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The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

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Re: The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

#81

Post by horsawlarway »

qsera wrote: post #79
horsawlarway wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a two year old that can't count. She can definitely walk around, talk, eat, and do all sorts of other things that I would argue indicate some form of intelligence. Same for my dog. Same for entire cultures, including adult humans (anumeric cultures). Arguably, they're constantly doing calculus, because they can walk, throw, catch, etc - but none of them can count. --- That said, to the point of my original com…

You are not getting it or getting it all very wrong.. Is a robot that can walk, throw and catch is intelligent? Last day there was a robot that can play ping pong? Is that intelligent?

but that's exactly the point. Is that intelligent?

We also see robots excel at chess and go, is that not intelligent? Why not? Given that's the mental opposite of the physical examples you're happy to discard (side note: I've done real world robotics development, I'd call walking/catching/throwing considerably more difficult activities than chess/go, and much closer to intelligence).

We see LLMs absolutely blow through the turing test, and that was literally the philosophical "gold standard" for machines that exhibit human-like intelligence for like 70 years.

So I really don't think I'm "getting it all very wrong" - I think this is a fundamental question that you're basically failing to honestly engage with because you've already made up your mind.

So again - define intelligence?

Re: The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

#82

Post by qsera »

horsawlarway wrote: post #81
qsera wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not getting it or getting it all very wrong.. Is a robot that can walk, throw and catch is intelligent? Last day there was a robot that can play ping pong? Is that intelligent?

but that's exactly the point. Is that intelligent? We also see robots excel at chess and go, is that not intelligent? Why not? Given that's the mental opposite of the physical examples you're happy to discard (side note: I've done real world robotics development, I'd call walking/catching/throwing considerably more difficult activities than chess/go, and much closer to intelligence). We see LLMs absolutely blow throu…

>Is that intelligent?

huh? In the comment above you said you would argue that it is. So is that not your argument?

>I'd call walking/catching/throwing considerably more difficult activities than chess/go, and much closer to intelligence

This is an even bizarre idea. I get that those things are harder to implement in a robot since it requires extremely fine sensors and motor control. But that making it closer to intelligence? That does not make a lot of sense..

Just because we cannot exactly define intelligence does not mean that you can call any arbitrary thing intelligent!

Re: The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

#83

Post by Lerc »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #64
Lerc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be trained to answer when it knows the answer, and to state that it does not know the answer when it does not. They might already have a very good understanding of not knowing internally, but are just not trained to express that. This is not a problem in the ability of the system, it is a problem of how to construct training for such a task. To provide training examples where it answers it does not know the…

> It should be trained to answer when it knows the answer, and to state that it does not know the answer when it does not Do LLMs even have any kind of internal model of what they know or don't know? My understanding is that they don't.

There has been quite a lot of work in this area. Analysis of activations around hallucinations seems to show that there is some representation of not knowing.

There are things like https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22071v2

But again things are not quite so simple. Detecting hallucinations might yield representations where it knew the answer but elected to hallucinate anyway because of some other obscure interaction.

Anthropics work on autoencoding activations for analysis has yielded a lot of information about the inner semantic information on models. I haven't seen a lot on bounds of knowledge there, but I wonder if that's something they hold back for competitive advantage.

Re: The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

#84

Post by GodelNumbering »

amelius wrote: post #44
GodelNumbering wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No consensus but a decent definition is: Ability to utilize resources to achieve outcomes

Like kicking a ball to win a soccer match?

Yes, kicking a ball in the right way does require intelligence.

Re: The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

#85

Post by quinndupont »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #51
quinndupont wrote: post #36

The rise of AI writing has only been matched by superficial articles comprised of ideas salad that evince no deep theoretical or historical understanding. Crappy writing has and always will exist, AI doesn’t change that, it just makes awful writing grammatical.

It has generally reduced the signal-to-noise ratio of writing, but the signal-to-noise ratio has been absolutely terrible for such a long time we’ve all adapted to better signal detection.

Syntactical (grammatical) text is signal but maybe not the kind of meaningful signal we all wish it was. Meaning, of course, resides in the reader, in the practice of reading (Wittgenstein etc), not the author. We used to use writing quality as a proxy for quality of meaning (thought), but that no longer works well.

