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Life is more than an engineering problem

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Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#241

Post by mapt »

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…

Chiang is a silly blob of meat, of course he's not capable of actual reasoning, much less "intelligence".

We grant him personhood, but personhood, like the LA Review of Books, is just a social construct.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#242

Post by bsenftner »

rambambram wrote: post #240
bsenftner wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that reasoning and consciousness are different, however what I do not see being discussed by the AI research community is the necessity to define and then develop "artificial comprehension". At this point in time, the act of comprehension is a scientific mystery. I'd say 'consciousness' is the ongoing ever present comprehension of the moment, a feedback self conversation assessing the current situation a bein…

Thanks for this. Do you have a blog somewhere, preferably with an RSS feed?

I have a never updated blog, but I'm not an active research scientist. I'm just a plain ordinary over educated guy, whose been writing software using AI, across all the things that have been called "AI" for about 45 years. One could say I'm "over read", at one point I'd read every single Nobel Literature winner, I have finished dozens of authors, and my personal taste is mind fuck philosophy in narrative fiction - think Clockwork Orange, Philip K Dick, and beatnik literature. I post a lot of my opinions at Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Blake-Senftner

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#243

Post by throw4847285 »

the_af wrote: post #212

Ted Chiang probably has an uphill battle convincing people here of his take, precisely because he thinks the engineering approach may be wrong. Or in his words: > Arguably the most important parts of our lives should not be approached with this attitude. Some of this attitude comes from the fact that the people making AI tools are engineers viewing everything from an engineering perspective, but it’s also that, as a…

I've always complained that engineering relies on a lot of stolen valor from its adjacency to science. There is nothing scientific about treating everything in life as an optimization problem. And yet engineers often act like they are noble pursuers of truth in the same vein as scientists.

For example, take the Tesla vs. Edison dichotomy that became popular on the internet in the mid 2000s. The narrative was that Edison was an idea stealing hack, while Tesla was a brilliant visionary scientist and engineer.

The reality was that Edison was a brilliant inventor and a shrewd businessman, while Tesla was only the former and he made brilliant inventions that made other men like George Westinghouse very rich. But a scientist? Tesla was a crank who doubted the existence of electrons and distrusted Albert Einstein.

Tesla makes a good patron saint of modern engineers, but not of engineering's self image. He had a victim complex, he constantly commented on topics outside his area of expertise, and his lack of business acumen was seen as proof that he was a true outsider genius whose ideas were actually too good.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#244

Post by acureau »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #74
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…

Even most intelligent people can hallucinate, we still haven't fixed this problem. There's a lot of training material and bias which leads many to repeat those things "LLM's are just a stochastic parrot, glorified auto complete/google search, Markov chains, just statistics", etc. The thing is, these sentences sound really good and so it's easy to repeat them when you have made up your mind. It's a shortcut.

Intelligent people do not "hallucinate" in the same sense that an LLM does. Counterarguments you don't like aren't "shortcuts". There are certainly obnoxious anti-LLM people, but you can't use them to dismiss everyone else.

An LLM does nothing more than predict the next token in a sequence. It is functionally auto-complete. It hallucinates because it has no concept of a fact. It has no "concept", period, it cannot reason. It is a statistical model. The "reasoning" you observe in models like o1 is a neat prompting trick that allows it to generate more context for itself.

I use LLMs on a daily basis. I use them at work and at home, and I feel that they have greatly enhanced my life. At the end of the day they are just another tool. The term "AI" is entirely marketing preying on those who can't be bothered to learn how the technology works.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#245

Post by RationPhantoms »

ip26 wrote: post #152
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…

Can an LLM discover a new theory of natural law, such as prove or disprove string theory? This is what I ponder. The creation or discovery of something new that it can’t just copy, that would have to be discovered via human thought otherwise. Something provably true. The equivalent of discovering general relativity before humans had.

I feel like there is likely far more useful answers in overlooked science then there is in "new" science.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#246

Post by ElevenLathe »

fmbb wrote: post #83
mofeien wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this also feels like a statement that would obviously need strong justification. For if animals are capable of reasoning, probably through being trained on many examples of the laws of nature doing their thing, then why couldn't a statistical model be?

> For if animals are capable of reasoning Are they? Which animals? Some seem smart and maybe do it. Needs strong justification. > probably through being trained on many examples of the laws of nature doing their thing Is that how they can reason? Why do you think so? Sounds like something that needs strong justification. > then why couldn't a statistical model be? Maybe because that is not how anything in the world a…

Are human beings not animals? If animals can't reason, then neither can we.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#247

Post by jrussino »

7thaccount wrote: post #26
gcanyon wrote: post #9

I'll take this as my chance to recommend Ted Chiang -- he is among the very best short story writers working in science fiction (I say confidently, not having done an extensive survey...). His works are remarkably clever, from Understand, which does a credible job of portraying human superintelligence, to Exhalation, which explores the concept of entropy in a fascinating way. And of course Story of Your Life, on whic…

Understand really was my favorite super intelligence story. Isn't the new show severance based off one of his short stories as well? I can't remember. I wasn't a big fan of the pacing of the digients story with the little digital life forms. It was certainly thought provoking though.

I'll preface this by saying I've only watched season 1 of Severance so far.

I have never heard anyone involved with the show suggest this, but I feel pretty strongly that it's based off or at least inspired by Greg Egan's "Learning To Be Me".

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#248

Post by rambambram »

bsenftner wrote: post #242
rambambram wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this. Do you have a blog somewhere, preferably with an RSS feed?

I have a never updated blog, but I'm not an active research scientist. I'm just a plain ordinary over educated guy, whose been writing software using AI, across all the things that have been called "AI" for about 45 years. One could say I'm "over read", at one point I'd read every single Nobel Literature winner, I have finished dozens of authors, and my personal taste is mind fuck philosophy in narrative fiction - th…

I don't care about qualifications or job titles, if I read a solid piece of text that makes me think differently, I want to know more. ;) I bookmarked your Quora page and blog in my RSS reader, so if you ever start blogging... And thanks for pointing to Philip K Dick, I might actually start reading science fiction.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#249

Post by SkiFire13 »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #233
SkiFire13 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see Tao claiming ChatGPT proved a theorem. Moreover most questions seemed to be about something already talked about online, so it seems plausible that it was included in the training data. This is IMO a big issue with evaluating LLMs, you can't keep asking the same questions because you can't be sure they will eventually answer by memory or actually reason.

"or actually reason." how can you be sure it actually do "reasoning" ??? all I can see just made up some nonsense words

That's the point of my comment though...

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#250

Post by snapcaster »

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.

The guy in memento is clearly still an intelligent human despite having no memory. These arguments always strike me as coming from a "humans are just special okay!" place. Why are you so determined to find some way in which LLMs aren't intelligent? Why gatekeep so much?
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