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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#41

Post by cycomanic »

delusional wrote: post #26
crocowhile wrote: post #15

"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subj…

> This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. That's just not true. It's been discussed many times in literary theory how communication is a two way cooperative game. That's FAR removed from picking the statistically most likely option. The difference is that the AI has nothing to say, it just mimics what you're saying.

If you can not detect the difference between someone having something to say and mimicing what you are saying, is there a difference?

That's essentially what the turing test is about is it not? Now if you are saying there is a difference no matter if you can detect it or not, I would argue you imply that sentience is an internal state that can not be tested. I don't consider that an acceptable outcome, because it can be used to declare anyone/everything non-sentient.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#42

Post by dr_dshiv »

ehsankia wrote: post #13

I also think the claims are overblown, but I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. Yes our inputs are different since we have more complex senses, and language is one of the main outputs we…

I found the present article to be very anti-intellectual. As in, it makes LaMDA an open-and-shut case, a priori. It does not seek to define intelligence nor sentience; it merely says “nothing to see here, people.”

This refusal to consider has the effect of making me think there might be something really interesting going on.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#43

Post by fnbr »

vostok wrote: post #32
mhh__ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming they even did them why would programming tests "catch" this? I know people who would probably ace quite a few rounds (basically until they get asked some soft questions about architecture) who really don't know much about the fuzzy boundary between the algorithm textbooks and actual practice or even just having thoughts about the field full-stop. Curiosity is not a given. Similarly I also asked someone I kno…

> Similarly I also asked someone I know who wants to a do a PhD in economics what he thought about the current macroeconomic situation in the US and he had no thoughts at all. I understand your friend very well. I love meaningless speculation about topics that are unrelated to my area of expertise, but topics that are remotely close to my area of knowledge are off limits for me. I know exactly how much I don't know a…

And getting a PhD in Economics teaches you quickly how little macroeconomics you understand.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#44

Post by renewiltord »

jck wrote: post #20
renewiltord wrote: post #7

I'll be honest. Talking to an average SF Walgreens pharmacist or SF government employee seems to be very much like the way people operate GPT-3. You have to use the correct prompt engineering and you'll get the right results. I've gotten results with bad initial conditions by correctly prompt-engineering them. I've watched other people have trouble (and rarely) have faced trouble myself by providing the same informat…

Pharmacists are bound by clear rules and regulations which dictate what drugs they can dispense and when. It has little to do with your "prompt engineering" and more to do with whether your doctor actually filed the prescription correctly.

Haha, you'd think but they get it wrong often and they'll bend things for you. It's why I can pick up other people's prescriptions for controlled substances with nothing but my ID at pharmacies I've never been to before, why I've transformed a no-refill into a refill (they just read it wrong) while another person had to call the doctor for the same outcome, etc.

People everywhere are not really bound by anything. They will bend anything for me. Even immigration. In the past I even flew through a place where I needed (back then) a transit visa I didn't have with a passport damaged beyond identification.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#45

Post by eecc »

orbital-decay wrote: post #10

> To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world A robotic arm with a self-collision avoidance algorithm (no ML or anything like that) needs a model of itself in the "world" it exists in; a set of bounding boxes at least. Is it self-aware by this definition? Sentience and consciousness are really ill-defined terms so everyone discusses this under their own arbitrary set of assumptions, at least that's my impr…

We have no clue and probably to a certain extent even cows and pigs are sentient. I guess we’ll never know and probably aren’t even that eager to do, lest we had to rethink how we feed and please our palates.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#46

Post by kgwgk »

randomsearch wrote: post #37
crocowhile wrote: post #15

"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subj…

“This is what we, humans, do too when we talk.” Citation needed. I mean, it’s possible right? That we’re just randomly sampling sentences. Maybe that’s all we do. But it’s a hell of a strong claim that necessitates strong evidence.

You mean you have not read trillions of pages of text to "learn" how words go together?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#47

Post by cuuupid »

s1mon wrote: post #11

It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…

Technically speaking isn't this blasphemy? If he's saying that the A.I. his division helped create was a soulful child, then he's basically claiming that the researchers in his division (and maybe even himself) are all gods, which is a form of blasphemy?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#48

Post by thaumasiotes »

randomsearch wrote: post #37
crocowhile wrote: post #15

"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subj…

“This is what we, humans, do too when we talk.” Citation needed. I mean, it’s possible right? That we’re just randomly sampling sentences. Maybe that’s all we do. But it’s a hell of a strong claim that necessitates strong evidence.

> I mean, it’s possible right? That we’re just randomly sampling sentences.

Actually, no, it isn't possible. There's an example sidethread that immediately disproves this theory:

> When you ask a human, "what did you eat for lunch?", we make a series of choices and recall bits of information to answer that. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31721870 )

If you observe someone having lunch (or skipping it), and later ask them what they had for lunch, you will usually get an answer that reflects what they had for lunch. This is not a guarantee -- they may make something up. But almost always they'll tell you what they had for lunch.

In order to be able to do that, they need capacities that a language model doesn't have.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#49

Post by zwaps »

I fully agree with the article that discussing sentience - at this point in time, at least - is not very useful. Perhaps it never will be when it comes to statistical models.

That being said, there are at more than two academic factions discussing what deep neural networks do and don't do.

And I can't help but feel like the symbolic crowd - Gary Marcus chief among them - have been sure about what these models do and don't do, only to be proven wrong repeatedly. At first these models were only fitting functions. Then language could never be learned due to its dimensionality. Then they were all only interpolating. Then they could never do math. etc. It just goes on and on.

Sure, it's correct academic procedure that someone then goes and writes a paper showing that these models actually do certain things, or that it ain't so simple.

And don't get me wrong, I don't even disagree that we will need more that just plain old' DNN's to throw data at to advance beyond certain points. In my view, the inductive bias of using Graph NN (Transformers) was simply one such step - and causal modeling may be another one.

What irks me, however, is how sure the symbolists always are of every absolute truth they seem to know. No - in truth, we don't really know in what way these models interpolate or extrapolate, memorise data representations, fit functions or bases or polyhedra boundaries, or fail due to lack of inductive biases in task Y. And what's true changes each quarter year.

At this point, symbolists keep making statements about what these models can't do, as they have for years. For me to take this seriously either way, I wanna see some mathematical proof. Because otherwise we are just going around in circles.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#50

Post by eecc »

chc wrote: post #38
crocowhile wrote: post #15

"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subj…

That is what we do when we talk, but that is not all we do when we talk. In composing this comment, I am not just stringing together words to create what I think constitutes a maximally appealing response to your comment. I am trying to convey an idea that I believe with the goal of helping others to understand something. These language AIs do not have the capability of believing anything and do not have any goal but…

Unless you’re a high-schooler trying to fit in ;)
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