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Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

victoramartinez.com

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Re: Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

#41

Post by throwaway287391 »

Herring wrote: post #21

Apple's tune will completely change the second they get a leading LLM - Look at all the super important and useful things you can do with "Apple General Intelligence"!

As someone who used to write academic ML papers, it's funny to me that people are treating this academic style paper written by a few Apple researchers as Apple's official company-wide stance, especially given the first author was an intern.

I suppose it's "fair" since it's published on the Apple website with the authors' Apple affiliations, but historically speaking, at least in ML where publication is relatively fast-paced and low-overhead, academic papers by small teams of individual researchers have in no way reflected the opinions of e.g. the executives of a large company. I would not be particularly surprised to see another team of Apple researchers publishing a paper in the coming weeks with the opposite take, for example.

Re: Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

#42

Post by jmsdnns »

throwaway287391 wrote: post #41
Herring wrote: post #21

Apple's tune will completely change the second they get a leading LLM - Look at all the super important and useful things you can do with "Apple General Intelligence"!

As someone who used to write academic ML papers, it's funny to me that people are treating this academic style paper written by a few Apple researchers as Apple's official company-wide stance, especially given the first author was an intern. I suppose it's "fair" since it's published on the Apple website with the authors' Apple affiliations, but historically speaking, at least in ML where publication is relatively fa…

The author is an intern, but they're also almost done with their PhD. They're not just any intern.

Re: Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

#43

Post by Asraelite »

roenxi wrote: post #6

Has anyone come up with a definition of AGI where humans are near-universally capable of GI? These articles seem to be slowly pushing the boundaries past the point where slower humans are disbarred from intelligence. Many years ago I bumped in to Towers of Hanoi in a computer game and failed to solve it algorithmicly, so I suppose I'm lucky I only work a knowledge job rather than an intelligence-based one.

Years ago when online discussion around this topic was mostly done by small communities talking about the singularity and such, I felt like there was a pretty clear definition.

Humans are capable of consistently making scientific progress. That means being taught knowledge about the world by their ancestors, performing new experiments, and building upon that knowledge for future generations. Critically, there doesn't seem to be an end to this for the foreseeable future for any field of research. Nobody is predicting that all scientific progress will halt in a few decades because after a certain point it becomes too hard for humans to understand anything, although that probably would eventually become true.

So an AI with at least the same capabilities as a human would be able to do any type of scientific research, including research into AI itself. This is the "general" part: no matter where the research takes it, it must always be able to make progress, even if slowly. Once such an AI exists, the singularity begins.

I think the fact that AI is now a real thing with a tangible economic impact has drawn the attention of a lot of people who wouldn't have otherwise cared about the long-term implications for humanity of exponential intelligence growth. The question that's immediately important now is "will this replace my job?" and so the definitions of AGI that people choose to use are shifting more toward definitions that address those questions.

Re: Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

#44

Post by throwaway287391 »

jmsdnns wrote: post #42
throwaway287391 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who used to write academic ML papers, it's funny to me that people are treating this academic style paper written by a few Apple researchers as Apple's official company-wide stance, especially given the first author was an intern. I suppose it's "fair" since it's published on the Apple website with the authors' Apple affiliations, but historically speaking, at least in ML where publication is relatively fa…

The author is an intern, but they're also almost done with their PhD. They're not just any intern.

That's kind of expected for a research intern -- internships are most commonly done within 1-2 years before graduation. But in any case, the fact that the first author is an intern is just the cherry on top for me -- my comment would be the same modulo the "especially" remark if all the authors were full time research staff.

Re: Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

#45

Post by chrsw »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #34
chrsw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One vague definition I see tossed around a lot "something can replace almost any human knowledge/white collar worker". What does that mean in concrete terms? I'm not sure. Many of these models can already pass bar exams but how many can be lawyers? Probably none. What's missing?

> Probably none. The qualification is unnecessary; we know the answer is "none". There's a steady stream of lawyers getting penalized for submitting LLM output to judges.

You're right. I should have said "can ever". Both in terms of permitted to and in terms of have the capacity to. And I'm only referring to current machine learning architectures.

Re: Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

#46

Post by thaumasiotes »

GrayShade wrote: post #39
thaumasiotes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a human will struggle to solve Hanoi using the recursive algorithm for even 6 disks, even given pen and paper. Why? The whole point of the recursive algorithm is that it doesn't matter how many discs you're working with. The ordinary children's toys that implement the puzzle are essentially always sold with more than 6 discs. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=towers+of+hanoi

The recursive solution has a stack depth proportional to the number of disks. That's three pieces (two pegs and how many disks to move) of data for each recursive call, so for 6 disks the "stack" will contain up to around 15 values, which is generally higher than an unaided human will be able to track. In addition, 64-256 moves is quite a lot and I suspect people will generally lose focus before completing them.

