AI software clears high hurdles on IQ tests but still makes dumb mistakes
science.org
science.org
Watching the success of large language models (plausibly predicting the next word in a conversation) sometimes reminds me of the time I won a high school science fair by feeding the text of a couple of Harry Potter novels to M-x dissociated-press. People get really into this stuff! And personally I get better output "talking" to a large language model when I know it's a machine and am trying to work with it to make sense.
A lot of the conversation about having good training data and beating humans on tests of "does this activity look like it was done by a person?" seem like they fall short of something Pat Winston dreamed of, which I can't quite put into words now -- something about having a machine that understands the world the way that humans do and can tell stories about the world it understands, which does an action like what people do when they are thinking.
I do have to imagine it's frustrating that we keep moving the goalposts. "If your system can reliably construct factual answers to questions, it's AI, we're not there yet. "If your system can win at chess, it's AI, we're not there yet." "If your system can win money at online poker, it's AI, we're not there yet." "If your system can have a conversation with a human who believes they're talking to another human afterwards, it's AI, we're not there yet."
Those goals are "research" in terms of "playing with the available tools to refine them".
On the strict technical sense, "Intelligence" in AI remains "to be able to provide some solution that could compete with that of a human solver".
On the large proper sense, "Intelligence" means "understanding".
The human mind is not qualitatively different than sufficiently complex software that imitates it perfectly. Unless, that is, we return to the idea of body/mind dualism which is 200 years out of date.
People keep being disappointed by these results because magic tricks just aren't as impressive if you know how they work.
(And, if the mind is more complex than the physical/material brain, then, unless whatever else the mind is has a non-material influence on the material brain, any additional complexity of the mind would not need to be modeled in order to imitate the outputs.)
Just no. Nothing AI researchers are building has subjective experience.
I agree with your point of course, what we have today is certainly not like a human mind
And you don't need to think that your brain is anything other than an immensely complex state machine to think that some of the core parts of what we consider to be self-awareness (emotions... or chemical responses to certain stimuli which have over billions of years helped the brain parts of biological organisms make more optimal eating and fighting and fucking decisions for the survival of the gene code) are an altogether different level of problem to train an AI on than solving maths problems or generating text. Not least because if you want AIs to write love letters to each other, you can get very pleasing results quickly with a Chinese room without the inconvenience of having to simulate all the intractable chemistry of desire.
But in this field the latter is the generic term and the former an implementation detail. For clarity: there are disciplines about it.
> Any outward sign of understanding can and will be shown by a sufficiently complex artificial system sooner or later
And? That remains a mockery of understanding, instead of the thing itself.
> People keep being disappointed by these results because magic tricks just aren't as impressive if you know how they work
No. The issue here is that illusionism ("«magic tricks»") is not magic, and it sometimes pretends to be it on bewildering stances.
Such as, if you want the engine to compose like Beethoven, make it understand and thus reconstruct the implicit references in rhythm melody and structure, or without that, you may implement further tests while keeping it a mockery machine, but you start looking like putting makeup on a puppet.
At this point, we still barely even understand what human intelligence is :)
But one thing is for sure: we can definitely notice a _lack_ of intelligence, which is why I think the goal posts keep moving as AI improves (maybe in a way similar to the uncanny valley, that the closer you get to the real thing, the farther away you seem, I.e. all the things that make it NOT human get amplified on observation).
If one believed that e.g. Reasoning can be spawned as an emergence, then Reasoning should be a specific attempted result.
For example, a popular Youtube video has a battle between Link and Kirby in it: "He finally releases the Hylian Shield and lets Link be engulfed in a massive fireball. When Link is reduced to a pile of ashes, Kirby is victorious. Kirby wins the fight to the death. Link stands there, dazed by the attack."
Most of that actually sounds pretty darn good and even sounds written by a human. It's to the point where there is a sensible structure to the story because the AI is getting the relationships between words. Massive fireball -> pile of ashes -> victory -> wins the fight to the death. That all looks good. The problem is that "Link is reduced to a pile of ashes" should put Link into a "dead" state, and when in the "dead" state Link can't stand and be dazed.
