There is no A.I. • Hacker News Board

Re: There is no A.I.

#421

Post by fauxpause_ » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #391

fauxpause_ wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s external state. I believe it just feeds the bot the entire conversation each time. I’m open to being shown otherwise. That is to say, swapping out bots midway through the conversation should have no impact.

There are piles of intermediate hidden activations involved in encoding the conversation and producing the next outputs, of course. "Internal" state also gets a bit weird as a concept when we can look at any activations we want.

We can surely construct a different definition if you want to win a semantic argument. But at the end of the day these LLMs have no clue what you just said and what it just said, after it’s done speaking.

Re: There is no A.I.

#422

Post by lm28469 » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #358

quonn wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's irrelevant. Transformers are Turing complete. Whatever mathematical system underlies human cognition will thus have some expression as a transformer. That‘s irrelevant, too, because nothing indicates that the actual transformer of, say, GPT or the training is in any way connected to such an expression of the human brain. Linux is written in C and that‘s Turing complete. And? Therefore Linux is like the brain…

> That‘s irrelevant, too, because nothing indicates that the actual transformer of, say, GPT or the training is in any way connected to such an expression of the human brain. It's not irrelevant, it was merely the premise for the following point, which was that transformers are trained to learn a function. Since they're Turing complete, they can thus hypothetically implement any function, including the function gover…

> What is irrelevant is trying to dismiss transformers as intelligent, or like the brain,

Well there is a very very very big thing that makes it relevant, which would be the fact that we have no fucking clue on how our brain actually works.

Wild claims, as always, no sources, as always

Re: There is no A.I.

#423

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

throwaway8503 wrote: post #55

williamtrask wrote: post #4

For those who don’t know about the author, he is most well known a founder of the field of virtual reality. As a full time philosopher in the CTO’s office at MSFT, and the originator of concepts like data dignity, he’s uniquely qualified to write this kind of piece. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

And a roommate of Richard Stallman at one point, AFAIR. the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it Indeed. His idea of attaching provenance to source of information used in models is a good one, and one that already has rumblings of legal weight behind it (see the various articles about copyright claims in response to GPT/Copilot). I worry a bit that his argument is too centred on digital inform…

[deleted]

Re: There is no A.I.

#424

Post by naasking » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 3:54 PM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #417

naasking wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the hell, we are looking at essentially millions of matrix multiplications done on powerful GPUs. And we're told this is what the brain does. Which is supremely stupid, since as Bernardo Kastrup has emphasized many times, our brains are completely UNLIKE those systems. That's irrelevant. Transformers are Turing complete. Whatever mathematical system underlies human cognition will thus have some expression as a…

Do you have like any sources to back up you magical claims ? The more I look into the more I see a cult/religion more than a science

What claims, specifically, do you want elaborated?

Re: There is no A.I.

#425

Post by naasking » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #422

naasking wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That‘s irrelevant, too, because nothing indicates that the actual transformer of, say, GPT or the training is in any way connected to such an expression of the human brain. It's not irrelevant, it was merely the premise for the following point, which was that transformers are trained to learn a function. Since they're Turing complete, they can thus hypothetically implement any function, including the function gover…

> What is irrelevant is trying to dismiss transformers as intelligent, or like the brain, Well there is a very very very big thing that makes it relevant, which would be the fact that we have no fucking clue on how our brain actually works. Wild claims, as always, no sources, as always

Thanks for agreeing with my point, which is that all of the people claiming that these systems are NOT like the human brain have no clue what they're talking about, and that these systems very well could operate just like the brain.

Re: There is no A.I.

#426

Post by b33j0r » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

bakuninsbart wrote: post #399

b33j0r wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just can’t accept that we might solve ourselves. People are understandably desperate to understand their experiences as more than an encoding of a thing that might be explained. And all of our surprising wins and awful mistakes had explainable reasons, dammit; it wasn’t just a misfiring of trained statistical networks!

