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There is no A.I.

newyorker.com

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Re: There is no A.I.

#361

Post by roflyear »

Swizec wrote: post #50
xz0r wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation is not causation. It feels more like smarter automation to me.

> It feels more like smarter automation to me. Yep. Elevators used to be proof that machines can think. Then compilers, and chess, and go, and search, and … The problem with AI is that as soon as it works, we stop thinking about it as “artificial intelligence” and it becomes “just automation”. Then AI moves to the next goalpost.

I had someone on HN state stockfish is intelligent. If that is your definition of intelligence sure GPT is also intelligent. I do not think that's a common definition though!

Re: There is no A.I.

#362

Post by adriand »

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…

But it’s true, it is a form of social collaboration. It’s based on a vast training dataset consisting entirely of things humans have written. It’s tuned via reinforcement learning via hiring thousands of people, many of whom are paid poverty wages. And it is further refined by the daily training it gets from its hundred million human users.

The core of the article is in the title. The tech is artificial but it’s not intelligent. I don’t think that’s a novel or interesting take either. But it’s true, and the fact you’ve conversed with a chatbot doesn’t change that fact.

We know how these things work, it’s not an ineffable mystery. Without the social collaboration - the distillation of vast amounts of human-generated text into statistics - there’s no “there” there.

Re: There is no A.I.

#363

Post by roflyear »

jackmott42 wrote: post #156
krainboltgreene wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

emergent behavior does happen with neural networks. It is correct to say that GPT 4 doesn't do math correctly, but it may be incorrect to say a large language model can't in principle.

Is there any evidence it can? It's not incorrect to say there is no God for example

Re: There is no A.I.

#364

Post by fauxpause_ »

GistNoesis wrote: post #338
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.

> 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

Correct me if I’m wrong but this concept of state is across a prediction which is a series of token proposals. Not a sense of persistent state over, say, a chat session.

Re: There is no A.I.

#365

Post by roflyear »

jameshart wrote: post #359
ogogmad wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably used GPT-3.5. That said, I didn't manage to get GPT-4 to calculate 36,330 * 26,951 correctly. I suggested casting out 9s, casting out 11s, doing long multiplication, reversing the digits - nothing. I have a theory that it does arithmetic badly because the logic goes right-to-left, when LLMs write left-to-right. If the digits were to be reversed, it might not make as many mistakes. I ran out of attempts b…

That’s not ‘basic arithmetic’. Most humans would need a pen and paper to solve it. GPT’s attention window is not equivalent to it being able to ‘write stuff down’ - it’s its equivalent of being able to remember the foregoing few minutes of conversation.

Stop redefining things to support your argument. "The basic operations under arithmetic are addition and subtraction, division and multiplication"

Re: There is no A.I.

#366

Post by roflyear »

IX-103 wrote: post #346
ogogmad wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably used GPT-3.5. That said, I didn't manage to get GPT-4 to calculate 36,330 * 26,951 correctly. I suggested casting out 9s, casting out 11s, doing long multiplication, reversing the digits - nothing. I have a theory that it does arithmetic badly because the logic goes right-to-left, when LLMs write left-to-right. If the digits were to be reversed, it might not make as many mistakes. I ran out of attempts b…

Did you adjust the prompt to ask it how a famous mathematician would answer the question? Or what a calculator would say the answer is? Sometimes LLMs get math wrong because people got math wrong on the training data and so they match the error frequency ( https://learnprompting.org/docs/basics/roles ).

Yes that's exactly what people are saying here. It's not a criticism of the tool it's an example of what the tool is and how it functions.

Re: There is no A.I.

#367

Post by fauxpause_ »

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

That’s external state. I believe it just feeds the bot the entire conversation each time. I’m open to being shown otherwise.

That is to say, swapping out bots midway through the conversation should have no impact.

Re: There is no A.I.

#368

Post by cudgy »

“For years, I worked on the E.U.’s privacy policies, and I came to realize that we don’t know what privacy is. It’s a term we use every day, and it can make sense in context, but we can’t nail it down well enough to generalize. The closest we have come to a definition of privacy is probably “the right to be left alone,” ”

How does anyone reach the conclusion that privacy is the right to be left alone? Many times seemingly intellectual people confuse issues with contorted analysis such as this one about privacy, which is not a difficult concept to understand. It is not about being left alone; it is about not being monitored and recorded regardless of what is done with that information. Stop the gathering of the information in the first place.

Re: There is no A.I.

#369

Post by citrusynapse »

IshKebab wrote: post #296
stabbles wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that you shouldn't dismiss an airplane by the fact that it doesn't flap its wings, but we also don't call them artificial birds. The debate is around the word 'intelligence', which is misleading.

Go and Google "artificial birds" and report back. Look up the definition of "artificial" while you're at it.

No, he's too busy making genuinely useful comments. Why don't you try it?

Re: There is no A.I.

#370

Post by aldarisbm »

adriand wrote: post #362
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…

But it’s true, it is a form of social collaboration. It’s based on a vast training dataset consisting entirely of things humans have written. It’s tuned via reinforcement learning via hiring thousands of people, many of whom are paid poverty wages. And it is further refined by the daily training it gets from its hundred million human users. The core of the article is in the title. The tech is artificial but it’s not…

and computers are fancy calculators, let’s be careful to not fall into reductionist views.

we know the architecture but we don’t know what happens in the black box.

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