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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

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Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#341

Post by yblu »

woodruffw wrote: post #193
yblu wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I found disheartening was many of those scientists, especially those on the "nothing to worry about" camp, seemed not to entertain the thought that they could be wrong, considering the scale of the matter, i.e. human extinction. If there's a chance AI poses an existential threat to us, even if it is 0.00000001% (I made that up), should they be at least a bit more humble? This is uncharted domain and I find it in…

There's a nonzero chance that the celery in my fridge is harboring an existentially virulent and fatal strain of E. coli. At the same time, it would be completely insane for me to autoclave every vegetable that enters my house. Sensible action here requires sensible numbers: it's not enough to claim existential risk on extraordinary odds.

Okay, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned the worst possible outcome. Let's use the words of Sam Altman, the risk here is "light out for all of us", and let's just assume it meant we would still live, just in darkness. Or whatever plausible bad case outcome you could imagine. Do you see any negative outcome is possible at all? If you do, would you at least be cautious so that we could avoid such an outcome? That would be the behavior I expect to see in leading AI scientists and yet...

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#342

Post by woodruffw »

yblu wrote: post #341
woodruffw wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a nonzero chance that the celery in my fridge is harboring an existentially virulent and fatal strain of E. coli. At the same time, it would be completely insane for me to autoclave every vegetable that enters my house. Sensible action here requires sensible numbers: it's not enough to claim existential risk on extraordinary odds.

Okay, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned the worst possible outcome. Let's use the words of Sam Altman, the risk here is "light out for all of us", and let's just assume it meant we would still live, just in darkness. Or whatever plausible bad case outcome you could imagine. Do you see any negative outcome is possible at all? If you do, would you at least be cautious so that we could avoid such an outcome? That would b…

All kinds of negative outcomes are possible, at all times. What matters is their probability.

If you (or anyone else) can present a well-structured argument that AI presents, say, a 1-in-100 existential risk to humanity in the next 500 years, then you'll have my attention. Without those kinds of numbers, there are substantially more likely risks that have my attention first.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#343

Post by ilaksh »

pzo wrote: post #94
seanhunter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, if humans created sapience, we created it with all the interacting elements that evolution used plus all the things that we used. Secondly, maybe sapience isn't as big of a deal as we thought compared with all the other things that evolution did. Remember that biological entities have to figure out survival, reproduction etc. Sapience emerges as a byproduct but the selective pressure is towards those things…

Good point. I would even add humans brain have to process a lot of sensory input: video, audio, touch, smell, taste. And communication channel for human is very inefficient - you have to translate your thoughs to language then to audio then someone alse doing the same in reverse. If you texting you have to slowly type something then someone else need to do text recognition in their brain. LLM are like handicapped hum…

GPT-4 can understand images. That feature is just not released to the general public yet.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#344

Post by croes »

jiggawatts wrote: post #294
croes wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The elephant flew to the Moon. Doesn't prove anything. So GPT-4 is trained on Wolframs example or many people tried it on GPT-4 and corrected the wrong answer.

Wolfram pulled that out of a hat in an interview that was just a week or two ago. The data used for training GPT-4 is from before September 2021. The point Stephen was trying to make was not about any specific sentence. The point is that while forcing these models to get better through gradient descent, their only option for "going downhill" and improving the loss function is to go above and beyond mere grammar. That…

I don't know if and how fast GPT learns from user input.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#345

Post by yberreby »

ekianjo wrote: post #29
yberreby wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is distinguishing between these parts requires me to be be an expert in the area I’m inquiring about - and then why the heck do I need to ask some idiot bot for answers to questions that I already know an answer to? Because it can be significantly faster to check something for correctness than to produce it? More so when the correctness check can itself be automated to some extent.