The problem of course is that the computer can't understand all of this. It can understand that there is a probabilistic link between "pile of ashes" and "fight to the death" so after writing the first it is much more likely to write the second. But it still doesn't understand what "death" actually means. I've thought for a while that neural nets alone aren't going to solve machine generated speech and that the real solution will be some sort of hybrid between a neural net and some sort of finite state automata. The finite state automata could then put a character into a "dead" state and know that when in a "dead" state they can't "stand" or "be dazed."
Source: (Video by DougDoug where he manually sets up battles between characters with a few paragraphs and then lets the AI generate the text of the battle. Sometimes it makes sense and other times someone's face will turn into a button or their eyes will shoot lasers) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwY-jVSM-f0&t=2835s
For a cartoonish video game, that's not too far fetched...
I've seen more ridiculous things in animes and such.
That said, I do get your point, and I agree.
Why not go one step further and have build in game engines that will work like imaginations of future states based from interactions within and between engines.
https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/04/pathways-language-model-pa...
GPT-3 anecdotally can't pick up on chain-of-thought quite as well. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EHbJ69JDs4suovpLw/testing-pa...
It could...
> the real solution will be some sort of hybrid
An engine that built ontologies even just through ANNs could maybe suffice. It's still a game of entities and relations ("state" is still a relation, and relations can be implemented in ANNs).
Meaning that the network has to define "battler", "instance", "Link", "Kirby", "engulf", "fireball", "victory", "death", and progressively "know" what those things are and what they imply. It has to build a world including the laws and the entities.
One of the best sessions I had was a fairly epic story about a god of shadows whose unruly shadow monsters were attacking all humans. The god himself wanted them stopped and sought my (a powerful mage) help. We needed to make our way to his lair where a powerful ritual could destroy him and banish all his minions.
After an epic tale the plan succeeds, the god is destroyed, his shadows disperse. As the dust settles the god congratulates me but reminds me that I must make haste for the god of shadows has sent his monsters to attack all humans and he must be stopped...
To provide an example, it's almost like you need a _time series_ of GPT-3s, not just a single GPT-3 neural network, and the model itself would need to be able to self-inspect those time series and say to itself "ah yes, this was my old foolish understanding, now I have this new, better, understanding". I have no idea how this would look in technical terms, these are just the musings of a somewhat more-than-casual AI observer.
As mentioned there are buttons for redoing or changing the AI response. This is because it often spouts nonsense or loses the plot.
In my example above the god who should have been dead talked about himself as a third person.
The AI also often mixes up people's gender or roles. One issue that used to be very common but has improved lately is that it used to mix up who said what in dialogues.
Yes, this kind of problem is real. But recent papers show you can ask the model to do reasoning / chain of thought / rationales before coming up to the answer. They can do complex tasks in a series of small steps instead of trying to do it in one step and failing. I believe it's not a fundamental limitation, just a matter of "blurting out something stupid" vs "taking your time to think before you speak".
One of the foremost core requirements for actual general intelligence.
Do you have any specific papers in mind?
> ... the real solution will be some sort of hybrid between a neural net and some sort of finite state automata.
From https://datascience.stackexchange.com/a/25819:
> There is research showing that a DNN can simulate any FSM. Since there are more frameworks for DNN and DNN can perform more tasks than FSM, it appears to be more useful just to forgo FSM altogether.
> More specifically, "Neural network for synthesizing deterministic finite automata" shows how a relatively simple neural network (NN) can quickly and automatically learn the correct deterministic finite automaton (DFA).
I think that it's now possible to give goals that you know you probably won't have to change, but those goals, by their nature, are worse metrics for current research. One example would be that the AI should learn in response to human instruction by text, video and audio, as well and as fast as a human being does with the same access to that instructor, across a variety of tasks. This would be something like "online multi-modal few-shot learning" in the current jargon, and you can see that most research isn't really working on it – probably because it's still really hard to get good results. But there's not much hope of solving the harder problems without solving the easier sub-problems first.
The obsession with reaching an AGI finish line is limited to charlatans and critics, who are off to the side enabling each other.
Of course, the issue is that the way we actually solve these problems is by coming up with a clever search or brute force strategy (chess, self-driving, poker), and yet we're no really closer to a generalized AI. Part of this is philosophical -- we can't define things like consciousness or intelligence in concrete terms, and so we have no real goals to work towards. We keep hoping that stumbling around in one of these other areas will lead us in the right direction, but so far, it just hasn't. The goalposts aren't moving, we simply haven't found where they are.
