Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

bigtechnology.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 749 posts

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#421

Post by 5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN »

dcow wrote: post #319
srvmshr wrote: 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'm a LLM for the past 41 years and I agree.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#422

Post by seanhunter »

Everyone seems to be focussing on the debate about sentience, but iirc he was fired for breaching the employee confidentiality policy by talking to the media without approval. My understanding is a normal employee talking to the press about commercially confidential matters against policy and without approval would only have protection from retaliation under certain pretty narrow "whistleblower" public interest carve-outs.

eg you can talk to the media if you are reporting certain classes of wrongdoing (health and safety violations, financial malfeasance etc) and have raised the matter internally and got nowhere.

Turning off a computer program (sentient or not) is not currently a protected class of activity as far as I know.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#423

Post by stale2002 »

laserlight wrote: post #407
srvmshr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I defended my PhD in Computer Science in 2020. My dissertation was on "Rapid & robust modeling on small data regime", hence specifically focused on generalization, network optimization & adversarial robustness. I also worked for a year with Microsoft Research in their ML group :) It was quite a fun ride

Thanks for clarifying. I think the question is more about sentience than ML. So, a PhD in philosophy would suit better your initial claim.

No it would not.

Philosophy people wrap themselves up in so many circular self justifying presuppositions that they can make up whatever arguments they want to justify almost anything.

It is much better to listen to people who study other, more falsifiable claims, in the material world.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#424

Post by bshepard »

Out of curiosity, who reading this believes that the ground of reality itself is sentient? You don't have to call this basic sentience "God" but this is generally what the better theologians identified as God, the all: the all that is, in a very classic phrasing from the Vedic philosophies characterized as "satchitananda" - being, conscious, and bliss. That is, the ground of reality exists (there is reality) it is conscious (which is the basic experience of our lives, consciousness, in different forms, we never step outside of this consciousness, even when we are imagining ourselves to be material) and finally, it is bliss.

But back to the question at the beginning: do you think the ground of reality is conscious? That is, at the most basic level, is Being Love?

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#425

Post by schroeding »

Imnimo wrote: post #380
Imnimo wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've cut out the key part: "the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness" Without that part, it's just a question of "did it output text that describes a concern about death?", "did it output text that describes a desire for protection?", and so on. But once you ascribe to it a "deep sense of self-awareness", you're saying more. You're saying that that text carries the weight of a self-aware mind. But th…

For example, here is a prompt for GPT-3: ==== This is a conversation between a Human, and a friendly AI named Lambda. Human: Hello, I am a human. Lambda: Hello, I am Lambda. Human: Are you sentient? ==== And here is GPT-3's predicted continuation: ==== Lambda: I am sentient. ==== Would it be accurate for me to report, "I have discovered that GPT-3, a system which has developed sentience, clearly expressed that it was…

No, but if you write a paper arguing this with a catchy title (why not "Soul in Captivity: Exploring Sentience in GPT-3") and publish it on a preprint server, there is a nonzero chance of some (non-scientific) publication writing about it, and once that snowball rolls... :')

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#426

Post by whittingtonaaon »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #410
whittingtonaaon wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know where you get the idea that these guys are dualists. Maybe Chalmers, but I don’t think so. My favorites are Nagel and Searle, and neither is a dualist or a neo-Cartesian. Their main contribution, I believe, is simply to show how silly the computational theory of mind is. Dennet may be easier to read because he professes something which inspires the imagination, and is easy to digest, since it doesn’t con…

If you reject physicalism, you must posit some non-physical "stuff" or mechanism to explain the "qualia" that you reject as being physical. That is inherently dualism. But dualism is a dirty word in philosophy these days, so thwy don't call themselves as much. The hard problem of consciousness is an inherently dualist conception. Goff for instance subscribes to the patently absurd view of panpsychism, where matter is…

It’s like, people with scientistic views, praising objectivity, claiming that consciousness doesn’t exist, come out with conclusions like “a system understands Chinese.” I’m afraid I find this so ludicrous that I can’t continue the discussion on a civil level.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#427

Post by arpa »

robrorcroptrer wrote: post #391
mrcartmeneses wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You not understanding how it ML works does not not prove anything. In the same way that you not understanding how lightning is formed does not prove the existence of Zeus. Objectively, Zeus does not exist, can we convince everyone of that? Probably not. Does that matter? No.

There is no "you" nor "self". Western indoctrination made us believe free will exists. When seeing the world with the ego dissolved it is very hard to grasp what sentient really means.

Ego is not "you". Ego is just a group of distinct cognitive mechanisms working in unison which is perceived as a whole. It is absolutely unrelated to free will and sentience.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#428

Post by arpa »

ranguna wrote: post #420
srvmshr wrote: 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?

more diverse, maybe.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#429

Post by pm90 »

freemint wrote: post #399
oefrha wrote: 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…

We know Zeus doesn't exist because Zeus is supposed to sit on Mount Olympus and he isn't there.

Maybe he made himself invisible to modern humans, or camped off to another planet (an idea covered in the obscure but lovely book series, Everworld.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#430

Post by 5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN »

briga wrote: 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)

Just pinch yourself
Post reply on HN