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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#71

Post by renewiltord »

Blahah wrote: post #57
thaumasiotes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, it’s possible right? That we’re just randomly sampling sentences. Actually, no, it isn't possible. There's an example sidethread that immediately disproves this theory: > When you ask a human, "what did you eat for lunch?", we make a series of choices and recall bits of information to answer that. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31721870 ) If you observe someone having lunch (or skipping it), and lat…

Did you read the original transcript? LaMDA reports (imagined) experiences in a way that seems perfectly compatible with human rhetoric.

It fails the usual memory tests. Zach W proposes asking it first about what it liked on its trip to Australia and soon after, why it has always avoided visiting Australia or some such thing. It provides plausible answers to both - which is problematic.

Except that there exist people who behave somewhat oddly similarly.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#74

Post by klohto »

eecc wrote: post #33
s1mon wrote: post #11

It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…

I’m guessing different positions are tested differently; any development role is heavily guarded by Indiana Jones temple traps while more “soft skills” roles are within reach of anyone eloquent enough to talk themselves into a community

Well, he was a software engineer

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#75

Post by tinco »

cuuupid wrote: post #35
ehsankia wrote: post #13

I also think the claims are overblown, but I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. Yes our inputs are different since we have more complex senses, and language is one of the main outputs we…

We have very little understanding of how "thoughts" work when it comes to humans. By comparison we know exactly what these large language models are doing, and it literally _is_ just completing word sequences. That is precisely what they are tasked to do. Training these models is primarily done in one of two ways (or both): - feeding it a ton of text, masking certain words or portions of the text, and then defining a…

I'm sorry but you completely fail at explaining what the difference is between GPT-3 and a human when generating sentences. And frankly I don't believe there is any significant difference. If you inform GPT-3 of what it has eaten then it can answer questions about it just as well as a human can, probably better. Why would you assume human thinking is different from generating the next N language tokens based on previous input?

In my opinion the only difference between a human and GPT-3 is we have more intrinsic motivations and more hardwired/pretrained subsystems and sensors. Lamda is not a 7 year old child because it has no motivation other than to respond to queries.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#76

Post by mejari »

cuuupid wrote: post #47
s1mon wrote: post #11

It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…

Technically speaking isn't this blasphemy? If he's saying that the A.I. his division helped create was a soulful child, then he's basically claiming that the researchers in his division (and maybe even himself) are all gods, which is a form of blasphemy?

No one ever think the things they think are blasphemy.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#77

Post by mpoteat »

Imnimo wrote: post #67

I think the real ethical concern here should be that people can be idly fooled into thinking good chat bots are sentient. Like this guy isn't the only person in the world who would fall for LaMDA's parlor tricks. He's just the one who got to spend hours talking to it every day. If you set up every American with a copy, I bet a non-trivial portion of society would come to the same conclusion. People are naturally pred…

Suppose a child was raised by a more advanced version of large scale language model, with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories.

Further suppose that this child develops a deep emotional connection with the AI.

Do you think that child would find your argument convincing that the AI is "not really a person"?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#78

Post by tsimionescu »

orbital-decay wrote: post #10

> To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world A robotic arm with a self-collision avoidance algorithm (no ML or anything like that) needs a model of itself in the "world" it exists in; a set of bounding boxes at least. Is it self-aware by this definition? Sentience and consciousness are really ill-defined terms so everyone discusses this under their own arbitrary set of assumptions, at least that's my impr…

I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts, at least in most areas of application (there are serious problems at the edges - e.g. is a an insect conscious? if you think it is, how about a jelly fish? if that too, how about a bacterium? a virus?).

However, our understanding of this concept is too limited to create a formal model that we can define satisfactorily; and coming up with an arbitrary model that fits some of our intuitions is silly. This is what the Integrated Information Theory people did, and I find it closer to economic models than to actual science - a nice little abstraction that can give you the appearance of being rigorous while in fact speculating wildly.

On the other hand, I think it's fair to say there are some decently well understood must-haves for something to match our idea of sentience - and being aware of yourself in the world is one of them; and yes, in that sense, it makes more sense to talk about the robot arm as being sentient, as simple as it is, than it is to say that about LaMDA or GPT-3. Of course, the robot arm is missing other per-requisites for sentience - it's programming is far too rigid, and it has no introspection.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#79

Post by jimhi »

jonathankoren wrote: post #63
probably_wrong wrote: post #39

This LaMDA story reminds me of another article I found last year about a man who fed his deceased girlfriend's chats to GPT3 [1] and believed the system was giving the answers she would have. Both articles rely on the operators taking the smallest amount of evidence and ignoring everything else, which I guess is what this article calls "the gullibility gap" (awful name). Getting your audience to do the heavy lifting…

Sadly, this is the very inspiration of Replika. https://replika.com/about/story How this company has remained an ongoing concern for 5 or 6 years, I’ll never understand.

I used Replika in their first few months. They were a chatbot for restaurant recommendations in SF believe it or not.

Their machine learning and language processing at the time was some of the best. They have since pivoted a ton clearly

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#80

Post by probably_wrong »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #42
ehsankia wrote: post #13

I also think the claims are overblown, but I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. Yes our inputs are different since we have more complex senses, and language is one of the main outputs we…

I found the present article to be very anti-intellectual. As in, it makes LaMDA an open-and-shut case, a priori. It does not seek to define intelligence nor sentience; it merely says “nothing to see here, people.” This refusal to consider has the effect of making me think there might be something really interesting going on.

Anti-intellectual? Interesting. I had the opposite thought: that the article aims at too high a level to be accessible for the common reader who doesn't know what "parametric functions in higher dimensions" are.

But having said that, I think you are not being fair to both sides: you are taking some researcher's gut feeling at face value while requiring the rebuttal to start with a formal definition of what intelligence and sentience are.

> This refusal to consider has the effect of making me think there might be something really interesting going on.

I know I am just a guy on the internet who has no right to tell you how to live your life, but I would strongly advice you against this line of thinking. At best it doesn't lead anywhere productive, and at worse you end up shooting an AR-15 inside a pizza restaurant while trying to save children trapped in a nonexistent basement.

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