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

How AI knows things no one told it

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 140 posts

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#61

Post by felix318 »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #49
famouswaffles wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real word actions and consequences give the words meaning. If you're rude to Bing, the conversation will end. You can keep typing but it won't respond. Searching the web and ending conversations are the only two actions Bing can currently do so what i'm saying is less applicable for now. But humanity is gearing up to give more and more control of more and more tools to increasingly powerful LLMs. Hell Bing is schedul…

So? This is a guardrail added by a Microsoft employee, mate. After their earlier dabblings in AI outputting bigotry and general toxicity, someone in their wisdom saw the sense to try and prevent going down a negative conversation path, hence all the edge lords on Reddit offering prompts to "jailbreak" an LLM and bypass the guardrails, which then get patched by a human being not long after. You're projecting so much m…

I’m not in the least worried about the supposed dangers of AI; I don’t see it causing major unemployment, nuclear armageddon, or anything particularly scary. However, I think the real danger with those chatbots is how people are becoming emotionally involved with them. This is clearly by design and it’s working extremely well with so many people.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#62

Post by hammyhavoc »

felix318 wrote: post #61
hammyhavoc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? This is a guardrail added by a Microsoft employee, mate. After their earlier dabblings in AI outputting bigotry and general toxicity, someone in their wisdom saw the sense to try and prevent going down a negative conversation path, hence all the edge lords on Reddit offering prompts to "jailbreak" an LLM and bypass the guardrails, which then get patched by a human being not long after. You're projecting so much m…

I’m not in the least worried about the supposed dangers of AI; I don’t see it causing major unemployment, nuclear armageddon, or anything particularly scary. However, I think the real danger with those chatbots is how people are becoming emotionally involved with them. This is clearly by design and it’s working extremely well with so many people.

Yes, completely agreed. There's a lot of being kidded that it's more than what it actually is because the hype is overblown. Statements are being made and repeated that simply have no basis in reality right now, nor in the future. Even this assumption that we are close to having AGI, I can only laugh.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#63

Post by rodoxcasta »

ggm wrote: post #50
byyyy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article isn't doing anything more then quoting experts in the field. From the article: “It is certainly much more than a stochastic parrot, and it certainly builds some representation of the world—although I do not think that it is quite like how humans build an internal world model,” says Yoshua Bengio, an AI researcher at the University of Montreal. If you remain unconvinced then the only conclusion I can make…

You keep using that word "expert" and I don't doubt they're experts in machine learning, GAN and NNs but at this point what we're looking for is experts in what intelligence IS and the problem is .. nobody knows. There's no underlying theory of mind here. There's a lot of opinion and belief .. mainly in emergent behaviour or properties of scale. My problem is that I'm old enough to have been a child during the years…

> There's no underlying theory of mind here.

Actually, there's some experimental evidence that GPT4 have a Theory of Mind as good as humans, maybe better.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11490

> GPT-4 performed best in zero-shot settings, reaching nearly 80% ToM accuracy, but still fell short of the 87% human accuracy on the test set. However, when supplied with prompts for in-context learning, all RLHF-trained LLMs exceeded 80% ToM accuracy, with GPT-4 reaching 100%.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#65

Post by thom »

1000thVisitor wrote: post #28
throwaway22032 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's bizarre. Are we not simply employing statistics when we deduce that yes, if we release our grip, the smartphone will fall to the floor? You wouldn't have to ever see a phone drop in order to know that, and neither would you have to study or know of the terminology of gravity. It comes from the statistical knowledge that all things fall when not blocked.

The key here is abstraction, not statistics. You have seen other items fall and are able to abstract this and then apply it to the phone.

Why would LLMs not learn abstractions when given millions of of concrete examples?

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#66

Post by titaniczero »

mike741 wrote: post #47
axutio wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's probably not anything more than statistics, but why can't statistics alone generate emergent phenomena? What convinces you that the human brain isn't also just statistics at a massive scale?

> why can't statistics alone generate emergent phenomena? because there is no generative mechanism in the definition of "statistics" with which to generate anything. > What convinces you that the human brain isn't also just statistics at a massive scale? Because the human brain created the concept of "statistics" so if statistics created the human brain this would mean statistics created statistics, leading to infini…

But the idea that the brain functions on a basis of complex statistical processes doesn't imply that statistics created the brain itself, it just suggests that the brain's processes can be modeled/understood through the lens of statistical methods. Statistics is just how we describe a tool we invented to analyze observable data, the brain could be a similar tool and it doesn't need to be the same tool.

It's akin to saying that we created the concept of "physics", yes we created it, and physics govern, for example, how a car moves, but it doesn't mean our concept of physics created the car or physics itself, we just use physics to describe and understand the car's movement.