Re: The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

#86

Post by horsawlarway »

qsera wrote: post #82
horsawlarway wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but that's exactly the point. Is that intelligent? We also see robots excel at chess and go, is that not intelligent? Why not? Given that's the mental opposite of the physical examples you're happy to discard (side note: I've done real world robotics development, I'd call walking/catching/throwing considerably more difficult activities than chess/go, and much closer to intelligence). We see LLMs absolutely blow throu…

>Is that intelligent? huh? In the comment above you said you would argue that it is. So is that not your argument? >I'd call walking/catching/throwing considerably more difficult activities than chess/go, and much closer to intelligence This is an even bizarre idea. I get that those things are harder to implement in a robot since it requires extremely fine sensors and motor control. But that making it closer to intel…

> This is an even bizarre idea. I get that those things are harder to implement in a robot since it requires extremely fine sensors and motor control. But that making it closer to intelligence? That does not make a lot of sense..

Why? It requires understanding a complex sense of self: where am I? How can I move? how do I fit within the environment? How can I change the environment?

Understanding, reasoning, self-awareness, and planning are all considered core aspects of intelligence, and those are all on display during navigation and locomotion.

I'd suggest those are all much closer to intelligence than the rules of chess. More complicated, too.

> Just because we cannot exactly define intelligence does not mean that you can call any arbitrary thing intelligent!

And just because intelligence appears alien in nature to you, doesn't mean it's not there... An ant only has ~250,000 neurons (far less than an LLM) are ants not intelligent? Not at all?

So if you define intelligence simply as "human", then sure - LLMs aren't that. But I also think that's an uninteresting and banal conclusion.

---

So my core point remains - define intelligent. I think it's surprisingly hard to do in a way that rules out LLMs, but doesn't also rule out large categories of things we do probably agree are intelligent.

Re: The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

#87

Post by Jensson »

oceansky wrote: post #37
alberto467 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the same true for a human?

It isn't. I constantly have access to non-public information, like the life of my peers and corporate secrets. Is it useful or essential or even desirable for LLM products? Hardly not, but it exists. Edit: for "not in the training data" yes, humans generally can't know what they can't know.

> Is it useful or essential or even desirable for LLM products? Hardly not, but it exists.

Its necessary if you want to replace such a worker, at least to have the corporate culture and knowledge in its training set.

Re: The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

#88

Post by Jensson »

bsenftner wrote: post #45
andsoitis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you state your point more simply?

We do not teach people, students, how to explore ideas as a group in a collective exploratory discussion. Students get impressed, meaning their peers with social status use the opportunity of a group conversation to impress social hierarchy: they ridicule ideas they think are "outsider concepts", and this behavior is not suppressed by the student's instructors, they often condone and participate. This is at the found…

> The ideas and concepts are there, but they are held private because their environment includes bullies that suppress non-mainstream perceptions.

You mean like teachers? Teachers bullies kids that answers wrong in class, so if you try to think for yourself rather than answer according to the book the teacher often makes fun of you and the rest of the kids laugh at you for not saying the right thing.

Just making teachers not do that would probably go a long way to changing the culture. Kids feeling fear of being asked a question in class is a strong signal we are doing something wrong.

Re: The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

#89

Post by qsera »

horsawlarway wrote: post #86
qsera wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is that intelligent? huh? In the comment above you said you would argue that it is. So is that not your argument? >I'd call walking/catching/throwing considerably more difficult activities than chess/go, and much closer to intelligence This is an even bizarre idea. I get that those things are harder to implement in a robot since it requires extremely fine sensors and motor control. But that making it closer to intel…

> This is an even bizarre idea. I get that those things are harder to implement in a robot since it requires extremely fine sensors and motor control. But that making it closer to intelligence? That does not make a lot of sense.. Why? It requires understanding a complex sense of self: where am I? How can I move? how do I fit within the environment? How can I change the environment? Understanding, reasoning, self-awar…

>where am I? How can I move? how do I fit within the environment?

These does not require any general intelligence or understanding and can be expressed as a bunch of fixed rules.

>I think it's surprisingly hard to do in a way that rules out LLMs,

May be. But we sure can say that LLMs are not "reasoning". Which is what I have done in the linked comment.

Re: The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss

#90

Post by bsenftner »

Jensson wrote: post #88
bsenftner wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not teach people, students, how to explore ideas as a group in a collective exploratory discussion. Students get impressed, meaning their peers with social status use the opportunity of a group conversation to impress social hierarchy: they ridicule ideas they think are "outsider concepts", and this behavior is not suppressed by the student's instructors, they often condone and participate. This is at the found…

> The ideas and concepts are there, but they are held private because their environment includes bullies that suppress non-mainstream perceptions. You mean like teachers? Teachers bullies kids that answers wrong in class, so if you try to think for yourself rather than answer according to the book the teacher often makes fun of you and the rest of the kids laugh at you for not saying the right thing. Just making teac…

I mean the students first, and the teachers second. Just ask any of the "not popular" kids why they do not speak up, and notice they are already afraid to say honestly, they've already been damaged by the bullyscape that is human childhood.
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