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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

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Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#71

Post by leptons »

chpatrick wrote: post #65
leptons wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I write a sentence, I do it with intent, with specific purpose in mind . When an "AI" does it, it's predicting the next word that might satisfy the input requirement. It doesn't care if the sentence it writes makes any sense, is factual, etc, so long as it is human readable and follows gramatic rules. It does not do this with any specific intent, which is why you get slop and just plain wrong output a fair amoun…

Actually LLMs crunch through half a terabyte of weights before they "speak". How are you so confident that nothing happens in that immense amount of processing that has anything to do with thinking? Modern LLMs are also trained to have an inner dialogue before they output an answer to the user. When you type the next word you also put a word that fits some requirement. That doesn't mean you're not thinking.

"crunch through half a terabyte of weights" isn't thinking. Following grammatical rules to produce a readable sentence isn't thought, it's statistics, and whether that sentence is factual or foolish isn't something the LLM cares about. If LLMs didn't so constantly produce garbage, I might agree with you more.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#72

Post by barnacs »

chpatrick wrote: post #62
barnacs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it's about motivation. Intelligent living beings have natural, evolutionary inputs as motivation underlying every rational thought. A biological reward system in the brain, a desire to avoid pain, hunger, boredom and sadness, seek to satisfy physiological needs, socialize, self-actualize, etc. These are the fundamental forces that drive us, even if the rational processes are capable of suppressing or delaying…

Are any of those required for thinking?

In my view, absolutely yes. Thinking is a means to an end. It's about acting upon these motivations by abstracting, recollecting past experiences, planning, exploring, innovating. Without any motivation, there is nothing novel about the process. It really is just statistical approximation, "learning" at best, but definitely not "thinking".

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#73

Post by chpatrick »

barnacs wrote: post #72
chpatrick wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are any of those required for thinking?

In my view, absolutely yes. Thinking is a means to an end. It's about acting upon these motivations by abstracting, recollecting past experiences, planning, exploring, innovating. Without any motivation, there is nothing novel about the process. It really is just statistical approximation, "learning" at best, but definitely not "thinking".

Again the problem is that what "thinking" is totally vague. To me if I can ask a computer a difficult question it hasn't seen before and it can give a correct answer, it's thinking. I don't need it to have a full and colorful human life to do that.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#74

Post by chpatrick »

leptons wrote: post #69
chpatrick wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could a human code the solution if they didn't learn to code from someone else? No. Could they do it if someone didn't tell them the rules of towers of hanoi? No. That doesn't mean much.

A human can learn and understand the rules, an LLM never could. LLMs have famously been incapable of beating humans in chess, a seemingly simple thing to learn, because LLMs can't learn - they just predict the next word and that isn't helpful in solving actual problems, or playing simple games.

Actually general-purpose LLMs are pretty decent at playing chess games they haven't seen before: https://maxim-saplin.github.io/llm_chess/

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#75

Post by chpatrick »

Gee101 wrote: post #67
chpatrick wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could a human code the solution if they didn't learn to code from someone else? No. Could they do it if someone didn't tell them the rules of towers of hanoi? No. That doesn't mean much.

It does since humans where able to invent a programming language.

Have you tried asking a modern LLM to invent a programming language?

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#76

Post by chpatrick »

leptons wrote: post #71
chpatrick wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually LLMs crunch through half a terabyte of weights before they "speak". How are you so confident that nothing happens in that immense amount of processing that has anything to do with thinking? Modern LLMs are also trained to have an inner dialogue before they output an answer to the user. When you type the next word you also put a word that fits some requirement. That doesn't mean you're not thinking.

"crunch through half a terabyte of weights" isn't thinking . Following grammatical rules to produce a readable sentence isn't thought, it's statistics, and whether that sentence is factual or foolish isn't something the LLM cares about. If LLMs didn't so constantly produce garbage, I might agree with you more.

They don't follow "grammatical rules", they process inputs with an incredibly large neural net. It's like saying humans aren't really thinking because their brains are made of meat.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#77

Post by stillsut »

1c2adbc4 wrote: post #10
marginalia_nu wrote: post #8

AI is technology that does not exist yet that can be speculated about. When AI materializes into existence it becomes normal technology. Let's not forget there has been times when if-else statements were considered AI. NLP used to be AI too.

Do you have a suggestion for a better name? I care more about the utility of a thing, rather than playing endless word games with AI, AGI, ASI, whatever. Call it what you will, it is what it is.

"Unstructured data learners and generators" is probably the most salient distinction for how current system compare to previous "AI systems" examples (NLP, if-statements) that OP mentioned.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#78

Post by barnacs »

chpatrick wrote: post #73
barnacs wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view, absolutely yes. Thinking is a means to an end. It's about acting upon these motivations by abstracting, recollecting past experiences, planning, exploring, innovating. Without any motivation, there is nothing novel about the process. It really is just statistical approximation, "learning" at best, but definitely not "thinking".

Again the problem is that what "thinking" is totally vague. To me if I can ask a computer a difficult question it hasn't seen before and it can give a correct answer, it's thinking. I don't need it to have a full and colorful human life to do that.

But it's only able to answer the question because it has been trained on all text in existence written by humans, precisely with the purpose to mimic human language use. It is the humans that produced the training data and then provided feedback in the form of reinforcement that did all the "thinking".

Even if it can extrapolate to some degree (altough that's where "hallucinations" tend to become obvious), it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety".

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#79

Post by j45 »

Havoc wrote: post #70

A better starting point imo is that it is a general-purpose technology. It can have a profound effect on society yet not be magic/AGI.

Absolutely. The first version to the world was the 3rd or 4th version of ChatGPT itself.

Some can remember the difference between iPhone 1 and 4 and where it took off with the latter.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#80

Post by alanbernstein »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #8

AI is technology that does not exist yet that can be speculated about. When AI materializes into existence it becomes normal technology. Let's not forget there has been times when if-else statements were considered AI. NLP used to be AI too.

I think I misinterpreted your comment as not understanding the AI effect, but actually you're just summarizing it kind of concisely and sarcastically?

LLMs are one of the first technologies that makes me think the term "AI effect" needs to be updated to "AGI effect". The effect is still there, but it's undeniable that LLMs are capable of things that seem impossible with classical CS methods, so they get to retain the designation of AI.

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