« As our systems get closer to AGI… »
That’s a pretty bold statement right there
That’s a pretty bold statement right there
There is an _action_ there, a module, a function, that has to be working.
Is that not what an LLM is doing?
Note that I'm not saying LLMs are sentient or anything (however, I have thoughts on sentience in general). I am simply saying there's an obvious similarity between how humans think and LLMs -- and for whatever reason, so many people think we are special simply because we are "made of meat".
One other aspect is the business side: in the following years lots of buzzwords will be flying around and most to all of the entities involved in statistical learning applications will get stuck in a local minimum worth somewhere between $10 billion to $10 trillion: shareholders care about, well, shares, not AGI. Another invariant in the technological race is that the worst technology will always win in the short to medium term: in Ancient Greece slavery was preferred to the steam engine [2], in 1900 the internal combustion engine won, not the more logical electric vehicle, today we have Windows and MacOS as major operating systems, not Plan9, and so forth.
[1] Michael Levin, From physics to mind, timestamp discussing Xenobots, https://youtu.be/_QICRPFWDpg?t=1343
It is surely moving away from AGI. The implementations go in the opposite direction.
As already expressed: "Intelligence is evolving a world model through critical consideration. Unintelligence is acritical disconnected repetition".
Many people have argued (successfully imo) that AGI is not even possible[1]. LLMs are not even trending in the direction of AGI. They are trending in the direction of annoying spam[2] and making our jobs harder[3]. A brave new world where anyone can generate hallucinated nonsense and feel clever for doing so.
[1] Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4
[2]A sci-fi magazine has cut off submissions after a flood of AI-generated stories https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt...
[3]CheatGPT https://blog.humphd.org/cheatgpt/
Me: by the way, if I may add something tangential, in my opinion you pass the Turing test 100%
ChatGPT: Thank you for the compliment! However, as an AI language model, I am not capable of passing the Turing test in the strict sense, as the Turing test requires fooling a human judge into believing that the AI is a human. While I strive to generate responses that are human-like and informative, I am still fundamentally a machine, and my responses are generated by algorithms rather than human thought processes.The "Imitation game" was introduced in the context of an explicitly very relaxed interpretation of "thinking" - broad to encompass the criticism of superficial cultural positions - in the question "«Can machines think?»".
The "Imitation game" has the purpose of deciding that "we could say that machines can think in a shallow sense of the term", for the purpose of stating a positive (positively negative) idea that "we cannot exclude that machines can potentially think".
This does not make a "fooling" machine intelligent.
Even though it has a lot of really stupid responses there's still a huge number of astonishing output that's incredibly hard to attribute to anything else other than intelligence and understanding.
I find it puzzling that people can be so vehemently adamant to downplay chatGPT as if they know what's going on. They don't. The creators of chatGPT wrote this article and it's partially an admission of this themselves, but obviously an armchair expert on HN who's never implemented an LLM as far reaching as chatGPT knows way better.
We can't say whether or not chatGPT is a step towards AGI. That much is true. But the astonishing thing about this iteration of AI is that we can no longer say if it's not a step either. We just don't know.
chatGPT comes out and everyone does a 180, the burden of proof for AGI is now so high it's currently undefined.
I think part of it is the hype cycle. There's just been so much stuff in the past decade that arm chair experts become use to downplaying everything. They read an article, they think they know better but this time they're wrong. When they read this stuff they think they know that LLMs are just statistical word generators but they aren't creative enough to see the disconnect in the responses of chatGPT that are just way too sophisticated for the statistical angle to be the only singular explanation for what's going on. They end up doing what they did in the last hype cycle which is what they're used to... downplaying it all.
I think it's all a matter of perspective. Yes from one angle it is a statistical word completer similar to how a computer program is just a stateful function that takes binary input and produces binary output. But there must be a macro-angle as well... a higher level macro structure that tells another story about what's going on.
No. And that would invalidate the process because it would mean posing unintelligent agents to judge Intelligence.
> accepting the Turing test
Because that posterior re-interpretation (rewriting) of the original "imitation game" was meant to signify "it will be stated as not Intelligent what under competent scrutiny will show not to be so".
> way too sophisticated
Which is interesting and exciting but still not Intelligence, and furthermore drowned in wishful attitude.
> downplaying
Downplaying a specific interpretation of the technology, and raising alarms over masses building shrines.
This is just you being biased. Read the last sentence of my first post. I said "We simply don't know." How does that in any way translate to "building shrines?"
It's just your bias talking. I make a claim that we don't fully understand what's going on here, and you turn it around and call that AI worship? Come on man.
>Which is interesting and exciting but still not Intelligence, and furthermore drowned in wishful attitude.
You do not have the knowledge or intelligence to say that chatGPT is not intelligence. No one does. Pun intended.
No, you misunderstood. I wrote that what you call downplaying is actually «raising alarms over masses building shrines», and I did not mean /you/ specifically. I wrote «masses».
> to say that chatGPT is not intelligence
If it is there, it is not substantially expressed. If there are minority workings, they remain drowned. The final effect is that of definite unintelligence. The point of intelligence is to base statements on an investigative refined ontology: if it is there somewhere, it is in some technical bits which are not emergent.
> You do not have ... to say
First of all, on the personal level: mh. On the substance: you can take the term "intelligence" to make it mean whatever suits some wish to call anything intelligent, but it remains finally operationally irrelevant.
...