> ecause it can be significantly faster to check something for correctness than to produce it Erm no There are many things that cant be easily checked especially if you dont know the topic well

Indeed, but I'm not claiming it's always faster to check than to produce. Simply that when it is the case, using GPT-4 can be worth it. It is to me - I use it daily.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#346

Post by Biganon »

namaria wrote: post #305
Biganon wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to enlighten us a little? What is there even to debate? The position expressed by your parent comment is so uncomfortable that it's constantly being challenged, but that doesn't make it wrong. Or are "thoughts" some sort of magical fluff not bound by the laws of physics? Are we constantly pulling ourselves by our bootstraps? Giving birth to entirely new brain activity out of nothingness? This is just woo woo non…

Does free will exist or only hard determinism can be true? You seem to have reached a definitive conclusion. And you seem to think natural selection and evolution of species and autonomous machines prove your point. You also seem to think that questioning the veracity of your position is engaging in magical thinking. How could I possibly 'enlighten' you if you are sure of being right? It doesn't matter if I point out…

Of course I'm willing to change my mind, but so far no one has ever given a compelling argument. I just follow Occam's razor.

> The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics appears to directly contradict your claims of hard determinism being the only valid explanation of reality

OK, fundamental physics might not follow hard determinism (or not in a way that we currently understand), but please, indeterminism says nothing about free will, human thoughts, or anything related to that. If you want to say the human brain follows the same physics rules as everything else in the universe, and that this implies some indeterminism, sure. That's almost certainly correct. But where do thoughts arise from that?

If you sprinkle randomness on the process, I'll agree with you; but nothing in physics even suggests ANY link between indeterminism, superposition, etc. and thought. So my point still stands: free will as we usually envision it has no reason to exist. The fact that particles can be in two states at once does NOT contradict this.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#347

Post by TeMPOraL »

namaria wrote: post #256
DJHenk wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago I transitioned from a developer role to a manager role and suddenly I had to do a lot more talking. Not all the talking needs to be a deeply involved exchange of complex ideas, a lot of it serves a different purpose. Sometimes it can be a simple as filling up the time in a pleasant way with a group of people that may or may not know each other that well. After getting some experience with this I noticed tha…

The very fact that we can be conscious about our ability to generate language and work it separately from the rest of our consciousness tells me that chatbots might emulate our language generation ability. We shouldn't invert it to conclude that means they can reason about it.

> We shouldn't invert it to conclude that means they can reason about it.

Agreed. However, I think it's somewhat accepted view that the bulk of work constituting reasoning happens subconsciously, with the conscious mind playing the role of a censor/gatekeeper, and occasionally handholding during when reasoning through tougher problems.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#348

Post by [deleted] »

Biganon wrote: post #292
namaria wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing a debate that has been raging for millennia across several disciplines to three lines of text tells me you don't have enough of a grasp on the subject to draw any conclusions about it, let alone resolve it altogether.

Care to enlighten us a little? What is there even to debate? The position expressed by your parent comment is so uncomfortable that it's constantly being challenged, but that doesn't make it wrong. Or are "thoughts" some sort of magical fluff not bound by the laws of physics? Are we constantly pulling ourselves by our bootstraps? Giving birth to entirely new brain activity out of nothingness? This is just woo woo non…

[deleted]

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#349

Post by goatlover »

leobg wrote: post #304
biorach wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now ChatGPT is pretty much Skinner’s work come to life. I'm pretty sure that is based on a misunderstanding of Skinner, ChatGPT, or both

Or very lossy compression of what I mean. I have studied both quite extensively. Not 10,000 hours each, but hundreds for sure.

Did Skinner have anything to say about how the reinforcement works? Because with LLMs you do need the right sort of architecture, and the same with neurons, even though they don't use back propagation. Only humans are known to have language in the full sense, and there has to be some neural reason why that is. Maybe you could make an argument for cetaceans or certain birds, but again they must have the neural architecture for it.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#350

Post by goatlover »

biorach wrote: post #303
mrtranscendence wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT does not fulfill that definition because it does not have any “mental representation”; it has no mind with which to form a “mental model”. It emulates understanding — quite well in many scenarios — but there is nothing there to possess understanding; it is at bottom simply a very large collection of numbers that are combined arithmetically according to a simple algorithm.

But now you have to explain why the same is not true of a human. Just saying a human has a 'mental representation' and a 'mind' is not explaining anything

Because as humans, we know we have something we call minds and mental representations, since we experience having such things as we go about our lives. How the nervous system produces those and how exactly we should understand mental is unclear. But since LLMs aren't brains and don't work the same way, we can't say they have anything like minds right now. The solution isn't to get rid of the mental in humans, it's to better understand the differences and similarities between machine learning models and biological nervous systems.
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