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Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

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Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First you call it a metaphor, now you call it an analogy. Which are you using it as? An analogy highlights similarities, a metaphor is saying a bird is a plane. Is a nuclear power station a coal-fired power station? Both produce electricity. Is an EV an ICE? Both can get you from point A to point B. A statistical model is not the same as a complex neural network, and its capabilities are not comparable. I don't think…

An analogy. That is precisely the point I am making. OP says we are a long way from achieving intelligence because we don't understand many of the components of human intelligence. We don't need to believe that artificial intelligence will arise from similar properties as human intelligence. In much the same way aeroplanes don't fly using the same mechanics as reached via evolution. Not sure what you mean when you sa…

> Not sure what you mean when you say a statistical model is not a neural net. If we are talking LLMs, they are neural nets.

No, it's an artificial neural network.

The human brain is a complex neural network.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#292
post #175

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Humans "hallucinate" in the AI sense (it's an awful word that obscures how often we do it) all the time too. You'll find people confidently make claims not supported by data or indeed by any of their own data all the time, where when you poke around in their justifications you'll find they have none. The key difference appears a combination of two factors: We appear to be more likely to have learnt which subjects we'…

> Humans "hallucinate" in the AI sense (it's an awful word that obscures how often we do it) all the time too. Agreed. I'd like to add another point to the discussion. It seems to me, as if LLMs are held to a higher standard regarding telling the truth than humans are. In my opinion the reason for this is that computers have been traditionally used to solve deterministic tasks and that people are not used to them mak…

> It seems to me, as if LLMs are held to a higher standard regarding telling the truth than humans are.

Paradoxically, it seems as if the people who are pushing this the hardest are the same people who flat out deny even the slightest flicker of what could be considered intelligence.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean exactly "besides math/logic"? Because logic underpins everything we think. For example it cannot identify musical chords because despite (I presume) ample training material including explanations of how exactly this works, it cannot reasonable represent this as an abstract rigorous rule, as humans do. So I ask what is C E G and it tells me C major correctly, as it presumably appears many times throug…

i dunno man, I asked it about that chord and it told me it was an F diminished 7th chord. I asked it what a d flat major chord was and it told me. I then asked it what the relationship between the two was. It didnt catch it immediately but when I told it to think about inversions it got it. That's decent for a music student. It even told me about the role of each in a chord progression and how even though they share…

> I asked it about that chord and it told me it was an F diminished 7th chord. I asked it what a d flat major chord was and it told me. I then asked it what the relationship between the two was. It didnt catch it immediately but when I told it to think about inversions it got it.

So it gave you a wrong answer and when you spelled out the correct answer it said "OK" x) Was that it? Or am I missing something.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, so what are the specific concepts it doesn’t understand? I don’t think its ability to program in an obscure program is really a great test. That’s a matter of syntax more than semantics, no? Novel conceptual blends are where it excels. Yes, it needs to understand the concepts involved to blend them —but humans need that too.

I think you missed my point. It's understandable that it doesn't know how to program in a moderately obscure language. But the model doesn't understand that it doesn't. The specific concepts it doesn't understand are understanding what it is, its limitations, and what it's being asked to do. It doesn't seem to have any "meta" understanding. It's subconscious thought only. If I asked a human to program in a language t…

I agree it has very minimal metacognition. That’s partially addressed through prompt chaining—ie, having it reflect critically on its own reasoning. But I agree that it lacks self-awareness.

I think artifacts can easily reflect the understanding of the designer (Socrates claims an etymology of Technology from Echo-Nous [1])

But for an artifact to understand — this is entirely dependent on how you operationalize and measure it. Same as with people—we don’t expect people to understand things unless we assess them.

And, obviously we need to assess the understanding of machines. It is vitally important to have an assessment of how well it performs on different evals of understanding in different domains.

But I have a really interesting supposition about AI understanding that involves it’s ability to access the Platonic world of mathematical forms.

I recently read a popular 2016 article on the philosophy of scientific progress. They define scientific progress as increased understanding — and call it the “noetic account.” [2] Thats a bit of theoretical support for the idea that human understanding consists of our ability to conceptualize the world in terms of the Platonic forms.

Plato ftw!

[1] see his dialogue Cratylus

[2] Dellsén, F. (2016). Scientific progress: Knowledge versus understanding. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 56, 72-83.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dunno man, I asked it about that chord and it told me it was an F diminished 7th chord. I asked it what a d flat major chord was and it told me. I then asked it what the relationship between the two was. It didnt catch it immediately but when I told it to think about inversions it got it. That's decent for a music student. It even told me about the role of each in a chord progression and how even though they share…

> I asked it about that chord and it told me it was an F diminished 7th chord. I asked it what a d flat major chord was and it told me. I then asked it what the relationship between the two was. It didnt catch it immediately but when I told it to think about inversions it got it. So it gave you a wrong answer and when you spelled out the correct answer it said "OK" x) Was that it? Or am I missing something.

it gave me a correct answer (but not the one GP expected), and then I asked it about another chord GP wanted it to say (D flat major) which can be stylistically replaced with this one (by "inverting" the top note). I asked it what the relationship between the two was and it told me about how they're used in songwriting correctly (gave information about the emotions they invoke and how they resolve to other chords), but didnt tell me the (frankly, trivia) fact that they share notes if you happen to invert it in a particular way.