You should try playing with one of the toys. It's not at all difficult to move 7 of them.

It's not necessary to use a stack. If you have a goal, you can work "top down", with nothing held in memory. All you need to know to begin the move is whether you're moving an odd number of discs (in which case, the first move will be onto the target peg) or an even number (in which case it will be onto the third peg).

Re: Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

#47

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway287391 wrote: post #41
Herring wrote: post #21

Apple's tune will completely change the second they get a leading LLM - Look at all the super important and useful things you can do with "Apple General Intelligence"!

As someone who used to write academic ML papers, it's funny to me that people are treating this academic style paper written by a few Apple researchers as Apple's official company-wide stance, especially given the first author was an intern. I suppose it's "fair" since it's published on the Apple website with the authors' Apple affiliations, but historically speaking, at least in ML where publication is relatively fa…

[deleted]

Re: Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

#48

Post by 542354234235 »

cardanome wrote: post #20
roenxi wrote: post #6

Has anyone come up with a definition of AGI where humans are near-universally capable of GI? These articles seem to be slowly pushing the boundaries past the point where slower humans are disbarred from intelligence. Many years ago I bumped in to Towers of Hanoi in a computer game and failed to solve it algorithmicly, so I suppose I'm lucky I only work a knowledge job rather than an intelligence-based one.

People confuse performance and internal presentation. A simple calculator is vastly better as adding numbers than any human. An chess engine will rival any human grand master. No one would say that this got us closer to AGI. We could absolutely see LLMs that produce poetry that humans can not tell apart or even prefer to human made poetry. We could have LLMs that are perfectly able to convince humans that they have c…

>The question of consciousness is based on what is going on in the inside, how the reasoning happening and not the output.

But we don’t really understand how the reasoning is happening in humans. Tests show that our subconscious, completely outside out conscious understanding, makes decisions before we perceive that we consciously decide something [1]. Our consciousness is the output, but we don’t really know what is running in the subconscious. If something looked at it from an outside perspective, would they say that it was just unconscious programing, giving the appearance of conscious reasoning?

I’m not saying LLMs are conscious. But since we don’t really know what gives us the feeling of consciousness, and we didn’t build and don’t understand the underlying “programing”, it is hard to actually judge a non-organic mind that claims the feeling of consciousness. If you found out today that you were actually a computer program, would you say you weren’t conscious? Would you be able to convince “real” people that you were conscious?

[1] https://qz.com/1569158/neuroscientists-read-unconscious-brai...

Re: Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

#49

Post by GrayShade »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #46
GrayShade wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recursive solution has a stack depth proportional to the number of disks. That's three pieces (two pegs and how many disks to move) of data for each recursive call, so for 6 disks the "stack" will contain up to around 15 values, which is generally higher than an unaided human will be able to track. In addition, 64-256 moves is quite a lot and I suspect people will generally lose focus before completing them.

You should try playing with one of the toys. It's not at all difficult to move 7 of them. It's not necessary to use a stack. If you have a goal, you can work "top down", with nothing held in memory. All you need to know to begin the move is whether you're moving an odd number of discs (in which case, the first move will be onto the target peg) or an even number (in which case it will be onto the third peg).

Yes, I'm aware of the iterative solution, which is why I explicitly mentioned the recursive one.

They tried to give the algorithm description to the LLMs, but they also used the recursive solution (see page 25 of the paper).

Re: Why Claude's Comment Paper Is a Poor Rebuttal

#50

Post by Lerc »

virgilp wrote: post #27
cardanome wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People confuse performance and internal presentation. A simple calculator is vastly better as adding numbers than any human. An chess engine will rival any human grand master. No one would say that this got us closer to AGI. We could absolutely see LLMs that produce poetry that humans can not tell apart or even prefer to human made poetry. We could have LLMs that are perfectly able to convince humans that they have c…

> Does that mean those LLMs have gotten consciousness and emotions? No. Is this a belief statement, or a provable one?

I think it is clearly true that it doesn't show that they have consciousness and emotions.

The problem is that people assume that failing to show that they do means that they don't.

It's very hard to show that something doesn't have consciousness. Try and conclusively prove that a rock does not have consciousness.

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