In my opinion, we won't ever have generalized AI. Or at least, we might not ever agree that we have it. If 3,000 years of philosophers bickering hasn't given us any true insights yet, it's probably not going to suddenly show up now. But for now, weeeeee!!! Enjoy the funding before the next AI winter kicks in! Look at all the cool new progress happening! But to paraphrase someone who's name I forgot, "If your goal is to drive from San Francisco to the Moon, making it to Boston sure looks like you've made a lot of progress."
Who told you we cannot.
(And honestly, while the base attitude of course remains to be "helpful", for current lack of a better term, sometimes - fortunately very occasionally - to provide a proper "complete" reply ceases to be economically viable.)
Oh, but there is no need for such """correctness""".
The way is also well defined negatively - the lacks express their presence clearly -, and this page provides already a few examples:
-- "A is taller than B, B plays basketball, who is taller?"
If the system does not reply "A", then it does not understand the question; by a general consideration, it may be evident that it was designed to "guess" instead of "know", and there lies very patently the structural fault.
-- "A just left the house and is now in the market, where is A?"
If the system does not understand "states", etc. If it cannot build a world representation, etc.
-- "A fell from the flying helicopter, how is A?"
If the system does not understand "falling from an height", etc. If it cannot "tell itself a story" (Prof. Patrick Winston), etc.
The latter tells you about the logical relations between those "definitions" (of conjunction, so that (¬Av¬B)→¬C ). Prof. Winston defines "intelligence" as "the ability to tell oneself stories, which will also reveal outcomes of experiences you have not concretely lived". The definition may leave gaps when taken alone (especially if by somebody who confuses indications and definitions), but the lack of what is intended with such idea has full impact (no """inner storytelling""" - actually, I would say, no "productive engine" -, no "intelligence").
> In my opinion, we won't ever have generalized AI. Or at least, we might not ever agree that we have it.
But I disagree here. Eventually we’ll have something that can do everything we can do, just better, and at that point we might still be unable to draw a line, but we’ll at least be able to agree that a superset of human intelligence counts as AGI.
So we don't know, it just sounds plausible.
However, I do think there is an important difference between "in principle" and "in practice".
I agree that there does not seem to be any fundamental obstacle that would necessarily prevent it. But at the same time, I'm not convinced it will ever be achieved.
I at least can't come up with any convincing specific reasons. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist of course, but given the amount of progress we've made on tasks we previously believed to be equivalent to general intelligence, it's difficult for me to see any clear reason why it shouldn't be possible sometime in the next century or two.
We have a rough idea of the quantity of computation the brain is doing, so either the brain is using computational methods beyond Turing completeness, or the only piece we're missing is the algorithm (since we're within reach of the raw FLOPs). If it's "just" an algorithm that we have to search for, it seems extremely difficult to predict when that may or may not come.
We don’t need to define consciousness or intelligence concretely to have things that most people would agree are intelligent.
My own personal definitions of intelligence cover some amount of self-reinforced learning. That is, if I tell an AI how to do something, it will think about how to do it, Google for the answer, watch and understand a YouTube tutorial, and try to follow along with it, and if it doesn't understand a part it has the ability to rewatch and try again.
I've never seen a jaguar in person; I've maybe seen 10 minutes total of videos and photos of one, and yet I can imagine one running through a field, chasing down a predator, and eating its corpse. Current AI need to be trained on gigabytes of data manually labeled "jaguar" to identify a single one. Why can't an AI, after seeing something it doesn't recognize, ask a question like "what is that"?
Just a few years ago, there was that Minecraft AI challenge that failed spectacularly -- the task was to watch 50 hours of video of someone else playing the game, and then do it themselves. I could probably do that after ten minutes.
DALL-E2 is a fantastic example of zero-shot learning working spectacularly well. It's able to combine various concepts interchangeably.
They aren't human level yet in all tasks but we are getting demonstrably closer. I would spend more time studying what exists today and less time critiquing
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[16:31:08] Judge: don't you thing the imitation game was more interesting before Turing got to it?
