Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There is no A.I.

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 523 posts

Re: There is no A.I.

#331

Post by AlecSchueler »

goatlover wrote: post #317
IshKebab wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this kind of argument is making a similar mistake. In the same way that there's nothing fundamentally special about the computation human brains do, there's nothing fundamentally special about our "fitness function" (to reproduce). It's just hard coded, whereas GPT's is dictated. More or less anyway. Also our "fitness function" or motivations & goals aren't even that hard coded. You can easily modify them thr…

The argument is that LLMs don't have any motivations or goals, unless a human prompts them. They're not trying to stay alive or reproduce. They don't get hungry, feel pain or loneliness. They're just complex tools.

But 6 months ago motivation to survive wasn't an aspect of intelligence.

Re: There is no A.I.

#332

Post by naasking »

mrjin wrote: post #89
tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do…

To me, the reason is rather simply: you cannot solve a problem you don't understand. And we don't understand how we understand, period.

> you cannot solve a problem you don't understand.

Well that's not true. We tamed fire before understanding combustion, friction, heat, or anything else.

Re: There is no A.I.

#333

Post by famouswaffles »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #115
ravenstine wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno if there's some trickery going on under the hood, but GPT-4 does basic arithmetic correctly.

It statistically outputs the next probable value of text. There is a lot of math related text in the CommonCrawl (likely the biggest source of it's training). That is all the company who owns it claims that it does. There is no calculation, therefor no basic arithmetic being done correctly.

It's extremely easy to test arithmetic on random numbers it'll never have seen in the training set. GPT-4 can do arithmetic just fine.

Re: There is no A.I.

#334

Post by coldtea »

sclarisse wrote: post #291
coldtea wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations have rights because they are owned by humans and those humans have rights. One does not really follow from another. Washing machines are also "owned by humans" but they don't get rights. > Corporations are just a convenient way to do things together, like conduct a business and own property. Corporate personhood is just a legal abstraction to represent those peoples’ rights, a facade pattern that lets…

It is seldom more-convenient to represent your property as a thing that has rights. But if we did decide to speak as if it had rights, it would have its owners rights. It would have the right not to be searched by the government, without due process of law, for instance. (This is your right not to be searched.) It would have the right not to have some components or clothes therein seized by the government, without ju…

>A corporation has the right to put out whatever message it likes, because its owners have that right. This is often threatened.

I think it would be that bad if a corporation didn't have some of those rights.

For example, one difference between a corporation and a person, is that a corporation is for profit. A corporation is also potentially much more powerful than a person (in how far-rereaching it can get, how powerful, how many people it controls as employees, and so on).

So a corporation should perhaps have less rights than people owning it. And be hit with more responsibilities (e.g. to contribute back to society, and so on).

Re: There is no A.I.

#335

Post by Robotbeat »

jackmott42 wrote: post #330
fauxpause_ wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are they self-aware? Who tf knows? But they are reasoning through problems. We know. They are not self aware. They’re a matrix. They don’t have any internal state. Do not anthropomorphisize the notion of reasoning.

People are using ChatGPT and observing it keep track of conversation state, so if you are going to claim it has no internal state you will need to be more precise in what you are saying, which I suppose is that the underlying neural network is not being updated as we talk to it? yet

The attention matrix/matrices are being updated as you talk to it, within the context window.

Re: There is no A.I.

#336

Post by coldtea »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #232
coldtea wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations have rights because they are owned by humans and those humans have rights. One does not really follow from another. Washing machines are also "owned by humans" but they don't get rights. > Corporations are just a convenient way to do things together, like conduct a business and own property. Corporate personhood is just a legal abstraction to represent those peoples’ rights, a facade pattern that lets…

As the foundation, the cornerstone, the most base part of said "Corporate law". Corporations do not exist without some humans behind them. There are no fully-autonomous corporations in corporate law (despite what ethereum would have you believe) . There are only groups of people. Those people, officers of corporations, impart the personhood - The Corporation is just an embodiment of the collective action of the offic…

Well, you don't really need to attribute "personhood" to corporations for that, do you?

You just need to codify into law what rights you afford the runners/owners of a corporation when acting on its behalf, and how blame/consequences/fines etc is transferred to the runners/owners of the corporation when they make shady shit.

In fact you could have more or less the same corporate laws as today, and not mention a concept of "personhood" there at all.

Re: There is no A.I.

#337

Post by coldtea »

fallingknife wrote: post #179
coldtea wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people running corporations are personally responsible (with no "limited liability" protections) they can't just play fast and loose letting AI make decisions.

That's between them and the people who choose to hire them (the shareholders) and lend them money.

When they operate within a society, and their actions affect society, then it's up to everybody else too.

Corporations and their shareholders should be constrained by the laws of society and operate to the benefit of society first and foremost, and by their profit-seeking second.

If that profit seeking or other interests go against societies (e.g. destroying the environment, bribing politicians, selling products that hurt people, etc.), they should be curbed.

Re: There is no A.I.

#338

Post by GistNoesis »

fauxpause_ wrote: post #327
titzer wrote: post #318

> If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration. What an utterly vapid and ignorant view. In the rest of the article Lanier goes on to argue that it's all just "simple mathematics". Yeah, yeah, and computers are just simple NAND gates, amirite? I've waffled over the years…

> Are they self-aware? Who tf knows? But they are reasoning through problems. We know. They are not self aware. They’re a matrix. They don’t have any internal state. Do not anthropomorphisize the notion of reasoning.

> They don’t have any internal state

This is a common misconception : they do have internal state. Transformers are RNNs : section 3.4 (page 5) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.16236.pdf

Re: There is no A.I.

#339

Post by naasking »

AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #266

What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems. The hubris in Big Tech right now is truly pathetic and imho a sign of a real disconnect with a sense of meaning and purpose to human life. In fac…

> What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems.

That's irrelevant. Transformers are Turing complete. Whatever mathematical system underlies human cognition will thus have some expression as a transformer.

These transformers are learning how to reproduce functions by inferring associations between inputs and outputs. The data whose function is being reproduced is the function in the human brain that produces human text. Therefore these transformers are literally learning how the human brain generates text, ie. this is what the brain does.

Furthermore, there have been neuroscience papers correlating spiking behaviour in neural networks and human neurons when processing the same information, lending even more credence to this hypothesis. It's not as far-fetched as you think.

Re: There is no A.I.

#340

Post by bloaf »

jstummbillig wrote: post #120
tracerbulletx wrote: post #27

All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn't also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. Obviously the brain has a way more complex network of subsystems with various specialties than the artificial models we have today and is able to generalize language, math, and positional reasoning and mix it with the older parts of the brain for reward and training mechanisms and it can do…

Agreed. One of the more interesting things about AI is how it forces humanity on a trip to consider what it means to be human. There is no soul, creativity or inspiration. There's only (very complex) agency. And that's completely fine.

There are deep philosophical implications, just not these.

There has been a long history of reifying the behaviors of living things in general (e.g. vitalism) and humans in particular (e.g. dualism).

The success of LLMs challenges a lot of philosophy dealing with what behaviors are and are not possible in the absence of these categorical districtions.

I have had casual debates years ago, in which strong dualists asserted that the kind of creativity exhibited by today's LLMs is simply impossible. No doubt those folks are busy inventing "special philosophical creativity" that LLMs "aren't really doing," but they've lost credibility.

LLMs have demonstrated that there was never any need to invoke categorical districtions between human behavior and math-as-implemented-by-physics. The gap is closed, there is no more room for gods.

Post reply on HN