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Cargo Cult AI

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Re: Cargo Cult AI

#91

Post by fragsworth »

_yb2s wrote: post #79

The whole premise of this article hinges on the idea that LLMs have fundamental limitations that they clearly don’t have if you’ve looked at lots of gpt4 examples. For example, it can do scientific thinking if you specifically ask it to, and it can reason about totally new situations outside of the training data based on generalizable models of reality it creates to predict training data. If you are certain these lim…

The article was clearly written by someone who hasn't used GPT-4 extensively.

"Current methods will not achieve AGI unless fundamental algorithmic innovations are introduced that enable AI to ask and answer questions of why."

This is complete nonsense. GPT-4 is already close to being able to do basically everything. All you need is the obvious improvements - better prompts, multi-shotting, bigger context, and access to other inputs/outputs.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#92

Post by tjr »

loandbehold wrote: post #89
danlugo92 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all fun and games until the AI completely hallucinates the answer, while making it sound completely pausible and correct.

The issue of hallucinations is overblown. I use GPT4 all the time and don't see any hallucinations at all. It's a big problem with Google BARD and GPT3 and earlier models. But GPT4 fixed the issue of hallucinations completely.

I wonder if it's "fixed" or if it's just less obvious. It seems that an LLM would "hallucinate" a bogus answer if it didn't actually have a good answer somewhere in its training. Is GPT4 so much more trained that it rarely encounters something it doesn't have a reasonable answer for? In which case, it would still "hallucinate" if cornered on some more obscure matter?

I mean, like, what would it mean to actually solve the problem? I would not expect any computer system to know the answer to literally everything, so the fix is not to train it more, but rather, for it to realize and acknowledge if it doesn't have enough data to give a good answer, and tell you that rather than make something up.

Does GPT4 do that? (I have yet to use GPT4 myself.)

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#93

Post by kerkeslager »

albertzeyer wrote: post #82
kerkeslager wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Echoing many who now find themselves blindsided by the emergent abilities and rapid adoption of LLMs, the OP I've said this over and over again: there are no emergent abilities . Before you leap to link me this paper, I'll link it myself: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682 I read that paper. Did you? Did you understand it? Because if you had, you'd have seen that early on they define what they mean when they say "eme…

> the idea that larger models can do more than smaller models, which should be a surprise to no one. Actually this was quite a surprise to a lot of people, since the whole race to scaling up began, with GPT2 or so. It was totally not obvious that you can scale up the model (and also training) and it would improve the performance. Many (most?) people thought there would be some limit, and we were close to that limit w…

You didn't read the post you're responding to, and shouldn't be responding.

In fact, you didn't read the part of the post you quoted, where I said it should be a surprise to no one.

But, unsurprisingly, the sort of people who stop reading at the first chance they see to correct something, are easily surprised, since actually understanding LLMs would require actually doing some nuanced reading.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#94

Post by paulddraper »

dirkt wrote: post #90
paulddraper wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So....like a person?

The difference to a person is that most (though not all) people actually have an understanding if they know something, if they guess something, if they are making something up, or if they are outright lying. Which is about the first thing you train during a scientific education. And in an honest interaction, they will tell you. ChatGPT etc. does not. So basically it acts like a pathological liar (who happen to be rig…

Yes, agreed.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#95

Post by sebzim4500 »

bmc7505 wrote: post #88
sebzim4500 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the relevance of the prior thread, except that you made the same claim with similarly scant evidence. What exactly is it that makes you so confident?

The problems that AI will manifest are the result of human ambition and failings, no different as any other technology that empowers individuals. Yes, individuals and organizations will misuse AI for immoral purposes, but the popular belief that AI is inherently antihumanist launders accountability by pretending to remove human agency from the equation. How we use or misuse AI technology is entirely on us. Furthermor…

> The problems that AI will manifest are the result of human ambition and failings, no different as any other technology that empowers individuals. Yes, individuals and organizations will misuse AI for immoral purposes, but the popular belief that AI is inherently antihumanist launders accountability by pretending to remove human agency from the equation. How we use or misuse AI technology is entirely on us.

