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“AI” is a misnomer. There's no ability to reason. Its just pattern matching

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“AI” is a misnomer. There's no ability to reason. Its just pattern matching

#1

Post by jonthepirate »

I think GPT is really neat. However, it cannot solve even the most basic reasoning problems I tried.

It feels like it understands what I'm asking for and it provides good answers, but so does Google.

I think calling this "Artificial Intelligence" creates a misunderstanding of what's going on because it's pattern matching.

Sure, the input and output is way better than Google, but if it can't reason, where's the intelligence? The whole thing seems like a hype train that I'm evidently not on.

Re: “AI” is a misnomer. There's no ability to reason. Its just pattern matching

#2

Post by PaulHoule »

Certain people always say that "art" isn't "art" but it's a consistent way to embarrass yourself whether the object is Duchamps' "Readymades" or video games (in the case of a famous movie reviewer.)

Particularly any kind of "A.I." is always considered by some to not be "A.I." for instance a chess playing program is just searching moves, an expert system is just applying rules, software that lays out microchips is just solving an optimization problem, etc.

It is moving the goalposts and it is a form of ignorance that leaves the field wide open to the likes of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Particularly, like the aphorism that "an LLM can't create anything new" it distracts people from the serious task of figuring out what specific things these things can and cannot do.

Re: “AI” is a misnomer. There's no ability to reason. Its just pattern matching

#3

Post by smoldesu »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Certain people always say that "art" isn't "art" but it's a consistent way to embarrass yourself whether the object is Duchamps' "Readymades" or video games (in the case of a famous movie reviewer.) Particularly any kind of "A.I." is always considered by some to not be "A.I." for instance a chess playing program is just searching moves, an expert system is just applying rules, software that lays out microchips is jus…

> the serious task of figuring out what specific things these things can and cannot do.

Is it rude or reductive to suggest that we already know what they can and cannot do? It's just text. Text can be interpreted in meaningful ways, and it's cool that this text can react to user input, but it's still... starkly limited. I'm honestly not sure what serious things are left to figure out with AI. It's like the Library of Babel in a way, it contains both everything and nothing. But it's also just entropy limited to text, which in-and-of itself is not that powerful.

It's heady stuff and I don't know if there are any right answers. I feel like it's capabilities are not as strong as others profess though.

Re: “AI” is a misnomer. There's no ability to reason. Its just pattern matching

#6

Post by proc0 »

I think your contention that it's not real intelligence is properly described by "artificial", i.e. artificial flavors like lemon are not the same as lemon juice.

Also, and maybe more importantly, it can be argued that reasoning is a form of pattern matching. All that brains do is pattern match, they just do it in a complicated way that we have no clue about yet, and therefore all the side effects and intricacies of the brain's architecture are not seen in the relatively more simple algorithms that we have now with artificial neural networks.

That said, maybe a better term could be Algorithmic Cognitive Tools, or something similar to point out it's just extending our own intelligence, however I think most agree that eventually we will have proper AI and machines will be doing some form of reasoning whether human-like or not. I just don't think that "cognitive architectures" (another misnomer abusing biological terms) are there yet.

Re: “AI” is a misnomer. There's no ability to reason. Its just pattern matching

#7

Post by effed3 »

I Agree. Probably the big part of the "intelligence" here, is by the reader, seeing in the textual output of a probabilistic model some sense or quality. The intelligence is hidden in the training data, i suppose, and probably the output is little more than a mirage.

Building this AI systems, now and in the past years, has proven usefull in narrow and specialized fields, chess play, chemical classification, planning, scientific data analysis, etc, but when the field is the Human Language -per se- and it's significance i feel something big and deep is still missing.

About the "Intelligence" till now we have no good idea of what really is, or how work, and how is related to Mind and Brain.

Re: “AI” is a misnomer. There's no ability to reason. Its just pattern matching

#9

Post by jstx1 »

This is pointless yelling at clouds.

For most things there's a generally accepted mapping : which evolves naturally over time as part of language and culture.

That's what AI is - a name for thing, not a promise or a contractual obligation to perfectly match the preexisting dictionary meaning of the words that compose it.

Re: “AI” is a misnomer. There's no ability to reason. Its just pattern matching

#10

Post by sigstoat »

jstx1 wrote: post #9

This is pointless yelling at clouds. For most things there's a generally accepted mapping : which evolves naturally over time as part of language and culture. That's what AI is - a name for thing, not a promise or a contractual obligation to perfectly match the preexisting dictionary meaning of the words that compose it.

this is the same crowd that is angry because openai has “open” in their name, but isn’t “open”.
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