651–660 of 1001 posts
I have personally witnessed AI capabilities that would be considered “impossible” by current public standards. The next 2-3 years are going to be incredibly interesting.
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Photons hit a human eye and then the human came up with language to describe that and then encoded the language into the LLM. The LLM can capture some of this relationship, but the LLM is not sensing actual photons, nor experiencing actual light cone stimulation, nor generating thoughts. Its "world model" is several degrees removed from the real world. So whatever fragment of a model it gains through learning to comp…
I agree with this. A metaphor I like is that the reason why humans say the night sky is beautiful is because they see that it is, whereas an LLM says it because it’s been said enough times in its training data.
Photoreceptors in your eye have been excited in the presence of photons. Those photoreceptors have relayed this information across a nerve to neurons in your brain which receive this encoded information and splay it out to an array of other neurons.
Each cell in this chain can rightfully claim to be a living organism in and of itself. “You” haven’t directly “seen” anything.
Please note that all of my instincts want to agree with you.
“AI isn’t conscious” strikes me more and more as a “god of the gaps” phenomenon. As AI gains more and more capacity, we keep retreating into smaller and smaller realms of what it means to be a live, thinking being.
Agency. If one studied the humanities they’d know how incredible a proposal “agentic” AI is. In the natural world, agency is a consequence of death: by dying, the feedback loop closes in a powerful way. The notion of casual agency (I’m thinking of Jensen Huang’s generative > agentic > robotic insistence) is bonkers. Some things are not easily speedrunned. (I did listen to a sizable portion of this podcast while makin…
I don't follow. If we, in some distant future, find a way to make humans functionally immortal, does that magically remove our agency? Or do we not have agency to begin with?
If your position on the "free will" question is that it doesn't exist, then sure I get it. But that seems incompatible with the death prerequisite you have put forward for it, because if it doesn't exist then surely it's a moot point to talk prerequisites anyway.
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This so much this. We don’t even have a good model for how invertebrate minds work or a good theory of mind. We can keep imitating understanding but it’s far from any actual intelligence.
I'm not sure we or evolution needed a theory of mind. Evolution stuck neurons together in various ways and fiddled with it till it worked without a master plan and the LLM guys seem to be doing something rather like that.
Andrej Karpathy seems to me like a national (world) treasure. He has the ability to explain concepts and thoughts with analogies and generalizations and interesting sayings that allow you to keep interest in what he is talking about for literally hours - in a subject that I don't know that much about. Clearly he is very smart, as is the interviewer, but he is also a fantastic communicator and does not come across as…
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> then the human came up with language to describe that and then encoded the language into the LLM No individual human invented language, we learn it from other people just like AI. I go as far as to say language was the first AGI, we've been riding the coats tails of language for a long time.
You're saying that language is an intelligence? So, c++ is intelliengece as well? It's an intelligence that can independently make deductions and create new ideas?
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I agree with this. A metaphor I like is that the reason why humans say the night sky is beautiful is because they see that it is, whereas an LLM says it because it’s been said enough times in its training data.
To play devil’s advocate, you have never seen the night sky. Photoreceptors in your eye have been excited in the presence of photons. Those photoreceptors have relayed this information across a nerve to neurons in your brain which receive this encoded information and splay it out to an array of other neurons. Each cell in this chain can rightfully claim to be a living organism in and of itself. “You” haven’t directly…
> Each cell in this chain can rightfully claim to be a living organism in and of itself. “You” haven’t directly “seen” anything.
What am "I" if not (at least partly) the cells in that chain? If they have "seen" it (where seeing is the complex chain you described), I have.
People keep talking about AGI as if it's some mystical leap beyond human capability. But let's be honest; software development at a modern startup is already the upper bound of applied intelligence. You're juggling shifting product specs, ambiguous user feedback, legacy code written by interns, and five competing JS frameworks, all while shipping on a Friday. Models can now do that. They can reason about asynchronous…
LLMs have continually taught me that we have vastly overestimated human intelligence
LLMs have continually taught me that we have vastly underestimated human intelligence, fixed that for you
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I don't think we can be confident that this is how it works. It may very well be that our level of intelligence has a hard limit to how many nines we can add, and AGI just pushes the limit further, but doesn't make it faster per se. It may also be that we're looking at this the wrong way altogether. If you compare the natural world with what humans have achieved, for instance, both things are qualitatively different,…
It's also assuming that all advances in AI just lead to cold hard gains, people have suggested this before but would a sentient AI get caught up in philosophical, silly or religious ideas? Silicone investor types seem to hope it's all just curing diseases they can profit from, but it might also be, "let's compose some music instead"?