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Four Fallacies of Modern AI

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Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#51

Post by koonsolo »

peterashford wrote: post #48
koonsolo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look at it the complete opposite way: humans are defining intelligence upwards to make sure they can perceive themselves better than a computer. It's clear that humans consider humans as intelligent. Is a monkey intelligent? A dolphin? A crow? An ant? So I ask you, what is the lowest form of intelligence to you? (I'm also a huge David Lynch fan by the way :D)

Im not sure what that gets you. I think most people would suggest that it appears to be a sliding scale. Humans, dolphins / crows, ants, etc. What does that get us?

Well, is an LLM more intelligent than an ant?

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#52

Post by tonyhart7 »

and this is misconception of this "AI"

they don't need to reach equal human intelligence, the just need to reach an acceptable of intelligence so corporation can reduce labor cost

sure it bad at certain things but you know what ??? most of real world job didn't need a genius either

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#53

Post by entropyneur »

cantor_S_drug wrote: post #24
entropyneur wrote: post #18

This article seems to fall straight into the trap it aims to warn us about. All this talk about "true" understanding, embodiment, etc. is needless antropomorphizing. A much better framework for thinking about intelligence is simply as the ability to make predictions about the world (including conditional ones like "what will happen if we take this action"). Whether it's achieved through "true understanding" (however…

Imagine LLM is conscious (as Anthropic wants us to believe). Imagine LLM is made to train on so much data which is far beyond what its parameter count allows for. Am I hurting the LLM by causing it intensive cognitive strain?

I agree that whether AI is conscious is an important question. In fact, I think it's the most important question above our own existential crisis. Unfortunately, it's also completely hopeless at our current level of knowledge.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#54

Post by sharikous »

theturtlemoves wrote: post #7

I've always had the feeling that AI researchers want to build their own human without having to change diapers being part of the process. Just skip to adulthood please, and learn to drive a car without having experience in bumping into things and hurting yourself. > Language doesn't just describe reality; it creates it. I wonder if this is a statement from the discussed paper or from the blog author. Haven't found th…

> I've always had the feeling that AI researchers want to build their own human without having to change diapers being part of the process. Just skip to adulthood please, and learn to drive a car without having experience in bumping into things and hurting yourself.

I partially agree, but the idea about AI is that you need to bump into things and hurt yourself only once. Then you have a good driver you can replicate at will

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#55

Post by alwinaugustin »

For all its advanced capabilities, the LLM remains a glorified natural language interface. It is exceptionally good at conversational communication and synthesizing existing knowledge, making information more accessible and in some cases, easier to interact with. However, many of the more ambitious applications, such as so-called "agents," are not a sign of nascent intelligence. They are simply sophisticated workflows—complex combinations of Python scripts and chained API calls that leverage the LLM as a sub-routine. These systems are clever, but they are not a leap towards true artificial agency. We must be cautious not to confuse a powerful statistical tool with the dawn of genuine machine consciousness.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#56

Post by whilenot-dev »

adastra22 wrote: post #29

> Does a model that can see and act begin to bridge the gap toward common sense Question for the author: how are SOTA LLM models not common sense machines?

Not the author, but to extend this quote from the article:

> Its [Large Language Models] ability to write code and summarize text feels like a qualitative leap in generality that the monkey-and-moon analogy doesn't quite capture. This leaves us with a forward-looking question: How do recent advances in multimodality and agentic AI test the boundaries of this fallacy? Does a model that can see and act begin to bridge the gap toward common sense, or is it just a more sophisticated version of the same narrow intelligence? Are world models a true step towards AGI or just a higher branch in a tree of narrow linguistic intelligence?

I'd put the expression common sense on the same level as having causal connections, and would also assume that SOTA LLMs do not create an understanding based on causality. AFAICS this is known as the "reversal curse"[0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/zjkBMFhNj_g?t=750

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#57

Post by gilleain »

entropyneur wrote: post #46
AIPedant wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Making predictions about the world" is a reductive and childish way to describe intelligence in humans. Did David Lynch make Mulholland Drive because he predicted it would be a good movie? The most depressing thing about AI summers is watching tech people cynically try to define intelligence downwards to excuse failures in current AI.

> Did David Lynch make Mulholland Drive because he predicted it would be a good movie? He made it because he predicted that it will have some effects enjoyable to him. Without knowing David Lynch personally I can assume that he made it because he predicted other people will like it. Although of course, it might have been some other goal. But unless he was completely unlike anyone I've ever met, it's safe to assume th…

> unless he was completely unlike anyone I've ever met,

I mean ... he is David Lynch.

We seem to be defining "predicted" to mean "any vision or idea I have of the future". Hopefully film directors have _some_ idea of what their film should look like, but that seems distinct from what they expect that it will end up.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#58

Post by AIPedant »

koonsolo wrote: post #40
AIPedant wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Making predictions about the world" is a reductive and childish way to describe intelligence in humans. Did David Lynch make Mulholland Drive because he predicted it would be a good movie? The most depressing thing about AI summers is watching tech people cynically try to define intelligence downwards to excuse failures in current AI.

I look at it the complete opposite way: humans are defining intelligence upwards to make sure they can perceive themselves better than a computer. It's clear that humans consider humans as intelligent. Is a monkey intelligent? A dolphin? A crow? An ant? So I ask you, what is the lowest form of intelligence to you? (I'm also a huge David Lynch fan by the way :D)

If you look at my comment history you will see that I don't think LLMs are nearly as intelligent as rats or pigeons. Rats and pigeons have an intuitive understanding of quantity and LLMs do not.

I don't know what "the lowest form of intelligence" is, nobody has a clue what cognition means in lampreys and hagfish.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#59

Post by musicale »

degamad wrote: post #10
jokoon wrote: post #9

Finally an insightful article about ai

It was, but it punted in the conclusion... > Mitchell in her paper compares modern AI to alchemy. It produces dazzling, impressive results but it often lacks a deep, foundational theory of intelligence. > It’s a powerful metaphor, but I think a more pragmatic conclusion is slightly different. The challenge isn't to abandon our powerful alchemy in search of a pure science of intelligence. But alchemy was wrong and cha…

> But alchemy was wrong

Yet alchemists developed and refined many important chemical processes including crystallization, distillation, evaporation, synthesis of acids/bases/salts, etc., as well as many useful substances and compounds from gunpowder to aqua regia. Also various dyes, drugs, and poisons. Their ranks included the likes of Paracelsus, Tycho Brahe, Boyle, and Newton.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#60

Post by 1718627440 »

lovecg wrote: post #25
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to ask because I'm curious, are you using em-dashes ironically, habitually from the Before Times, or did you run your comment through chatgpt first? Or have I been brainwashed into emdash == AI always?

They’re putting spaces around the em-dashes which is—believe it or not—incorrect usage. ChatGPT doesn’t put in spaces. (I’m annoyed by this since I learned about em-dashes long before AI and occasionally use them in writing, which now gets me an occasional AI accusation)

Not the whole world has the same typographic conventions. To me omitting the word separator across a symbol designed to separate half-way sentences seems wrong.
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