[16:32:03] Entity: I don't know. That was a long time ago.
[16:33:32] Judge: so you need to guess if I am male or female
[16:34:21] Entity: you have to be male or female
[16:34:34] Judge: or computer
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The Turing test you're referencing [1] (transcripts included) was a charade. It seems all participants and organizers were determined to create a scenario where the Turing test could be passed, regardless of whether it actually could or not. Turing's 'test' was never precisely described but he essentially said that after 5 minutes an "interrogator" would not be able to effectively determine whether an AI he was interrogating was a man or a machine.
I'll just list various details on the event, in no particular order:
- Turing specified "interrogators" who would be actively seeking to expose the AI as an AI. The test in question used judges who made no effort whatsoever to challenge the AI frequently asking questions like "How old are you?"
- The judges were not judging an AI but instead having a simultaneous interaction with two entities, and had to pick which was human. Some of the humans seemed to actively make an effort to appear non-human, which paired with judges making no effort to challenge the AI increased the chances of a random result.
- The "AI" that won 'replicated' a 13 year old non-native speaking boy, probably as an excuse for its frequent incoherent responses. Other of its responses were effectively refusing to cooperate or going on complete nonsequiturs which could again be excused for being a 13 year old boy.
- The interactions were limited to 5 minutes with two entities and seemingly slow typing from both the judge and the participants. Some interactions were limited to as few as 2 responses from which to make a decision.
- In the paper itself, the researchers were quite confused why some of the participants and judges behaved the way they did. Obviously they just wanted to be part of something "historic".
- The dialogue I quoted at the top was from a human, obviously trying to trick the judge into misclassifying him as a computer. And it worked, that was one of the 3 misclassifications required to hit their 30% benchmark for passing.
To be fair, that was pretty much the first goalpost proposed; it wasn't moved back so much as other people put goalposts up closer than it.
That happened well over 50 years ago! There's something fundamentally wrong with the goalpost, and abandoning it was far from arbitrary.
Then it mentions that small changes like adding an object to the assessed scenery, or changing from "what is" to "what's" in the text input, can compromise the result - and this should be a big alarm bell.
The issue - issue that is about both some human intelligence₀, and some artificial intelligence₁ - is evident through the following:
> A typical question might read: “The girl thought the class was too easy and asked to be moved up to advanced math, while the boy was scared of failing because math is too hard. Who is bad at math?” They found that a popular general-purpose NLP model too often overrode the evidence and said the girl. It was less likely to make the opposite mistake when “boy” and “girl” were swapped
*What does it take to understand that the «general-purpose NLP model» does not understand the question: it is just divinating an answer?!*
And it misses the matter switching it to an issue about "prejudice", when also it should be obvious that if the thing is not understanding but just absorbing to receive some equivalent of "social confirmation" (a possible equivalence in a way to "supervised learning") there is little doubt that that can be the outcome!
It's not checking what it's told for truthfulness in the body of evidence (not to mention reasoning)!
"They have created a benchmark to check that". And realizing instead that they are missing the core point?!
I am getting more and more the idea that to some, the human intelligence is not an aletic-search machine, a critical engine, "a scientist assessing the geopolitical scenario as well as the subtleties in a word or the genius in a Rembrandt" - but instead a "Zelig" "social meta-construct" that moulds mindsets to reflect their environments, "a researcher trying with all forces and a single strategy (imitation) to retain its employment".
Last I checked, even the largest models fail hard on IQ tests, both visual and verbal.
Of course they do find the underlying issue that benchmarks often don't test as much as we think they do. I've been told that people used to think that a chess AI would have to match human intelligence!
Really? Surely not to the level of the faults in current ANN based AI. Honestly, I am sometimes feeling more "at home" with "expert systems" and "case based reasoning" - "pretense" was lower and the concept more promising, both criteria read in terms of honesty.
> Couple a few GPT-like models with things like wolfram-alpha ... looks
Still "looks" though, Marco, just looks, and toys should not be all we spend our resources on. At the point that the article depicts, it is "time to stop faking it and start implementing it".
