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There is no A.I.

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481–490 of 523 posts

Re: There is no A.I.

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to predict the next token it’s doing something more like simulating the writer of the words and the context they were likely to be in while writing the words. You cannot make accurate predictions without understanding the world that gave rise to these words. Consider a detective story with all the clues laid out and then at the end the detective says: “I know who it is. It is: …” Correctly predicting the nex…

> You cannot make accurate predictions without understanding the world that gave rise to these words. I think you must either admit that chatgpt does exactly this, or else give up our traditional connotation of "understand". Chatgpt has never seen a sunset, felt pain, fallen in love, etc, yet it can discuss them coherently; to call that understanding the world is to implicitly say that the world can be understood sol…

Ok, but billions upon billions of “statistical relationships”.. I mean at some point the term “simple” loses its meaning. I get your point though. It is not pure magic.

Re: There is no A.I.

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a misleading analogy because Bob "reads the transcript"; we generally view "reading" as separate from our conscious narrative. However, consider the alternate scenario where Bob "replays the stream of consciousness" from Alice. In that case, we may argue that Bob has conscious continuity from Alice. The argument would then be that the context window is functionally closer to "replaying a stream of consciousne…

It’s literally the text. It is not a stream of consciousness. There is no carryover of “consciousness” state. It is the raw text without even the embedding information, not that we should consider the embedding representation to be an internal state, because it is not. That difference is the whole point. There is nothing to transfer.

Humans verbalize their conscious state. What little consciousness GPT has, ie. CoT and the like, it picked up by imitating human verbalization of conscious interiority. (I don't think layer state qualifies as consciousness.) As such, I believe two things: 1. the generated text is, if at all, very weak conscious state; 2. if there is any, it is there.

Re: There is no A.I.

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations lobby and bribe governments officials to keep the status quo as is. Egg or chicken first? With your framing of the issue, I wonder what would be the solution. Smaller government? That just gives more power to corporations.

Empirically we know that practically any sector that is left "to the markets" will evolve to be dominated by 2-3 conglomerates / gatekeepers that will choke all competition, replace regulation with "self-regulation" and eventually hold society hostage as too-big-to-fail etc. That dynamic is not intrinsic to private enterprize, for-profit entities or corporate structure. You can, e.g. as a crude thought experiment, ke…

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Re: There is no A.I.

#484
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels more like smarter automation to me. Yep. Elevators used to be proof that machines can think. Then compilers, and chess, and go, and search, and … The problem with AI is that as soon as it works, we stop thinking about it as “artificial intelligence” and it becomes “just automation”. Then AI moves to the next goalpost.

I had someone on HN state stockfish is intelligent. If that is your definition of intelligence sure GPT is also intelligent. I do not think that's a common definition though!

Point is that we move the bar every time computers reach it. At least in part because we want to keep feeling special. And in part because we go “Well that can’t have been the bar then”

I suspect even full AGI will be considered “just a machine” for many decades, even centuries, before it gains the same rights as humans. We love to find reasons we’re special. Look how long it took us to admit animals are intelligent.

For many humans, computers definitionally can’t be intelligent. It’s important to recognize that.

Re: There is no A.I.

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Winner winner chicken dinner. Could sum the argument as: Transformers appear to be approximately emulating the brain despite us not fully understanding how either works "inside". Which is weird and eerie, but plausible.

Re: There is no A.I.

#486
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah the same old argument Hayek dismantled over 70 years ago.

I'm familiar with Hayek and can't really discern exactly what you're referring to. You'll need to be a little more specific.

That technological progress will be so vast and destructive to the social fabric that individual freedom / capitalism cannot handle it anymore, thus we need central planning to address it.

Re: There is no A.I.

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had the following conversation on chatGPT > Human: what is 36,330 26,951 * (input is expressed in reverse post fix notation) > chatGPT: To evaluate this expression using reverse Polish notation, we need to use a stack to keep track of the intermediate results. Here's how we can evaluate the expression: 1. Read the first number "36,330" and push it onto the stack. 2. Read the second number "26,951" and push it…

You should ask it to show its working. The problem is that it uses a fixed amount of thinking for each character - and it writes left to right - while long multiplication is computed right to left. Past a certain number of digits, the amount of "thinking" needed to compute long multiplication in the wrong order (left to right) increases without bound -- accuracy suffers as a result. A tangential point: Note that mult…

I was thinking along the lines of maybe it reads the digits as individual tokens and reading from left to right it get confused. That's why I thought it might be about notation. I have learned it's definitely not the case (read a bit about what tokens actually mean)

I also tried the show your work methods. I will not paste my conversations here as they are so long but even with showing it's work it doesn't give the right answer. Two funny things I noticed

1. It either uses a completely wrong method to calculate it, or it shows the right "kind" of work and then gets the wrong answer

2. If I tell it it was wrong and it will just agree with me. I multiply two huge numbers and tell it no the answer is actually 42, it will just apologize. Then when I ask the reason why it thinks it's right it will give the most bullshit things lol. Once it even said "I read the number wrong, the second number should be x I read y". The thing is if I had actually given x in the input it would have gotten the answer right.

It's all very confusing.

Re: There is no A.I.

#488
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that we have zero awareness about the edge cases in the world of general intelligence doesn't give us right to think there aren't any. The world of the minds isn't necessarily simpler than physical world and we know about it even less. For example think of all cognitive biases and myriad of illusions we have to struggle very hard with when we apply out minds to any problem and want to have any hopes of achie…

The fact that there are edge cases is actually part of what worries AI doomers. We'll be deploying these AI systems to non-critical areas where they can still do a lot of damage.

This reminds me of how totalitarian systems create their enemies. Enemy is at the same time portrayed as dangerously incompetent but also incredibly dangerously cunning.

Re: There is no A.I.

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human mind works by cross referencing sensory inputs with internal state, which may result in answering a question through some sort of reasoning, which may resemble the architecture of a neural net. An LLM is stateless function that answers a question. It constructs a working representation of the question. It cannot be aware of itself because there is nothing to be aware of. It is a process, not a thing. Intellig…

Any stateful function can be made stateless by turning the state into an argument to the function and the updated state into an additional return value: y := f(x) becomes y, z' := f(x, z). The usual implementation for LLMs are stateless in exactly this way. The actual operation is autoregressive - ie, stateful and developing over time, where the state is the set of intermediate activations of the network - but it's o…

Making something “autoregressive” by moving the numbers around doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. A stateless thing is stateless. It has no internal state. It has no self to be aware of.

> Why should continuous time matter for intelligence? That seems entirely arbitrary.

Intelligence is arbitrary. This is a personal view that helps keep it meaningful. If you exist discretely you may as well not exist. You’re just a concept

> How often do humans apply reasoning to make a decision? Are humans not intelligent when not employing reasoning? Does reasoning require language? And are humans without language intelligent? What about animals? Any definition of intelligence really should spend some time grappling with the facts of animal intelligence...

You’re gradually shifting the bar from “self aware” to “capable” and I don’t care about the latter.

Re: There is no A.I.

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s literally the text. It is not a stream of consciousness. There is no carryover of “consciousness” state. It is the raw text without even the embedding information, not that we should consider the embedding representation to be an internal state, because it is not. That difference is the whole point. There is nothing to transfer.

Humans verbalize their conscious state. What little consciousness GPT has, ie. CoT and the like, it picked up by imitating human verbalization of conscious interiority. (I don't think layer state qualifies as consciousness.) As such, I believe two things: 1. the generated text is, if at all, very weak conscious state; 2. if there is any, it is there.

Any definition that tries to claim your response here is consciousness is wrong and uninteresting to me. It is subjective either way.
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