And all of these three points converge again in the substance, because only yesterday a "message to the world" from a leading figure came out spreading word to the peoples that "do not fear the epochal switch in which these new latest technologies will aid your decision": that is emergent deliriousness - no, we do not base decisions on the output of lunatics - and must be regarded as a terrifying undercurrent of widespread madness. "«Raising alarms»". We have been studying Decision Support Systems since forever, and they have requirements.
But I bet you'd have a hard time finding that thread because most people on the other end of your spectrum are like me. Simply questioning it. The "madness" your seeing is not the majority behavior.
>First of all, on the personal level: mh. On the substance: you can take the term "intelligence" to make it mean whatever suits some wish to call anything intelligent, but it remains finally operationally irrelevant.
No need to get pedantic about the word. We all know what intelligence is without getting pedantic. I am making my point categorically clear: you do not know if chatGPT is intelligent or not.
>If it is there, it is not substantially expressed. If there are minority workings, they remain drowned. The final effect is that of definite unintelligence.
An ant displays intelligence as does a human with brain damage as does a human without brain damage. Given the vast scope of the word, it is a relatively tame statement to say that for chatGPT we simply don't know how similar it's intelligence is to human intelligence.
That^ is the obvious heart of the matter.
I assume that with «here» you mean HN. It may be that here the phenomenon is reduced, but signals have been present also on these pages. Outside of HN, may remind you of the engineer that cried "It's sentient!!!". That is just a variation of a general widespread phenomenon. Let me reconstruct the path of this part of the exchange: you mentioned a tendency in «downplaying», I tried to make you see that there is an attempt to "bring back on track" ideas, which you may take for downplaying, as a reaction to those who claimed e.g. that "we'd reached AGI". So, it's not off-topic, but an answer to your notes.
> pedantic ... We all know
It is not pedantic, but a definition of what different positions mean with 'intelligence' - also given that you write «We all know» but in the past months another topos has been "nobody knows". Definitions that are raised in order to discriminate debates for labelling different things. So: a thing that gives an output of "1000 has 5 digits" is not intelligent, because it has not checked. I know that it is not from those pieces of evidence - output we call, on the contrary, "unintelligent". And that is according to a valid definition of Intelligence, one that that I called «operationally []relevant»: i.e., you cannot trust a tool that returns such outputs.
For what 'intelligence' in 'Artificial Intelligence' is concerned, the operational purpose of AI is to create problem solvers that can replace professionals for some tasks: already there you need reliability. For 'Intelligence' in "actual proper Intelligence", in the sense that make you say that some people are "definitely intelligent", as per the previous paragraph, it appears that that is not an achieved goal for current technologies. Both meanings are critical for operation.
So, when you write «you do not know if X is intelligent or not», I understand that you must be talking of some property that I would name differently.
> as does a human with brain damage
Very much not necessarily, according to what I call Intelligence. I do not call a random passer by "Intelligent" - only, maybe, "potentially intelligent". Do not forget that, given that we are in a broad context of AI, it is a normal perspective to assume an engineering point of view: an engineered tool will have to augment human capabilities. An implementation of Intelligence will have to be useful as such, as an Intelligent part - an actually, properly Intelligent part, not "just a living thing". This makes the perspective of things that "may have some intrinsic property that some may call a form of intelligence" - but does not constitute a usable Intelligence -, irrelevant (or as I wrote «operationally irrelevant»).
That there may be elements in the workings of some new NN structure that may develop elements of intelligence is good at the level of /research/. But on the level of product, for that to be called Intelligent this part demands:
_ that it has a world model which it progressively refines through critical revision. _
(Edit: and that our checks show that it works well, consistently.)
That is what we call Intelligence. Other forms of "potentially presumable" intelligence we call unimportant outside the studies.
And meanwhile, there is a phenomenon of actual misrepresentation of the whole matter ("the Overlord has come", etc.): that should be corrected.
This is a very narrow conception of intelligence as kilgnad pointed out, but nevermind that. The most interesting word you used is "investigative". The most surprising thing about LLMs -- surprising nearly all researchers -- is that merely reading the internet (observation) is enough to build a model of the world. Many people thought that investigation/experimentation by an embodied agent was necessary to do so. I now think that experimentation is much more efficient, but enough observation can be sufficient. For example imagine you look over someone's shoulder while they spend years going through school learning mathematics. Difficult but not impossible to learn from their exercises and mistakes. On the other hand the world model contained in LLMs is still very deficient in many basic things such as understanding consequences of simple physical interactions, which aren't captured by online texts.
> narrow conception
It is there to place constraints. Like when a job description for a teacher included "The incumbent shall refrain from false statements, and shall be able to produce relevant, important true statements from creatively reasoning over solid ideas and logic". I mention "operational relevance" because "we have already invented cats" (i.e. the need remains that of problem solvers).
> enough to build a model of the world
Sure - and that is very interesting -, but a point of "Intelligence vs acquisition" is that of "Judgement vs prejudice". You get a world model, but if such model is not under active refinement through critical processing (in the sense of criticizing its elements - the ideas), its contents will be "stale" and unreliable. An Intelligent agent verifies its statements upon production (which is part of the refinement process). It is "mission critical".
> understanding consequences of simple physical interactions
That reminds of the definition from the late Prof. Patrick Winston, "Intelligence is to know what would happen if you ran holding a bucket of gravel, even though you never did that".
Such as?
And then following comment chain with another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32960083
I swear you'll have people tell you it's just "clever statistics" as they're being gunned down by skynet.