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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

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Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#401

Post by ChatGTP »

jiggawatts wrote: post #152
ChatGTP wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be rude, but are you paid by OpenAI to say this? The amount of comments here telling people to “upgrade to ChatGPT 4” is absolutely unprecedented. I know it might be good, but people will find value in it and upgrade if they see the need to do so?

I am in no shape, way, or form affiliated with OpenAI or any other AI company. What I and many others have noticed about the "Are LLMs really smart?" debate is that everyone on the "Nay" side is using 3.5 and everyone on the "Yay" side is using 4.0. The naming and the versioning implies that GPT 4 is somehow slightly better than 3.5, like not even a "full +1" better, just "+0.5" better. (This goes to show how trivial…

So no, people won't form their own opinions, at least not yet, because they can't do so without paying for access. People will pay for access is they find it valuable enough.

I work with people who use it, I've not seen anything impressive enough come from them to make me want to pay for it so I don't. I've also screen shared because I was curious what all the fuss was about. What I saw that pissed me off was that they've stopped contributing to our internal libraries and just generate everything now. I found that kind of disturbing. It's not the products fault but it's the kind of thing I imagined would start happening.

I'm glad you like it, I just don't know why people feel the need to sell it so hard.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#402

Post by eternalban »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #386
eternalban wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That conflates perception with perceiver. LLMs have only internalized [/encoded] our perceptions and expressions. From a model of the mind pov, the 'self' that we sense has an internal LLM-like tool . And it is that self that understands and not the tool.

> That conflates perception with perceiver. I'm not sure I understand. Can you elaborate? > From a model of the mind pov, the 'self' that we sense has an internal LLM-like tool. And it is that self that understands and not the tool. I'm starting to think it's the other way around. I think it's somewhat widely accepted that our brains do most of the "thinking" and "understanding" unconsciously - our conscious self is…

[I may have to take you up on your profile offer of out of band continuation of this as there is a lot here to delve into and it would make for interesting conversation.]

The model of the psyche that I subscribe to is ~Jungian, with some minor modifications. I distinguish between the un-conscious, the sub-conscious, and consciousness. The content of the unconscious is atemporal, where as the content of the (sub-)conscious is temporal. In this model, background processing occurs in the sub-conscious, -not- the un-conscious. The unconscious is a space of ~types which become reified in the temporal regime of (sub-)consciousness [via the process of projection]. The absolute center of the psyche is the Self and this resides in the unconscious; the self and the unconscious content are not directly accessible to us (but can be approached via contemplation, meditation, prayer, dreams, and visions: these processes introduce unconscious content into the conscious realm, which when successfully integrated engenders 'psychological wholeness'). The ego -- the ("suffering") observer -- is the central point of consciousness. Self realization occurs when ego assumes a subordinate position to the Self, abandons "attachment" to perceived phenomena & disavows "lordship" i.e. the false assumption of its central position, at which point the suffering ends. This process, in various guises, is the core of most spiritual schools. And we can not discount these aspects of Human mental experience, even if we choose to assume a critical distance from the theologies that are built around these widely reported phenomena. I am not claiming that this is a quality of all minds, but it seems it is characteristic of human minds.

The absolute minimum point that you should take away from this (even if the above model is unappealing or unacceptable or woo to you /g) is that we can always meaningfully speak of a psychology when considering minds. If we can not discern a psychology in the subject of our inquiry then it should not be considered a mind.

I do -not- think that we can attribute a pyschology to large language models.

~

Your comment on the mapping of the latent spaces is interesting, but as you note we should probably wait until this has been established before jumping into conclusions.

And also please excuse the handwavy matter in my comment as well. We're all groping in the semidarkness here.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#403

Post by JoshTko »

goatlover wrote: post #391
JoshTko wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This was my second draft. I reviewed my first draft which became an input in my second draft which gained more clarify after reviewing the first draft.

The way people usually say it is that you revised your first draft upon reflection, because it didn't quite get across the point you wanted to make, or something to that effect. So what makes the way you state it more true than the way people typically state it?

I can switch from word generation and evaluation. I saw the score of 1st draft was below my target. And I used the insights from the eval of the 1st draft to inform the 2nd draft.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#404

Post by cf141q5325 »

pixl97 wrote: post #356
cf141q5325 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great posts. I think its an error caused by a mistake often made on the topic, the assumption that side effects we see now are some fundamental problem and not just an artifact of the way systems are trained and used. And of how we (mal)function. Especially tightly embracing the cognitive bias of how special and wonderful our intelligence is. After all we have that fancy squishy brain which we assume to be essential.…

NOVA just released an episode on perception ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU6LfXNeQM4 ) and, yea, and aligning machine perception to human perception is going to be nearly impossible. Or to put it another way, your brains model of reality is one that is highly optimized around the limitations of meatsacks on a power budget that are trying not to die. Our current AI does not have to worry about death in its most c…

Thanks for the link! Trying to figure out how AI thinking looks sounds like a dead end to me. Its not human, you dont understand it, so whats the point? Especially when you have to worry about getting manipulated. Alignment this way seems indeed impossible. But given the ability to produce language that makes sense it should be possible to emulate the human thinking process by looking how that actually works on a practical level. Same way you dont care how the brain actually works to produce language.