In music theory a set of the same notes can be one of several chords, the correct answer as to which one it is depends on the "key" of the song and context which wasnt provided, so the AI decided to define the root note of the chord as the bottom one which is a good and pretty standard assumption. In this case major chords are much more common than weird diminished 7 chords but I think you'll agree the approach to answering the question makes sense.

It's kind of like asking the AI about two equivalent mathematical functions expressed in different notation, and it saying a bunch of correct facts about the functions like their derivative, x intercept and stuff and how it can be used, but needing a prod to explicitly say the fact that they are interchangable. It's the kind of trivial barely-qualifies-as-an "oversight" I would expect actual human people who fully understand the material to make.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#296
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think ChatGPT is good evidence of this. What evidence do we have that this isn't how intelligence works? Animals have bodies and have to survive in an environment. They're not just sitting there waiting on a prompt to generate text. They do things in the real world. Language is later invention by one particular social animal which serves our needs to communicate, which is different than waiting on prompts.

That is just taking data in and generating data out, though. Language is just data, not something fundamentally different. There are certainly some missing elements, such as ongoing training and memory, but it's not at all clear that there's any major conceptual differences. There could be , we just don't really know.

The environment is noisy. Organisms generate data by making sense of the noise in ways that are beneficial to their survival.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything in the universe must by definition be rational. Why? You assume nature must be comprehensible to us because you define it that way? Nature's not under any obligation to us. > If something seems irrational, that's because there are rational things layered on top of one another in a way that creates a misapprehension in a partially-informed observer. Possible irrational things: Collapse of the wave functio…

Rationality != comprehensible to us We can't look at quantum mechanics and call it irrational. The way the universe works is by definition the right / correct / only way. If logic points one way and reality points another, the logic isn't taking everything into account.

You're confusing the map for the territory. Rationality is something that makes sense for us. That need not apply to nature. It's misplaced to say that nature is rational. Nature just is.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#298
post #118

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« I don't believe we've seen any evidence of this. » I think chatgpt did show proof of what was considered at least until very recently « intelligence ». aka: understand enough about context and concepts to provide relevant answers to very complex and open questions.

I think this is the culprit: ChatGPT does not understand , as proven by hallucinations, by being wrong on certain questions or puzzle etc.. It just seems to understand. This is useful, and deeply impressive, but it's not the same thing.

"it just seems to understand" :

Does stockfish "understand" chess, or does it just "seem to understand" chess ?

For all practical purposes and intent, this doesn't make much difference.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Let’s take quantum theory. There are lots of concepts that are based in math but can be reasoned about non-mathematically. The reason that chatGPT can write quantum computer programs to in any domain (despite the lack of existing programs!) is because it can deal with the concepts of quantum computing and the concepts in a domain (eg, predicting housing prices) and align them. Very little of human reasoning is…

>There are lots of concepts that are based in math but can be reasoned about non-mathematically. Can you be more specific? I literally don't know what you mean. What can you say about quantum mechanics that is not mathematical or logical in nature? Barring metaphysical issues of interpretation, which I assume is not what you mean.

Rarely do I think responding with chatGPT is appropriate, but this is one of those times. * Of course! When discussing concepts from quantum mechanics without getting into the mathematical details, we can focus on the general ideas and principles that underlie the theory. Here are some key concepts in quantum mechanics that can be explained in a non-mathematical way:

1. Superposition: In quantum mechanics, particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously, until they are measured. This is called superposition. It's like a coin spinning in the air, being both heads and tails at the same time, until it lands and shows one face.

2. Wave-particle duality: Particles like electrons, photons, and others exhibit both wave-like and particle-like properties. This means they can sometimes behave as particles, and at other times, as waves. This dual nature has been experimentally demonstrated through phenomena like the double-slit experiment.

3. Quantum entanglement: When two particles become entangled, their properties become correlated, regardless of the distance between them. If you measure one of the entangled particles, you'll immediately know the state of the other, even if they are light-years apart. This phenomenon is often referred to as "spooky action at a distance."

4. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: This principle states that we cannot simultaneously know the exact position and momentum of a particle. The more precisely we know one of these properties, the less precisely we can know the other. This inherent uncertainty is a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics.

5. Quantum tunneling: In quantum mechanics, particles can "tunnel" through barriers that would be insurmountable in classical physics. This is because the particle's wave function, which describes its probable location, can extend beyond the barrier, allowing the particle to appear on the other side.

6. Quantum superposition of states: Quantum systems can exist in multiple states at once, and when you measure a property of the system, it "collapses" into one of the possible states. This is a fundamental difference between quantum and classical mechanics, where systems have definite properties even before measurement.

These concepts can be discussed and reasoned about without delving into the complex mathematical equations that govern quantum mechanics. While a mathematical understanding is necessary for rigorous study and application of the theory, non-mathematical discussions can still provide valuable insights into the strange and fascinating world of quantum mechanics.*

QED

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think ChatGPT is good evidence of this. What evidence do we have that this isn't how intelligence works? Animals have bodies and have to survive in an environment. They're not just sitting there waiting on a prompt to generate text. They do things in the real world. Language is later invention by one particular social animal which serves our needs to communicate, which is different than waiting on prompts.

Reinforcement learning emulates survival of the fittest, in that smarted algorithms/parameters survive.

What that’s not how it works. You can be dumb and stil survive if you are better adapted to your environment.
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