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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

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Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#411
post #319
post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers…

As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity (or at least until we further our understanding of how to define sentience to the point where we can do so objectively enough to f…

I think the actual firing is very objective.

He was under NDA but violated it. They reminded him to please not talk in public about NDA-ed stuff and he kept doing it. So now they fired him with a gentle reminder that "it's regrettable that [..] Blake still chose to persistently violate [..] data security policies". And from a purely practical point of view, I believe it doesn't even matter if Lemoine's theory of sentience turns out to be correct or wrong.

Also, we as society have already chosen how to deal with sentient beings, and it's mostly ignorance. There has been a lot of research on what animals can or cannot feel and how they grieve the loss of a family member. Yet we still regularly kill their family members in cruel ways so that we can eat their meat. Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#412
post #69

Less surprised about this outcome than that the guy was a Google engineer in the first place. Their hiring standards seem so high from the outside, yet this guy comes across as barely computer-literate, the kind who would have fervently demanded an in-person session with the ELIZA 'therapist' in the 70's. He really should know better what's under the hood. I guess he got carried away by his impressions, or he's playi…

Having been a Google reject, I thought this too. But I think there is a now almost an entire field of engineering which is "learn to get a FAANG job" which if you apply yourself too anyone get probably get in given enough time.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a little sloppy in my formulation. A better way would be the ability to observe one's own thought processes and integrate them back into consciousness. Meta-cognition is a much better term, I think. It doesn't seem to me like cats for instance have this ability.

You should check out the YouTube of the cat that was trained to use buttons to speak. It sometimes says things that are surprising which it wasn't trained to say directly - like complaining that its owners music is bad. I realize that this isn't contradicting your thesis of language models not being conscious - but I just generally think people should check out things like that cat. So I'm not trying to disagree with…

I already have, and I'm considering trying it out with my own cat at some point. Cats are way more intelligent than people give them credit for, I agree. But I think you can get very far without the ability to turn the mind's eye inward, and I don't think it's controversial to state that cats don't have a great deal of self-awareness and metacognitive ability.

Neosocial insects like ants are amazing indeed. I often wonder what kind of "mind" an anthill has. Hurts just to think about it.

And, to quote Oliver Sachs: "I'm not sure about octopuses..."

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.) These things are orthogonal to sentience.

Not really. Anything that's sentient should have the general intelligence to figure out addition. Make mistakes, sure, but at least understand the concept.

That's not proven. Not even a little.

Dolphins most probably are sentient, and we still can't communicate with them well enough to talk about arithmetic.

Even if some animals can figure out small numbers, anything over 7 is just too much for them.

To have an algorithm to sum any arbitrarily pair of huge numbers, that's entirely something else, even for many people.

Any other 'thing' that's sentient being able to generalize sums is just speculation on your part.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#415
post #58

I’ll byte… Current generation of AI / ML is simply an approximation function with large number of parameters that are “tuned” on a given set of inputs. The output of AI / ML is “good” if the approximation is good and most of the time this means that the new input is similar to the training data. However, if the input is very different from training data then at worst the models will be completely wrong (but very sure…

Your brain is literally just a giant neural network approximating what to say and do at each point in time in order to optimize survival of your progeny

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#416
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Objectively, Zeus does not exist Speaking as a theoretical physicist: we don't know that. What we do know is we have a better explanation for lightning within a conceptually simple framework (starting from a few simple principles) with predictive power, compared to an explanation that involves some mysterious old dude doing mysterious things with no evidence whatsoever. Could Zeus or Thor or whatever exist? Sure; t…

Issue is that we don’t need it to explain humans either. Most people think that a human is sentient and a rock isn’t – but humans and rocks are both atoms bouncing around, so you need an explanation for what’s different. I think most physicists think that if you started with a description of the positions and velocities etc of all the particles in a human, and put them into a supercomputer the size of the moon, and h…

Your first sentence was very thought provoking! I wholeheartedly agree, everything is/was/and will be alive.

The philosophical point you're making is also interesting in a "devil's advocate" sort of way. For instance, let's say the AI in question is "sentient." What right do humans have to preside over its life or death?

Those kind of questions might engender some enlightenment for humanity regarding our treatment of living creatures.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#417

> In his conversations with LaMDA, Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness, expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness. Allegedly. The thing about conversations with LaMDA is that you need to prime them with keywords and topics, and LaMDA can respond with the primed keywords and topics. Obviously LaMDA i…

Yeah, I get the impression that the reporting here's fairly one-sided in the employee's favour. Lemoine didn't "discover" that LaMDA has all those attributes, he thought it did.

This entire saga's been very frustrating to watch because of outlets putting his opinion on a pedestal equal to those of actual specialists.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#418
post #48

Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)

> what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations sentience and consciousness are the same thing... if i believe i am conscious and so do you, then it's good enough for me. why does there need to be a light switch. if there are 5 deer in the field and i have 1 bow and arrow, i need to focus my attention and track one deer only for 5 or 10 mins to hunt it - consciousness al…

Yes, we also don't know what consciousness is.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#420
post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers…

> large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models

And who says our brain is not exactly that, but at an even greater scale?

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