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AI capability isn't humanness

research.roundtable.ai

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Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#3
One thing I don't understand in these conversations is why we're treating LLMs as if they are completely interchangeable with chatbots/assistants.

A car is not just an engine, it's a drivetrain, a transmission, wheels, steering, all of which affect the end-product and its usability. LLMs are no different, and focusing on alignment without even addressing all the scaffolding that intermediates the exchange between the user and the LLM in an assistant use case seems disingenuous.

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#4

Unfortunately a lot of the hype around LLMs is that their capability is humanness, specifically that they are (much) cheaper humans for replacing your expensive and annoying current humans.

What I think you mean to say is that AI is promoted as fungible with humans at a lower price point.

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#5
> Compared to humans, LLMs have effectively unbounded training data. They are trained on billions of text examples covering countless topics, styles, and domains. Their exposure is far broader and more uniform than any human's, and not filtered through lived experience or survival needs.

I think it's the other way round: humans have effectively unbounded training data. We can count exactly how much text any given model saw during training. We know exactly how many images or video frames were used to train it, and so on. Can we count the amount of input humans receive?

I can look at my coffee mug from any angle I want, I can feel it in my hands, I can sniff it, lick it and fiddle with it as much as I want. What happens if I move it away from me? Can I turn it this way, can I lift it up? What does it feel like to drink from this cup? What does it feel like when someone else drinks from my cup? The LLM has no idea because it doesn't have access to sensory data and it can't manipulate real-life objects (yet).

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#6
post #4

Unfortunately a lot of the hype around LLMs is that their capability is humanness, specifically that they are (much) cheaper humans for replacing your expensive and annoying current humans.

What I think you mean to say is that AI is promoted as fungible with humans at a lower price point.

I think that's the first time the C suite is so interested in having their employees using a tool regardless of the result. It likes prescribing that you have to send an email twice a day using outlook. And make sure to use attachment both time.

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#8
I think there might be a slight bias in this blog article in favor of their product/service. Their human verification service probably needs AI to have less humanness.

But as we saw over the course of recent months or years, AI outputs are becoming more indistinguishable for human output.

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#9
post #5

> Compared to humans, LLMs have effectively unbounded training data. They are trained on billions of text examples covering countless topics, styles, and domains. Their exposure is far broader and more uniform than any human's, and not filtered through lived experience or survival needs. I think it's the other way round: humans have effectively unbounded training data. We can count exactly how much text any given mod…

Not only that, but humans also have access to all of the "training data" of hundreds of millions of years of evolution baked into our brains.

Re: AI capability isn't humanness

#10
LLMs are language models. We interact with them using language, all of that, but also only that. That doesn't mean that they have "common sense", context, same motivations, agency, or even reasoning like us.

But as we interact with other people using mostly language, and since the start of internet a lot of those interactions happen in way similar to how we interact with AI, the difference is not so obvious. We are falling into the Turing test in this, mostly because that test is more about language than about intelligence.

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