So what? If it kills us, we're still dead.

> I would argue there are strong complexity-theoretic bottlenecks to computational processes which limit the expressive power of neural networks

Of course there are physics/CS limits to how intelligent something can be in a given volume, but those limits are vastly higher than our own so I don't think they are particularly relevant. For instance, a system which could simulate the brains of a thousand scientists as smart as Einstein a billion times faster than realtime would not violate any rules of physics, even though it is far beyond our current capabilities.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#96

Post by maxdoop »

I am curious how the author of this post would define (or recognize) "thinking abstractly". And I'd ask what humans do that suggests any ability to "reason abstractly".

I'm not saying we don't, but I am saying these sorts of arguments always leave so many begging questions. "What does it mean to think abstractly? What does it mean to think? What does it mean to reason?"

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#97

Post by [deleted] »

_yb2s wrote: post #79

The whole premise of this article hinges on the idea that LLMs have fundamental limitations that they clearly don’t have if you’ve looked at lots of gpt4 examples. For example, it can do scientific thinking if you specifically ask it to, and it can reason about totally new situations outside of the training data based on generalizable models of reality it creates to predict training data. If you are certain these lim…

[deleted]

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#98

Post by sebzim4500 »

hospitalhusband wrote: post #87
sebzim4500 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because we don't think one word at a time In what sense does an LLM think one word at a time that doesn't also apply to a person typing at a keyboard? I'm typing one word at a time right now, I assume you aren't about to declare me a markov chain. When I read my brain presumably ingests one word at a time (not sure if it's one exactly, but it can't be much more than one). It is of course true that I have some notion…

> In what sense does an LLM think one word at a time that doesn't also apply to a person typing at a keyboard? Because you already have the thought formed before you started typing. > When I read my brain presumably ingests one word at a time (not sure if it's one exactly, but it can't be much more than one) And these models ingest many vectors at once, up to the context length. Your brain is also recursive, and regu…

>Because you already have the thought formed before you started typing.

Can you prove that GPT-4 doesn't? Clearly there is a sense in which thinks more than one word ahead, since as I mentioned above it would not otherwise be able to use 'a' vs 'an' correctly.

As far as I am aware, exactly to what extent these models have determined what tokens will be generated before they produce anything is an open question in mechanistic interpratability research. I would be very interested if you knew of some work that answers this question empirically.

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#99

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #97
_yb2s wrote: post #79

The whole premise of this article hinges on the idea that LLMs have fundamental limitations that they clearly don’t have if you’ve looked at lots of gpt4 examples. For example, it can do scientific thinking if you specifically ask it to, and it can reason about totally new situations outside of the training data based on generalizable models of reality it creates to predict training data. If you are certain these lim…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Cargo Cult AI

#100

Post by jacobr1 »

majormajor wrote: post #24
cs702 wrote: post #18

Echoing many who now find themselves blindsided by the emergent abilities and rapid adoption of LLMs, the OP: * complains that we still lack a "comprehensive theory to explain what intelligence is or how it emerges from first principles," * argues that deep neural nets like LLMs may not be capable of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and * contends that achieving AGI will require "new algorithmic paradigms." Ric…

I think there's likely to be a distinction here between "things that are learnable through computation" and things that aren't. A machine or algorithm that needed to evaluate various methods of planting seeds in soil, for instance, is going to be limited by hard time factors short of figuring out how to put in the "physics" of it from the current state of the art of human knowledge. And that pushes you up against the…

This is a good point, but the distinction isn't computational/human, it is something like deducible from current knowledge vs requires physical interactions/experiments with the world.

You don't necessarily need humans for the latter. Robotics will enable a whole lot of physical interaction. We are pretty close to a fully-automatable definition wet-lab for example.

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