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There is no A.I.

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Re: There is no A.I.

#371

Post by nologic01 »

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #268
nologic01 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The elephant in the room is the concept of the State. Bad corporations flurish in the shadow of bad government. Governments are supposed to safeguard the interests of the many. Over decades they used collective resources to advance the research that made IT/AI possible. They granted corporates (private interests) the license to operate, a financial system to oil them, a security system to protect them. If current IT…

Corporations lobby and bribe governments officials to keep the status quo as is. Egg or chicken first? With your framing of the issue, I wonder what would be the solution. Smaller government? That just gives more power to corporations.

Empirically we know that practically any sector that is left "to the markets" will evolve to be dominated by 2-3 conglomerates / gatekeepers that will choke all competition, replace regulation with "self-regulation" and eventually hold society hostage as too-big-to-fail etc.

That dynamic is not intrinsic to private enterprize, for-profit entities or corporate structure. You can, e.g. as a crude thought experiment, keep everything else equal, add a simple line to the tax code that the corporate rate goes up with market share and thus change monetary incentives for investors and executives.

The main difficulty is not lack of solutions (there are hordes of very sharp economists out there) but moral confusion about what a good, sustainable society looks like.

You might argue: what's new. Its always been a struggle to suppress our worst behaviors and "progress" only seemed to ever work over the long term (even that is under dispute now).

The risk is that technology is an accretive, exponential process and our collective ability to adopt governance that mitigates its risks is practically non-existent. It is based on trial-and-error (regulate or change behaviors under overwhelming social anger and pressure after the inevitable disasters).

The novelty of our condition is that one of the next "errors" might be the last.

Re: There is no A.I.

#372

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #140
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…

> All of these arguments seem to think that the brain isn’t also generating a statistical ordering of semantic words and actions. There may be a part of the brain that is modelled well by an LLM, but if so, there seem to also be parts that aren’t, or even existing “multimodal” models like GPT-4, which is more than an LLM. Humans, including their brains (both in the narrow sense and in the broader sense of “everything…

[deleted]

Re: There is no A.I.

#373

Post by ImHereToVote »

asddubs wrote: post #357
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…

if it's reasoning through problems, why is it so bad at math?

The same reason most humans are. Why are we so bad at math?

Re: There is no A.I.

#374

Post by 77pt77 »

throwaway8503 wrote: post #63
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…

Since LLMs can't do arithmetic, one has to think there's more going on, at least in the arithmetic part of the brain, than is going on in LLMs.

One should think these things are disembodied politicians.

That has been my best analogy so far.

They'll never say I don't know and bullshit you into oblivion while never backtracking.

Re: There is no A.I.

#375

Post by wmoxam »

afro88 wrote: post #267
kazinator wrote: post #38

GPT4 appears very intelligent when you discuss program code with it. It simply crazy; it can write SNOBOL4 code to extract a field from /etc/passwd. When you discuss other things, it goes off the rails a lot more. For instance, I have had it quote some passages of classic English poetry to me, stating blankly that those passages contain certain words. The passages did not contain any traces of those words or even rem…

But out of all the programmers I know, there are only certain ones that are embracing it, and the rest are still stuck in "I tried it and the code wasn't exactly what I wanted - it's all hype" land. And I think for one of the reasons you say: programmers are vain and believe everything they do requires great intelligence. A lot are still missing the forest from the trees.

For programming I find ChatGPT to be a great rubber duck

Re: There is no A.I.

#376

Post by uoaei »

vimax wrote: post #146
jstummbillig wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me it shows how fundamental language is to intelligence. Not just that LLMs are very capable by themselves, but significantly improve speech and image models. We’ll need to break out of the Chomsky hierarchies and develop some new theories of language. Vocal communication isn’t unique to humans, a new theory should be more broadly applicable to non human and non vocal languages. I’m excited to see what big questio…

You're just describing information theory. Every message is contextualized within the codebooks used to encode/decode it. Sometimes we call that codebook "language", sometimes it uses another representation.

Re: There is no A.I.

#377

Post by 77pt77 »

yarg wrote: post #200
Animats wrote: post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

> Once AI systems can outperform CEOs, investors and boards will insist they be in charge And nothing in the rules says that a dog can't play basketball. What that would actually result in is a complete and utter lack of any accountable entities, which the government would block and stockholders wouldn't want to begin with.

This is not how it works.

Those jobs are not based on performance or anything remotely meritocratic.

Re: There is no A.I.

#378

Post by ResearchCode »

b33j0r wrote: post #43
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…

We just can’t accept that we might solve ourselves. People are understandably desperate to understand their experiences as more than an encoding of a thing that might be explained. And all of our surprising wins and awful mistakes had explainable reasons, dammit; it wasn’t just a misfiring of trained statistical networks!

I think people look more desperate to hype these LLM toys, that they are not the next blockchain or self-driving car. When they fail it's just excuses like you are not using the latest version or "prompting" them right.

The LLM value add for coding is less than the value add of syntax highlighting in my experience.

Re: There is no A.I.

#379

Post by Mezzie »

nyolfen wrote: post #144
rootusrootus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition, we shouldn't draw false equivalence between not knowing how brains work and not knowing how LLMs work, and concluding they must be similar.

there are currently two things we are aware of in the universe that can reason abstractly. i don't think this is a coincidence.

More than 2.

For an example, crows can effectively use tools and communicate abstract concepts to one another from a memory. Which means they can observe a situation, draw conclusions, and use those conclusions to act as well as make decisions on how to act. That would seem to meet the bar for reasoning abstractly.

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