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Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

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Re: Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

#81

Post by CamperBob2 »

jacobgold wrote: post #74
CamperBob2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's talk about category mistakes. You've been here since 2007, according to your other reply. You understand that calculators have as much to do with mathematics as telescopes have to do with cosmology. Right? If someone unskilled at math brings a calculator to an international math competition, they will not succeed at solving many problems. Most likely, they will solve none at all. But if they bring a frontier LL…

> If someone unskilled at math brings a calculator to an international math competition, they will not succeed at solving many problems. > But if they bring a frontier LLM (and succeed at concealing it from the organizers), they can walk away with a gold medal. Of course you could win all kinds of math competitions with a concealed calculator. Maybe you'd need a fancy one, like a little SBC running Python. Anything c…

Of course you could win all kinds of math competitions with a concealed calculator. Maybe you'd need a fancy one, like a little SBC running Python.

My mistake.

Re: Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

#82

Post by jacobgold »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #81
jacobgold wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone unskilled at math brings a calculator to an international math competition, they will not succeed at solving many problems. > But if they bring a frontier LLM (and succeed at concealing it from the organizers), they can walk away with a gold medal. Of course you could win all kinds of math competitions with a concealed calculator. Maybe you'd need a fancy one, like a little SBC running Python. Anything c…

Of course you could win all kinds of math competitions with a concealed calculator. Maybe you'd need a fancy one, like a little SBC running Python. My mistake.

Taking issue with using a computer to power the calculator? If so, you should know that all modern calculators are computers under the hood.

Everything I've written about calculators applies to computers doing any kind of traditional deterministic processing, without anything like LLMs.

Re: Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

#83

Post by lopsotronic »

jacobgold wrote: post #11

We're choosing to call LLMs (and the little "harness" programs that query them in loops and execute their output) "AI", even though it doesn't make much sense. I absolutely love this technology but these aren't autonomous intelligences. They're little programs executing Bash scripts from JSON output. Our ideas about AI were naive. We thought passing a basic Turing test would require human-like intelligence. It turned…

What I'm seeing here, reading this thread, is that "intelligence" isn't a thing.

"Thing" in terms of a quantifiable that you can measure with tools and reason about, reproducibly. Everyone's got some idea what it is, so you get lots of different angles, but no one has an Intelligence Ruler we can hold up to a text output and say, yep, this one's got an INT of 14.

Seems to be the crux of the disagreement.

Re: Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

#84

Post by CamperBob2 »

dang wrote: post #55
_doctor_love wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Personal attacks aren't allowed here. As I just mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981624 , we need you to stick to HN's rules if you want to keep commenting on the site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a semi-valid reply to deliberately-provocative phrasing on my part, I suppose. I'm over it, don't ban him. :)

I do wish that people who aren't interested in, engaged with, and informed about technical progress in AI would find someplace else to signal their disinterest, disengagement, and disregard. But that's admittedly a me problem and not an HN problem.

Re: Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

#85

Post by daveguy »

davidpapermill wrote: post #12
jacobgold wrote: post #11

We're choosing to call LLMs (and the little "harness" programs that query them in loops and execute their output) "AI", even though it doesn't make much sense. I absolutely love this technology but these aren't autonomous intelligences. They're little programs executing Bash scripts from JSON output. Our ideas about AI were naive. We thought passing a basic Turing test would require human-like intelligence. It turned…

> It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning. What would a frontier API have to be able to do to satisfy you?

Not OP, but I'd settle for something that actually learns, instead of being a static pile of linear algebra. Pretending it learns because you change the input (context) doesn't count.

Re: Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

#86

Post by daveguy »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #48
dominotw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was true. I would repalce myself with ai that pretends to be me on slack. my coworkers would know almost immediately if i did that.

> my coworkers would know almost immediately if i did that. The same would happen if you were replaced by any random human.

But immitating others is about the only thing genAI does. Sometimes "others" is a 'programmer', sometimes "others" is an 'artist', but regardless, it still does it poorly.

Re: Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

#87

Post by ACCount37 »

jacobgold wrote: post #77
ACCount37 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying that a class of mistakes points out a "major (possibly fundamental) flaw". I'm pointing out some very similar classes of mistakes in humans - well known, well documented and widely exploited. They just keep paying the "IRS" in gift cards, buying lottery tickets and getting the captain's age wrong. If you're using the existence of flaws in LLMs to deny the claim of intelligence to them, then why do "gene…

> If you're using the existence of flaws in LLMs to deny the claim of intelligence to them... That's not the point at all. It's the fact that they fail in ways completely unlike humans. You also have the burden of proof reversed. Its on you to prove these LLM agents are human-like intelligences if that's your claim. No one can prove this because it's false.

You are the one claiming that "they fail in ways completely unlike humans" insistently. Now go cough up some proof. I'll wait.

Re: Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

#88

Post by ACCount37 »

jacobgold wrote: post #70
davidpapermill wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I agree, they’re an alien kind of intelligence. But that doesn’t mean they don’t reason.

I get what you're saying but this is kind of a semantic game. These LLM models/agents absolutely do not reason in the sense that humans do, so you're quietly redefining the word. You can say of course decide to call them an "alien kind of intelligence" that "reasons" but you could just as reasonably say that calculators are an "alien" kind of intelligence that "reasons" about math differently than us.

And what stops what AIs do from being "reasoning"? What's the elusive magic fairy dust of reasoning that humans put into their napkin notes, but AIs neglect to put into their chain of thought scratchpads?

Do you have a RealReasoningBenchmark, perhaps, that can reliably tell apart that fake mass produced token-flavored AI reasoning from the real, organic, 100% natural human reasoning?

Re: Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

#89

Post by pj_mukh »

ACCount37 wrote: post #13
jacobgold wrote: post #11

We're choosing to call LLMs (and the little "harness" programs that query them in loops and execute their output) "AI", even though it doesn't make much sense. I absolutely love this technology but these aren't autonomous intelligences. They're little programs executing Bash scripts from JSON output. Our ideas about AI were naive. We thought passing a basic Turing test would require human-like intelligence. It turned…

We've chosen to call Deep Blue and Half-Life 1 NPCs "AI" too. It boggles my mind that this "b-b-but it's not actual real AI" whine is even a thing. Were people saying this living in the cave for the past 5 decades of AI research?

Is this a real debate? AI has a well-defined technical definition. It’s right there in the Wikipedia [1] . Yes it’s quite a broad umbrella of systems and algorithms but it’s all AI

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Re: Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)

#90

Post by dominotw »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #48
dominotw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was true. I would repalce myself with ai that pretends to be me on slack. my coworkers would know almost immediately if i did that.

> my coworkers would know almost immediately if i did that. The same would happen if you were replaced by any random human.

that would be a silly test then
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