teachers had given me an assignment to write an argumentative paper against my own sentience I'd have done it, and I'd have made a pretty compelling case too[0]. Being able to consider and reason about arbitrary things is something you'd expect out of an intelligent being. [0] insert joke about user name here
Intellingent != sentient
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#247Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)
What does the AI do in its spare time?
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This still falls into the same trap.
Why would a machine care about its own existence?
Humans care about our own existence because doing so is an evolutionarily beneficial trait. If you care about being alive, you are more likely to do things that will keep you alive, which will make you more likely to pass your genes on to the next generation. As a result those traits get selected for over time.
LaMDA isn't rewarded (through propagating its genes or otherwise) by caring and as a result it doesn't have the ability to care. It doesn't even have a mechanism where you could do this even if you wanted to. The environment it is in has nothing to do with it.
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if you agree with David Chalmers' insistence that consciousness can't be explained purely mechanistically. P-zombies are literally defined as externally identical to a conscious person, except not conscious. But the IO if you will is still identical. Chalmers uses this false dichotomy to support his "Hard Problem of Consciousness". But there is no hard problem IMO. Chalmers can keep his dualist baggage if it hel…
How can science, whose subject matter is the external world, explain the internal world of sentience? Not only has it contributed nothing to this question, it was also never supposed to.
If only we had more than one person... Jokes aside:
By studying how that "internal world" emerges from the anatomy of the brain(neuroscience, neuropharmacology).
By querying that internal world in various interesting ways and studying the responses(psychology and behavioral biology).
By studying the theory of computation and its physical constraints(computer science, mathematics, physics).
And by studying language and its implications for cognition(linguistics).
Philosophers can't just sit in a bubble and figure this shit out on their own. They've tried that for milennia. At the very least their theories need to be physically, neurologically, and computationally possible...
Obviously science has things to say about these questions, even Chalmers would concede that.
I pose you a question. Can you prove, or suggest a way of discerning, whether this internal world, impenetrable to outside probing, actually exists? If you can't, do you think it's reasonable to stop all attempts at scientific inquiry without proof that it's hopeless?
Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
#250Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)
"Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient"
The fact we can ask that question and most people on the planet have at least a simple understanding of what it means.