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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#351

Post by anon84873628 »

antihipocrat wrote: post #243
anon84873628 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad truth is that we are all NPCs without free will. "Thoughts" are a non-physical phenomenon that, seemingly, arise from physical activity in the brain. The thoughts (our "experience") come after the electrochemical reaction that manifests them. How could these non-physical phenomena then turn around and influence the physical chemistry? They can't. By the time we experience a thought, the physical state for it…

The act of being conscious of our own thoughts and using them to influence our physical state is skill practiced by many people with success.

Nope, that's just what it feels like we're doing. It's a good trick!

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#352

Post by Al0neStar »

jiggawatts wrote: post #123
sheeshkebab wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anytime I ask these things something (bard, gpt etc), 33% of the answer is genius, 33% misleading garbage, 33% filler stuff that’s neither here or there 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? I don’t know who finds these things use…

Bard is a brain-damaged-but-literate idiot compared to GPT 3, which is still dumber than the typical human. Try GPT 4 for a week. I've found it to be more like 50% immediately useful, 25% very impressive, and 25% where it's not wrong but I have to poke it a few times with different prompts to coax out the specific answer I'm looking for. That's better than most humans that I collaborate with at work. Literally half o…

[flagged]

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#353

Post by goatlover »

ShaddyDC wrote: post #221
goatlover wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what would be the path for GPT5 or 6 creating an improved model of itself? It's not enough to generate working code. It has to come up with a better architecture or training data.

The idea is that a model might already be smarter than us or at the very least have a very different thought process from us and then do something like improving itself. The problem is that it's impossible for us to predict the exact path because it's thought up by an entity whose thinking we don't really understand or are able to predict.

I understand the idea of a self-improving intelligence, but unless there's a path for it to do so, it's just a thought experiment. The other poster who replied to you has a better idea that civilization can be thought of as the intelligence that is improving itself. Instead of worrying about some emergent AGI inside of civilization, we can thing of civilization itself as an ASI that already exists. Anything that emerges inside of civilization will be eclipsed and kept in check by the existing super intelligence of the entire world.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#354

Post by foldr »

goatlover wrote: post #349
leobg wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 archite…

Skinner (and behaviorists in general) did establish various 'laws' of behavioral reinforcement that do tend to hold in simple cases such as pigeons pecking at levers in return for food, etc. etc. Of course these laws had nothing interesting to say about language acquisition. I challenge anyone who thinks otherwise to actually try reading Verbal Behavior. It's an incredibly turgid and uninsightful book.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#355

Post by anon84873628 »

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…

Indeterminism does not automatically imply free will. None of the open questions of physics, including how qualia arise, could plausibly explain free will. Neuroscience is continuing to show just how deterministic and predictable brains are.

So at this point the burden is on free will proponents to offer a plausible explanation for it. Without resorting to dualism, which is great for religious people but not scientifically useful.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#356

Post by pixl97 »

cf141q5325 wrote: post #182
jiggawatts wrote: post #110

This is a terrible article written by someone who doesn't seem to have even tried GPT 4. Their only example references GPT 3.5, for example, and then they waffle on about only vaguely related topics such as level 5 self-driving. This quote in particular stood out as ignorant: “What the large language models are good at is saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” That…

Great posts. I think its an error caused by a mistake often made on the topic, the assumption that side effects we see now are some fundamental problem and not just an artifact of the way systems are trained and used. And of how we (mal)function. Especially tightly embracing the cognitive bias of how special and wonderful our intelligence is. After all we have that fancy squishy brain which we assume to be essential.…

NOVA just released an episode on perception (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU6LfXNeQM4) and, yea, and aligning machine perception to human perception is going to be nearly impossible.

Or to put it another way, your brains model of reality is one that is highly optimized around the limitations of meatsacks on a power budget that are trying not to die. Our current AI does not have to worry about death in its most common forms. Companies like Microsoft throw practically unlimited amounts of power at it. The textual data that is fed to it is filtered far beyond what a human mind filters its input, books/papers are a tiny summarization of reality. At the same time more 'raw' forms of data like images/video/audio are likely to be far less filtered than what the human mind does to stay within its power budget.

Rehashing, this is why I think alignment will be impossible, at the end of the day humans and AI will see different realities.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#357

Post by anon84873628 »

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…

Also, it's funny for you to start this thread with such a disparaging and dismissive comment, then come back and act victimized that you're being questioned. If you are a self aware entity in control of your behavior, maybe you should try harder not to be a hypocritical asshole.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#358

Post by pixl97 »

croes wrote: post #344
jiggawatts wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't learn directly from user input.

Instead there are two options. Taking the user input and putting it in the training corpus and reweighting the neural net. Or, using the user input as up/down votes on the RLHF to alter the output of the weights that already exist.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#359

Post by pixl97 »

jltsiren wrote: post #184
jiggawatts wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bard is a brain-damaged-but-literate idiot compared to GPT 3, which is still dumber than the typical human. Try GPT 4 for a week. I've found it to be more like 50% immediately useful, 25% very impressive, and 25% where it's not wrong but I have to poke it a few times with different prompts to coax out the specific answer I'm looking for. That's better than most humans that I collaborate with at work. Literally half o…

> Literally half of humans -- in a professional IT setting -- can't understand simplified, clear english in emails. Similarly, in my experience about half can't follow simple A -> B logic. There are alternate hypotheses. People have preferences. When it appears that someone does not understand something, they may be pretending they don't understand it, or they may simply be ignoring it. Maybe they are trying to avoid…

The particular problem with work is, people that are commonly promoted to tasks that are neither interested nor comfortable with the task they have been given.

You've instead moved the task from general human capability to one of management alignment with worker capability and human statistical probability. This is something that human management has been failing at for about forever, especially as team size gets large. Maybe we'll see AI 'management' align humans to tasks better, or more likely as time and LLM capability progresses, we'll just see the average AI capability increase over the average worker capability and companies will just depend on unreliable meat less.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#360

Post by seanhunter »

ilaksh wrote: post #343
pzo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. One of the astonishing examples in the paper I quoted earlier [1] is an image produced in response to the prompt "Produce Javacript code that creates a random graphical image that looks like a painting of Kandinsky”. The response by GPT-4 does kind of look quite a lot like a Kandinsky.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf

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