Maybe statistics can't generate anything, but if you imagine everything we can do as very complex, unimaginable multi-dimensional functions that can generate outputs based on inputs, we can use statistics to find functions that fit any real (ground truth) function in the observable universe.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#67

Post by mike741 »

rodoxcasta wrote: post #63
ggm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep using that word "expert" and I don't doubt they're experts in machine learning, GAN and NNs but at this point what we're looking for is experts in what intelligence IS and the problem is .. nobody knows. There's no underlying theory of mind here. There's a lot of opinion and belief .. mainly in emergent behaviour or properties of scale. My problem is that I'm old enough to have been a child during the years…

> There's no underlying theory of mind here. Actually, there's some experimental evidence that GPT4 have a Theory of Mind as good as humans, maybe better. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11490 > GPT-4 performed best in zero-shot settings, reaching nearly 80% ToM accuracy, but still fell short of the 87% human accuracy on the test set. However, when supplied with prompts for in-context learning, all RLHF-trained LLMs excee…

>> There's no underlying theory of mind here.

> GPT4 have a Theory of Mind

You are misunderstanding ggm. That study is on ToM tasks referring to GPT's analysis and perceived recognition of the user's mind. It says nothing of GPT's own status as a mind. Nowhere in it is an ontological theory of mind actually defined. If you were to refute ggm's claim, you (or preferably the author of the original article) should be presenting your theory of mind, not GPT's.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#68

Post by version_five »

kgeist wrote: post #13
ggm wrote: post #4

Exceptionally unconvinced that it's more than statistics, and frankly unhappy that pop Sci media is being this uncritical of claims it's emergent intelligence.

If you invent/introduce made up concepts and rules on the spot ("let shmerple be ..."), which can't possibly be found in its training data, then, from my experience, when queried, LLMs are able to correctly reason most of the time... So it's not just Markov chains regurgitating sentences verbatim from their dataset. Even if this kind of intelligence is just statistics, does it really matter? If it quacks like a duck,…

Also want to add:

  ELIZA: How do you do.  Please tell me your problem.
  YOU:   I'm worried about shmerple
  ELIZA: Do you believe it is normal to be worried about shmerple ?
The fact that it can insert your made up word into patterns has no significance in itself.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#69

Post by byyyy »

damiankennedy wrote: post #56
byyyy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article isn't doing anything more then quoting experts in the field. From the article: “It is certainly much more than a stochastic parrot, and it certainly builds some representation of the world—although I do not think that it is quite like how humans build an internal world model,” says Yoshua Bengio, an AI researcher at the University of Montreal. If you remain unconvinced then the only conclusion I can make…

"you know that what these experts say have merit" No, we don't know that at all.

If experts don't have merit, then what person has merit? Non experts like you and I?

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#70

Post by byyyy »

ggm wrote: post #50
byyyy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article isn't doing anything more then quoting experts in the field. From the article: “It is certainly much more than a stochastic parrot, and it certainly builds some representation of the world—although I do not think that it is quite like how humans build an internal world model,” says Yoshua Bengio, an AI researcher at the University of Montreal. If you remain unconvinced then the only conclusion I can make…

You keep using that word "expert" and I don't doubt they're experts in machine learning, GAN and NNs but at this point what we're looking for is experts in what intelligence IS and the problem is .. nobody knows. There's no underlying theory of mind here. There's a lot of opinion and belief .. mainly in emergent behaviour or properties of scale. My problem is that I'm old enough to have been a child during the years…

>You keep using that word "expert" and I don't doubt they're experts in machine learning, GAN and NNs but at this point what we're looking for is experts in what intelligence IS and the problem is .. nobody knows.

So the experts say they don't know. But you make the opposite claim. You previously claimed you know it's nothing more than statistical phenomena. Now you changed your opinion and are now inline with the article in saying we don't know.

So discussion over?

>There's no underlying theory of mind here. There's a lot of opinion and belief .. mainly in emergent behaviour or properties of scale.

But again this is all negated by the experts claiming they don't know what's going on. And your statement is in direct opposition with your previous claim that it's only statistical phenomena.

>I admit, what this cycle of GPT and LLMs do is pretty bloody impressive. I don't see inductive reasoning, directed drive or any evidence of what I think intelligence is. I do see good approximations. But that winds up in "well it's a different kind of intelligence" which I find unsatisfying.

There is evidence inductive reasoning. It's not consistent nor is it as complex as human induction but evidence of actual inductive reasoning exists. Plenty of examples of it. I can provide proof of this if you want... but it's quite obvious it's actually everywhere.

>I totally get I do anything but define what intelligence is, and for a good reason: nobody knows yet.

The claim cited by researchers in that article is "emergent abilities." Nobody tries to define what intelligence is. It's more of "I don't know what's going on but something is up" attitudes that I see. This is in stark contrast to your claim of "The only thing going on is statistical anomalies".

>I certainly don't think animals inability to speak makes them "unintelligent" but there's a qualitative and quantitative difference between them and us, humans. And I continue to believe (and I stress believe, not have evidence or scientific proof) there are no signs of latent intelligence in what we're seeing.

I don't think this claim was made in the article. The strongest claim that opposes what you're saying here is this, and I quote:

“They’re indirect evidence that we are probably not that far off from AGI,” Goertzel said in March at a conference on deep learning at Florida Atlantic University.

It's just speculation we may be close to something.

I think the theme in your response is "we don't know" and it echoes the theme in the article so we are all in agreement here.

Just note the claim of "we don't know" or we "don't understand" something that we artificially created from scratch is strictly much more profound then saying we definitely know it's all statistical parroting.

Post reply on HN