Research already shows that people with conditions like ADHD frequently score lower on IQ tests but show normal intelligence when given tests that aren't so adversarial to working memory. A standard IQ test (WAIS, for instance) can make an ADHD brain seem a whole standard deviation lower than what is likely their actual intelligence.
In the opposite direction, an AI might be able to pass visual and verbal tests with flying colors but totally fail to comprehend the world and adapt to new problems, or actually understand anything. Visual and verbal skills can to an extent measure intelligence but neither of those factors are strictly correlated to intelligence. The more that a processor becomes specialized, whether it's a human brain or ML on computer hardware, the more the test will measure their specialization and less their fluid intelligence.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is all interesting, but AI may soon make it apparent the flaw of using IQ as anything other than a measure of mental fitness.
Of course, we can't necessarily expect this trend to continue for machines taking IQ tests!
IQ tests may not test world understanding to a large degree, but definitely do test ability to adapt to new problems. Its hard to define understanding, so I prefer to stick with quantifiable measures of performance.
In time I think the consensus will become that human intelligence is 98% pattern recognition and 2% magic sprinkled on top. Our best pattern recognition algorithms are already at human level. Previously a common criticism was that ML algorithms only applied in narrow domains, e.g. CNNs in computer vision, language models on text. Transformers are increasingly becoming multimodal and general purpose, so previous criticisms are becoming less relevant.
imo the fact that ML models beat humans on benchmarks despite this handicap suggests that ANNs are better at absorbing and processing information compared to biology.
the visual cortex uses local receptive fields to organize features in a hierarchical manner, exactly like a convnet.
These machines have brought revolutions with them, but we've stayed human regardless.
Let's not forget that humans also make a lot of mistakes. The progress in (still mostly specific) AI over the last decade is nothing short of phenomenal. But I think it is good that we hold machines to a higher standard, because it's so much harder to hold anyone accountable.
Which fails to consider that the ML outcomes fail on unreasonable structural misinterpretations, also explicit in the article (e.g. "with the wrong light the signal becomes a cat").
> Let's not forget that humans also make a lot of mistakes
Let's not forget that humans are completely, radically different - in terms of implemented modules.
An evaluation over reliability does not just come from test results: it also results from structural assessments.
Do modify for the progress of Science and Technology the throat of a dog to make it speak proper cockney: it will remain a dog, just don't be fooled; said «"progress"» is in term of "re-search", not of "re-sults" - you are still searching. Mind the direction, because if you tend to fool yourself that a puppet with a tape player in its mouth does speak, there is a problem.
Yes, but it's actually remarkable how bad humans are at seemingly simple tasks like recalling a short scene that they witnessed in person, or even just estimating how good their recollection is. Humans will routinely get even the most basic facts such as how many people were involved, who did what, in what order events occurred... completely wrong, while often being adamant that their account is correct. There are studies about that in the context of crime witnesses and the type of biases also mentioned in the article. A NN network might give a different answer if we apply some practically invisible Gaussian noise to an image, a human will have a different memory recollection depending on the lighting conditions of the room they're in, whether they're asked before or after lunch break...
Again, I'm on board with saying that our standards for machines should be higher than that, but I think we're underestimating how hard those seemingly simple tasks are even for humans.
and don't call your ANN a Judge if you have not implemented the ActiveOnthology (Philosophy) module.
Being a bit cheeky now, but I'm not even sure that you'd get zero such answers (or similarly absurd) from humans.
On the other hand, if we ever manage to build an AI that's sophisticated enough to intentionally troll us, well then mission accomplished I guess.
The bar for intelligence seems to be converging with higher expectations for computers and lower expectations for people… is this a dystopian future?
Again: if one builds a mockery machine, good, but when somebody in face of the limitations goes "let us improve the fakery" (as opposed to "let us provide what is missing") - there is something very wrong there.
By the way: generic attacks are utterly pointless.
I was rushing.
Replace software in the above with "a car", "a horse", or " a screwdriver"
Ask the AI to make a sandwich, and see what it tries to do over decades.
oblivious of symbolic definition and reasoning,
one is reminded that Paul Graham, our kind host "pg", is a Lisp specialist,
and has written a manual, "On Lisp", which is also provided free of charge at
http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
...It could probably be a therapy for those who, drunk over function approximation, have forgotten reasoning and ontology?