I find this quite similar to the issue of free will: If we live in a generally deterministic universe, where is the space for independent decisions of individuals? Was every single decision we take already predetermined before we were born? A lot of ink has been spent on this topic, and as far as I know, only a small minority of people actually deny free will. One assumption I have is to why is because it absolutely…

Maybe it makes me weird, but the idea of being determined, but still having to follow those emotional and cognitive tasks to moral conclusions is some kind of “work” we still have to do, to get good outcomes.

That’s still the hole in my theory of consciousness. I admit it ;)

But it doesn’t give me as much cognitive dissonance as others to believe that the process of performing moral actions still has to be “processed” by me, a processor. In some sense.

Re: There is no A.I.

#427

Post by beezlewax » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 4:11 PM UTC

notjoemama wrote: post #402

aldarisbm wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and computers are fancy calculators, let’s be careful to not fall into reductionist views. we know the architecture but we don’t know what happens in the black box.

Well, and let's not treat it like dancing bear either. I've been following AI/ML for years so I'm not blown away like so many other people. I know enough I'm also not mystified by the current popular form. Which is to say there have been previous. LLMs are not AGI but still "a form of AI". Unfortunately AI has become a buzzword, actually it has been for years. While many are just coming to the party I feel a sense of…

This is the problem right here AI as a definition is now fairly meaningless. Are they self aware ... no and they're not designed to be. Can they do intelligent things?... well yes when they're trained to with huge amounts of probably flawed data.

I use these models everyday to look up answers to coding problems which prior to this required minutes of wading through ad riddled noise.

Re: There is no A.I.

#428

Post by Jeff_Brown » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 4:23 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #318

> If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration. What an utterly vapid and ignorant view. In the rest of the article Lanier goes on to argue that it's all just "simple mathematics". Yeah, yeah, and computers are just simple NAND gates, amirite? I've waffled over the years…

Useful discussion needs to unbundle intelligence. Some people mean reasoning, some agency, some consciousness, and some the desert of moral consideration.

Re: There is no A.I.

#429

Post by sdenton4 » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

fauxpause_ wrote: post #421

sdenton4 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are piles of intermediate hidden activations involved in encoding the conversation and producing the next outputs, of course. "Internal" state also gets a bit weird as a concept when we can look at any activations we want.

We can surely construct a different definition if you want to win a semantic argument. But at the end of the day these LLMs have no clue what you just said and what it just said, after it’s done speaking.

Why is that a prerequisite for intelligence?

Suppose we could upload + fully simulate a human mind. Now suppose that we chose to spin it up, run it briefly, then throw away all the state every time we wanted to interact with it. Would the choice to throw away the internal state mean it wasn't intelligent?

LLMs run in an autoregressive mode for inference. We can concatenate conversations, but choose not to because shit gets weird if you let them run long enough, and partly because there's a finite context window in the current architectures.

I'm not saying that gpt is intelligent, mind you, but that your argument is insufficient to show non intelligence: it's really a 'airplanes can't fly because they don't flap their wings' argument.

Re: There is no A.I.

#430

Post by tcoff91 » Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 4:39 PM UTC

bakuninsbart wrote: post #399

b33j0r wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just can’t accept that we might solve ourselves. People are understandably desperate to understand their experiences as more than an encoding of a thing that might be explained. And all of our surprising wins and awful mistakes had explainable reasons, dammit; it wasn’t just a misfiring of trained statistical networks!

I find this quite similar to the issue of free will: If we live in a generally deterministic universe, where is the space for independent decisions of individuals? Was every single decision we take already predetermined before we were born? A lot of ink has been spent on this topic, and as far as I know, only a small minority of people actually deny free will. One assumption I have is to why is because it absolutely…

My understanding of how physics works is that due to the probabilistic nature of quantum physics, you can’t predict the future perfectly. So your decisions were not pre-ordained even though they were the result of physical processes happening in your brain.