As such i see no hurdle to get something to emulate the thinking in language of an individual. Assuming that there arent actually multiple realities to see, just different perspectives you can work with. Which would mean we are looking for the one utilizing human perspectives, but not making the mistakes humans do.

Which makes this so scary, the limitations are just a byproduct from the current approach. They are just playing the wrong game. Which means i am pretty confident they already exit somewhere.

edit: In this context i believe its also worth mentioning what Altman said at Lex Fridman, that humans dont like condescending bots. Thats a bitter pill to swallow going forwards. Especially since we require a lot of smoke and mirrors and noble lies, as an individual as well as a society.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#406

Post by lee101 »

hattmall wrote: post #186
zainhoda wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an exercise that some people do when learning programming, which is to write down the steps to make a sandwich. Then the teacher follows the exact instructions to make a sandwich and most people don’t put enough detail for a computer to follow (I.e. open the fridge etc) and the teacher will run around bumping into things. That used to be a teaching exercise to show people the amount of precision required when…

I don't get the "magic" people are seeing. It makes sense. >LLMs have somehow learned to fill in the blanks It's not somehow, it's because they have read a ton of books, documents, etc and can make enough links between cheese and refrigerator and follow that back to know that a refrigerator needs to be opened. I have seen a lot of very clever AI examples using the latest tools, but I haven't seen anything that seems…

[dead]

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#407

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

RandomLensman wrote: post #376
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How well do humans reason about 7-dimensional objects? I'm already impressed if a computer can reason flexibly about 3-dimensional objects.

Humans having the right mathematical tooling do ok.

What percentage of humans have that mathematical tooling?

The fact that people are even raising these sorts of obscure tests shows just how far AI has advanced.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#408

Post by Turing_Machine »

foldr wrote: post #296
leobg wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s doing the same to ChatGPT that he did to Skinner in the 1960s. Back then, it put him on the map, and he lives in the illusion that he was right. Now ChatGPT is pretty much Skinner’s work come to life. The BFS book Chomsky critiqued was literally “Verbal Behavior” - a book about how intelligence arises from “dumb” reinforcement learning of words. Obviously Chomsky must now claim that ChatGPT only pretends to be i…

It’s a significant misunderstanding of Chomsky’s life’s work to think that ChatGPT would prove it wrong. Chomsky’s primary claim is a claim about how language acquisition works in humans. He argues, for example, that certain locality constraints on linguistic dependencies are ‘built in’ and not learned inductively. Thus a human does not ‘learn’ that (i) is ambiguous and (ii) is not: (i) How often did you tell John th…

> He argues, for example, that certain locality constraints on linguistic dependencies are ‘built in’ and not learned inductively.

Checking in late here, but one of the pillars of Chomsky's argument is the so-called "poverty of the stimulus" -- basically, that human babies simply don't receive enough training data to acquire language as rapidly and correctly as they demonstrably do. Chomsky therefore concludes that there must be some kind of pre-existing "language module" in the brain to account for this. Now, not everyone accepted this idea even at the time, but surely the argument is much less plausible for an LLM which is likely exposed to more training data than even an adult human.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#409

Post by Turing_Machine »

foldr wrote: post #293
avereveard wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well not in the field he's a professional clickbaiter targeting a specific, well defined eco chamber.

Accusing Chomsky of being a ‘clickbaiter’ is maybe the most absurd thing I’ve heard all month. You think he’s trying to get additional views for his TikTok videos? His recent political ramblings and Epstein-adjacency are extremely embarrassing (at best), but he's not some kind of cheap online attention whore.

> Accusing Chomsky of being a ‘clickbaiter’ is maybe the most absurd thing I’ve heard all month. You think he’s trying to get additional views for his TikTok videos?

Chomsky has been addicted to media attention for decades. Back in the day there were literally people selling cassette tapes of his latest thoughts.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#410

Post by foldr »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #408
foldr wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a significant misunderstanding of Chomsky’s life’s work to think that ChatGPT would prove it wrong. Chomsky’s primary claim is a claim about how language acquisition works in humans. He argues, for example, that certain locality constraints on linguistic dependencies are ‘built in’ and not learned inductively. Thus a human does not ‘learn’ that (i) is ambiguous and (ii) is not: (i) How often did you tell John th…

> He argues, for example, that certain locality constraints on linguistic dependencies are ‘built in’ and not learned inductively. Checking in late here, but one of the pillars of Chomsky's argument is the so-called "poverty of the stimulus" -- basically, that human babies simply don't receive enough training data to acquire language as rapidly and correctly as they demonstrably do. Chomsky therefore concludes that t…

>Now, not everyone accepted this idea even at the time, but surely the argument is much less plausible for an LLM which is likely exposed to more training data than even an adult human.

Yes indeed. Of course this doesn't show that Chomsky was wrong about humans. In any case, I've seen no evidence that current LLMs successfully learn the kinds of constraints I was talking about.

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