Comment by alexahn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexahn | Hacker News Reader

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>Or at least, I think I agree. What I would have said is that you can write down words on a paper, and the words are a representation of meaning, but the paper doesn't understand meaning, nor do the words. You need a human, with a human understanding of words, and language, and what those things mean, in order to decode the meaning from the words. In other ah words, the words on the paper are a representation of meaning, but only for a human. For a cat, say, they don't represent anything.

If you change your perspective on language to mean any arbitrary capture of useful information (such that it can be used in the future), then you can see that the boundary between words and the world is not the heart of the issue. For example, your perception of the world works in a similar manner in that your sensory organs cannot comprehend the world, almost like your sensory organs interpret the world using their own language. Or maybe if that example is not very intuitive, then how about imagining an alien species that has sensory organs that act on linguistic structures. In some way, the aliens will figure out a coherent structure of their own, even though they cannot "experience" the world through senses like ours. What "intelligence" is doesn't seem to be bound by how "close" someone is to reality, and "close" might not even be the right word, since different perceptions can have different capabilities. I think the tricky part about "intelligence" is that there is always some "meaning" captured, it is just alien to those who do not share the same interpretive capacity. A cat could extract meaningful information from words on a paper, but certainly not in the same way we do.

Now if we want to make an AI that acts and thinks like us, then understanding our own machinery (the relationship between the world and language) is certainly important. But I think the bitter lesson rears its head here, and I believe that something that is truly worthy of being called AGI will be able to thrive given any set of arbitrary senses, even linguistic ones. In other words, I do not think embodiment will naturally lead to AGI, rather that embodiment is a necessity if we want make AI in our image. And making an AI in our image is the fastest way to get an AI to do useful work for us.

>> If you change your perspective on language to mean any arbitrary capture of useful information (such that it can be used in the future), then you can see that the boundary between words and the world is not the heart of the issue.

I don't think that it is. What I think is that language encodes meaning, that can be decoded only by an entity that knows how to decode meaning from language; which is a bit of a tautology, but that's the point, you can't expect an entity without the ability to decode meaning from language to understand what language means. Or at least I don't expect that.

Here's an analogy, and I shouldn't be making it because it's about cryptography and I'm not an expert there. Suppose I sent you an encrypted message and you knew how to decrypt it- I encoded it with your public key and you decrypted it with your private key, or whatever. If you could do that, then you could read my message and know what it says.

If you couldn't decrypt my message, then you could stare at it for as long as you liked, you could make copies of it, you could make variations of it, you could even learn a model of the structure of encrypted messages like mine, and be able to produce many more of those messages, but you would still not know what those encrypted messages say. Because they're encrypted and you can't read them, you can only read their encoding.

That's what I'm driving at. I think that's how language works, in practice. Not that it's some form of encryption, but that it only makes sense to humans, so only humans can decode meaning from language. With language modelling, we're reproducing the encoded message, but we haven't yet found out how to equip the machines modelling language with the ability to decode meaning from it, so for all intents and purposes it might just as well be encrypted.

I'm not arguing for embodiment, either. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of a "brain in a jar". But I agree that if we want our AI's to behave like humans, they will have to have some experience in the world.

If I can make convincing messages based on the structure and swapping around pieces of data, then it sounds like I got past the encryption well enough to have a partial understanding of the plaintext.

Like when you encrypt an image in ECB mode: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Tux_ECB....

>> If I can make convincing messages based on the structure and swapping around pieces of data, then it sounds like I got past the encryption well enough to have a partial understanding of the plaintext.

I think that no, because you can manipulate the structure of an encrypted string and swap around pieces of it etc, without having to decrypt it.

As to making convincing messages, as you say, the entity making the messages and swapping around the data is a language model, but the entity reading the generated messages is a human. It is the human that finds the messages "convincing" as you say. We have no doubts that humans can decode meaning from text, even if we have no idea how we do it, yet. The question is whether language models can do the same thing. And what I say above is that there is no indication that they can, because all they do can be done by language generation, without any decoding of meaning needed.

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