Earlier quoted context omitted.
Irrelevant
Understanding the relevance of this will help you see beyond the hype and marketing.
What is the relevance from your perspective?
What happens when people don't understand how AI works
291–300 of 359 posts
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#292LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...” - Carl Sagan
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#293> Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, proclaimed last year that the platform may soon allow users to automate dating itself, disrupting old-fashioned human courtship by providing them with an AI “dating concierge” that will interact with other users’ concierges until the chatbots find a good fit. > Herd doubled down on these claims in a lengthy New York Times interview last month. Seriously, wha…
I’ve been asking myself that question regarding dating app companies for 10 years. The status quo is so dystopian already. Sure, go ahead, put an LLM in it. How much worse could it get than a glorified ELO rating?
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I cant see how this doesn't describe, abstractly, human cognition. now, maybe llms are not fully capable of the breadth of human cognition But, I can fire back with: You're making the same fallacy you correctly assert the article as making. When I see how a CPU's ALU adds two numbers together, it looks strikingly similar to how I add two numbers together in my head. I can't see how the ALU's internal logic doesn't…
do they matter in a practical sense? an LLM can write a structured essay better than most undergrads. and as for measuring "smart", we throw that word around a lot. a dog is smart in a human way for being able to fetch one of 30 objects based on name or to drive a car (yes, dogs can drive), the bar for "smart" is pretty low, claiming llms are not smart is just prejudice.
On a finite planet, we probably ought to care about how many orders of magnitude more energy that the LLM must use to perform a task than our 20-watt chimp-brains.
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s because the brain is simply a set of chemical and electrical interactions. I think some believe when we understand how the brain works it won’t be some “soulful” other worldly explanation. It will be some science based explanation that will seem very unsatisfying to some that think of us as more than complex machines. The human brain is different than LLMs, but I think we will eventually say “hey we can…
It looks like you did exactly what I described in my parent comment, so it doesn't add anything of substance. Let's agree to disagree.
The logic is that you preemptively shut down dissenting opinions so any comments with dissenting opinions are necessarily not adding anything of substance. They made good points and you simply don't want to discuss them; that does not mean the other commenter did not add substance and nuance to the discussion.
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms. I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.
I've tended to agree with this line of argument, but on the other hand... I expect that anybody you asked 10 years ago who was at least decently knowledgeable about tech and AI would have agreed that the Turing Test is a pretty decent way to determine if we have a "real" AI, that's actually "thinking" and is on the road to AGI etc. Well, the current generation of LLMs blow away that Turing Test. So, what now? Were we…
I posted a very similar (perhaps more combative) comment a few months ago:
> Peoples’ memories are so short. Ten years ago the “well accepted definition of intelligence” was whether something could pass the Turing test. Now that goalpost has been completely blown out of the water and people are scrabbling to come up with a new one that precludes LLMs. A useful definition of intelligence needs to be measurable, based on inputs/outputs, not internal state. Otherwise you run the risk of dictating how you think intelligence should manifest, rather than what it actually is. The former is a prescription, only the latter is a true definition.
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
do they matter in a practical sense? an LLM can write a structured essay better than most undergrads. and as for measuring "smart", we throw that word around a lot. a dog is smart in a human way for being able to fetch one of 30 objects based on name or to drive a car (yes, dogs can drive), the bar for "smart" is pretty low, claiming llms are not smart is just prejudice.
You are assuming that because we measure an undergrad's ability to critical think with undergrad essays, that is a valid test for the LLM's capacity to think -- it isnt. This measures only, extremely narrowly, the LLM's capacity to produce undergrad essays. Society doesnt require undergrad essays. Nor does it require yet another webserver, iot script, or weekend hobby project. Society has all of those things already,…
I'd just like to say, with unfortunately little to add, that your comments on this article are terrific to read. You've captured perfectly how I have felt about LLMs roughly from the first time they came out to how I still feel now. They're utterly amazingly technology that truly do feel like magic, except that I have enough of a background in math modeling and ML to de-mystify them.
But the key difference between a model and a human is exactly what you just said. It's what animals can do on the margin. Nobody taught humans language. Each of us individually who are alive today, sure. But go back far enough and humanity invented language. We directly interact with the physical world, develop mental models of it, observe that we are able to make sounds and symbols and somehow come to a mutual agreement that they should mean something in rough analogy to these independent but sufficiently similar mental models. That is magic. Nobody, no programmer, no mathematician, no investor, has any idea how humanity did that, and has no idea how to get a machine to do it, either. Replicating the accomplishments of something else is a tremendous feat and it will get our software very, very far, maybe as far as we ever need to really get it. But it is not doing what animals did. It didn't just figure this shit out on its own.
Maybe somewhat ironically, I don't even know that this is a real limitation that current techniques for developing statistical models can't overcome. Put some "AIs" loose in robot bodies, let them freely move about the world trying to accomplish the simple goal of continuing to exist, with cooperation allowed, and they may very well develop ways to encode knowledge, share it with each other, and write it down somehow to pass on to the future so they don't need to continually re-learn everything, especially if they get millions of years to do it.
It's obvious, though, that we don't even want this. It might be interesting purely as an experiment, but it probably isn't going to lead to any useful tools. What we do now actually does lead to useful tools. To me, that should tell us something in these discussions. Trying to figure if X piece of software is or isn't cognitively equal to or better than a human in some respect is a tiring, pointless exercise. Who cares? Is it useful to us or not? What are its uses? What are its limitations? We're just trying to automate some toil here, aren't we? We're not trying to play God and create a separate form of life with its own purposes.
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing these models are extremely good at is reading large amounts of text quickly and summarizing important points. That capability alone may be enough to pay $20 a month for many people.
Why would anyone want to read less and not more? It'd be like reading movie spoilers so you didn't have to sit through 2 hours to find out what happened.
Because you could do something else during those 2 hours, and are interested in being able to talk about movies but not in watching them?
Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works
#299The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions? The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!" You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is. To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for…
> The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions? > The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!" > You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is. > To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's outp…
> the reduction of "intellgence" to "language" is a catagory error made by people falling vicim to the ELIZA effect[1], not the result of a sum of these particular statistical methods being equal real intelligence of any kind.
I sometimes wonder how many of the people most easily impressed with LLM outputs have actually seen or used ELIZA or similar systems.