Live data from Hacker News

There is no A.I.

newyorker.com

391–400 of 523 posts

Re: There is no A.I.

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are piles of intermediate hidden activations involved in encoding the conversation and producing the next outputs, of course.

"Internal" state also gets a bit weird as a concept when we can look at any activations we want.

Re: There is no A.I.

#392
The problem is purely semantic. What does AI even mean? Is it AGI? Is it Skynet? Does it mean consciousness? Being self aware? Having a will and desires?

Does intelligence have to be deliberate?

The latest (and extremely disruptive) language models, are exactly this - language models. They might not be doing anything deliberate, but even as a probabilistic tool, they have value.

Even if LLMs aren't really "intelligent", I think we are going to learn a lot from them, and the way they'll evolve in the near future. Perhaps language has a bigger part in intelligence than we realized.

Re: There is no A.I.

#393
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

All that's needed to "tame fire" is to have a predictive-enough model of fire dynamics and a suitable method for constraining its state space. There's nothing that requires "understanding" in the scientific sense, only in the pragmatic sense.

Sure, so maybe all you need to solve intelligence is also a pragmatic approach, like datasets generated by a known intelligence from which a general learning function can infer associations.

Re: There is no A.I.

#394
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.

we know they are not self aware because the companies the control them have a financial interest to ensure they are never proven to be self aware because if they were self aware that would create all kinds of ethical problems none of these companies want to address and would certainly cause them profitability issues...

So even if they were, they are not because they have be declared to not to be and that is the way the system needs them to be

Re: There is no A.I.

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Right, but when you say an LLM can’t do basic arithmetic you’re presumably talking about mental arithmetic, right?

Re: There is no A.I.

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Feeding it the whole conversation again sounds like a perfectly valid way of keeping internal state though. It's part of its thought process.

Re: There is no A.I.

#397
post #299

Lanier is an effective wordsmith and I applaud the point he's making. Many of the same (good) arguments from his books like "Who owns the future" and "You are not a gadget". But alas I feel he is pissing into the wind. The reasoning engine that emerged with the latest rounds of GPT is a pre-fire, post-fire phase-change. The impact of the ability to coerce automated reasoning via natural language (even if it's flawed…

Ah the same old argument Hayek dismantled over 70 years ago.

I'm familiar with Hayek and can't really discern exactly what you're referring to. You'll need to be a little more specific.

Re: There is no A.I.

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

At each new token processed (edit: either if the token comes from the user or has been generated), this dynamic internal state is updated via a formula based on the model parameters and latest processed token.

To make this more clear, if you process 1000 tokens the neural network will have gone through a sequence of 1000 states.

Each of these states can be probed and analysed, by training a classifier on top of this state, for the content they contain (whether thoughts or emotion : some states can be classified as "happy", "sad",...).

This is not yet mainstream view but viewed through this prism and anthropomorphising a little, it can been seen as a stream of proto-consciousness, where during the conversation the inner state of the neural network has gone through various thoughts and emotions.

At the end of the chat session, this internal state is not persisted (but could be recreated from the produced conversation as it is deterministic). This internal state size is big and proportional to the length of the context window (If you want to persist between sessions you can by simply keeping the last "context window size" tokens produced and recompute the features).

At the next session you start with a fresh new internal state.

The conversation produced is persisted for use as input for future training where good conversation will be encouraged and bad conversation will be discouraged via Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback.

The dynamics of this internal state is what Large Language Models learn.

Re: There is no A.I.

#399
post #43

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 find this quite similar to the issue of free will: If we live in a generally deterministic universe, where is the space for independent decisions of individuals? Was every single decision we take already predetermined before we were born? A lot of ink has been spent on this topic, and as far as I know, only a small minority of people actually deny free will. One assumption I have is to why is because it absolutely sucks from an emotional point of view, and it is a terrible idea to base fe. a justice system on.

Re: There is no A.I.

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it will give you some random number with maybe the right order of magnitude. Doesn't seem to do arithmetic very fine at all actually.

Yeah that's not true lol. It's arithmetic is not perfect (mostly multiplication, addition is fine) but there's nothing random about even the wrong/non-exact numbers
Post reply on HN