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How AI knows things no one told it

scientificamerican.com

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Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#81

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

mike741 wrote: post #59
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's just statistics, but so are we. Define intelligence. Say you took a human brain and kept it alive in a mad scientist's pickle jar. Let's assume the brain's wired up so it can hear and speak, it's got an idiot savant's memory, and someone has just read it the internet. What do you think the most impressive things are that the brain could do, that GPT-4 couldn't ?

We can describe ourselves with statistics, that does not mean we are statistics. This is called the "Fallacy of the Map" where a symbol is falsely equated with the entity it represents. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mistaking_the_map_for_the_terr... Statistics is collecting and analyzing numerical data. But what is the numerical data quantifying? It's quantifying a second thing. If everything were "just statistics" t…

You haven't defined intelligence, nor answered the question.

Controlling a body is not relevant to a brain in a jar, nor does it detract from the intelligence of someone like Stephen Hawking.

We're talking about intelligence - a capability - so applying labels like organic, analog, etc is irrelevant. The question is what can it DO, not how is it built.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#82

Post by unsupp0rted »

version_five wrote: post #68
kgeist wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ChatGPT answers the way a human might:

> I'm sorry to hear that you're worried about someone named "shmerple." Can you please provide me with more information about who shmerple is and why you're worried about them?

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#83

Post by turnsout »

One well-supported theory for how humans learn language and knowledge is Relational Frame Theory (RFT)[0]. Essentially, when we learn that an elephant is larger than a mouse, we're learning a relationship ("more") and a dimension ("size"), which can be reversed ("smaller") or generalized (we can figure out what's larger than an elephant or what's smaller than a toaster).

I think one theory is that the large number of parameters in LLMs allow them to go beyond mere association and actually model relational frames, which lets them generalize knowledge in an analogous way to humans. Maybe this behavior is not emergent in smaller networks (which could explain why animals with fewer neurons don't process language as well).

Disclaimer: I'm not an academic researcher or scientist of any kind, this is just a hunch.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_frame_theory

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#84

Post by kmac_ »

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.

I will be convinced when AI will create its first breakthrough PhD paper/discovery. But we have to admit that emergent properties like chain of thoughts are facts and are really impressive. The question is how much model size, context, training pipeline, etc. have to evolve to gain next levels. Two years ago people expected next AI winter, but here we are. There is Copilot and other tooling that is indeed useful.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#85

Post by georgeg23 »

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.

But none of its behaviour is even close to by design. The emergence of reasoning is completely unexpected for a word prediction model.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#86

Post by dS0rrow »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #39
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.

Of course it's just statistics, but so are we. Define intelligence. Say you took a human brain and kept it alive in a mad scientist's pickle jar. Let's assume the brain's wired up so it can hear and speak, it's got an idiot savant's memory, and someone has just read it the internet. What do you think the most impressive things are that the brain could do, that GPT-4 couldn't ?

> Of course it's just statistics, but so are we.

Where is this coming from?

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#88

Post by hgsgm »

mike741 wrote: post #67
rodoxcasta wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

If an AI can understand how you think, but you can't understand how the AI thinks... that's not an argument that the AI is the unintelligent one.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#89

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

dS0rrow wrote: post #86
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's just statistics, but so are we. Define intelligence. Say you took a human brain and kept it alive in a mad scientist's pickle jar. Let's assume the brain's wired up so it can hear and speak, it's got an idiot savant's memory, and someone has just read it the internet. What do you think the most impressive things are that the brain could do, that GPT-4 couldn't ?

> Of course it's just statistics, but so are we. Where is this coming from?

Experience wires our brains by forming/strengthening/weakening synapses based on correlated activity, starting with perception.

In other words, our brains are tuned according to the statistics of experience, just as a Transformer's weights are tuned by the statistics of the training set.

Re: How AI knows things no one told it

#90

Post by goatlover »

ben_w wrote: post #20
goatlover wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the brain is alive and is trying to keep the rest of the organism alive But n an environment.

One could reasonably say that's merely what the statistics are doing, not evidence to deny that the brain is just statistics.

Statistics is about the likelihood of events happening. It's not the things themselves. A brain isn't a statistical model. It's a bunch of living cells. It may do the equivalent of statistical modeling for some activities, like predicting what comes next. But it's more than just a model. Models are like maps. We make them.
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