Every single retort of “these machines aren’t smart or intelligent” requires answering the question, “what is intelligence”?
I struggle to see how GPT-4 is not intelligent by any definition that applies to a human.
I struggle to see how GPT-4 is not intelligent by any definition that applies to a human.
Often, people say yes. Those people almost universally cannot be convinced that a machine is intelligent. But, if they agree the brain is an organ, its not hard to convince them that the functions of that organ can be simulated, like any other.
edit. tried the same with GPT-4, doesn't look like it understand either, but can't ask follow up questions since I do not have access (and what really make the other answer so incredibly dumb is not so much that it gets it wrong the first time, but that it keeps not getting it despite the very not subtle hints): https://postimg.cc/ftWJXhtJ
Like isn't that why humans are "more intelligent" than animals?
Plenty of animals can do things that humans can't do, but that doesn't make them necessarily "intelligent".
The fact that it seems trivially simple to fool and trick ChatGPT makes me feel like it's not very intelligent, but that's just me.
Obviously you can trick humans, but IMO it takes more effort than to trick ChatGPT. It just way too often makes such simple and stupid mistakes that it makes it hard for me to think of it as "intelligent".
I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think it is possible we will have AGI, even ASI, long before we have sentience in AI. Of course, I'm a little skeptical of measures of sentience, so even if I'm right it will certainly be debatable.
I don't know. My point is that if there is some objective indicator that's correlated with sentience, LLMs are probably already close to us on it, maybe even beating us on it. And if, at some point, a ML model reaches our levels at every objective measure we can think of, then we'll have no choice but to grant it is intelligent/sentient/sapient.
But sentience itself involves self-reflection, which there is no evidence LLMs do at all. When you submkt a prompt, a giant mathematical operation happens, and when it is complete, it stops. ChatGPT is not sitting there thinking "oh man, I should have said..."
For humans, time does not stop - we constantly process both sensory information and our own thoughts, and even if you cut out external stimuli via e.g. sensory deprivation tank, the brain will just loop on its own output instead, of which you'll suddenly become much more aware.
Sentience is that internal loop you point out. LLMs (today) don't have that. When you prompt for "write a tagline for an ice cream shop", there is no identity that remembers other prompts about ice cream, or which reflects on how taglines have changed over time, or anything else. The results can be astoundingly good, even intelligent, but there's no sentience.
If you somehow turned off a person after each sentence, upon waking up to the next prompt their first thought would be "that was weird, I must have passed out", and we could use fMRI to track brain activity indicating that thought. We are even more capable of inspecting LLMs, and there is no equivalent activity. LLMs start and end with the tokens going in and out, and a huge matrix that transforms them.
I'm generally an open minded, probabilities-rather-than-certainties person, but I'd say the odds of LLMs having sentience that we can't detect are about the same as the odds of a television having sentience that we can't detect: as close to zero as we can measure.
Yes, but that is arguably a trivial limitation. Nothing stops you from running an LLM in a loop and feed it its own output. Plenty such experiments are probably going on already - it's a trivial loop (and a trivial way to burn through your wallet). The problem is, of course, context window being rather small. So it's possible - by no means certain, but I'm no longer dismissing this idea - that the capability for sentience is already there in GPT-4 structurally, and we just lack the ability to sustain it in a loop long enough to bring it into the open.
> If you somehow turned off a person after each sentence, upon waking up to the next prompt their first thought would be "that was weird, I must have passed out", and we could use fMRI to track brain activity indicating that thought.
That's not what I meant by LLM iteration. When I said that time stops, I mean that for LLM, it literally just stops. If you were to step-execute a human like that, they would never notice; it's not like the brain has a separate RTC module constantly feeding it with sub-second resolution timestamps (and if it did, we'd turn that off too). Over a hour or more, the human may realize their inner perception of time is increasingly lagging the wall clock, but to keep it comparable to LLM, we'd be iterating sub-second process.
In this hypothetical, there would be no extra activity in brains that isn't there in LLMs. Step-executing a human mind doesn't freeze some abstract subprocess, it freezes photons and electrons and chemical gradients.
On the other hand, sentience just means having an experience of observing the world, it doesn‘t even need to include a concept of self. Presumably at least all mammals have this, for sure a dog has this. ChatGPT - probably not.
Humans became more intelligent due to developing oral and literary traditions that allowed the preservation and accumulation of knowledge. Everything that made a modern human "intelligent" is a direct result of that accumulation of knowledge, not some sort of biological miracle.
This explains the various pejorative names given to LLMs - stochastic parrots, Chinese Rooms - etc, etc, etc.
I have a feeling all of these things are limited by time/space/speed of light/heat/density limitations. Could be things can't get that much smarter than humans with in an OOM... tho they might get a lot more able to cooperate / delegate.
The only way anybody has ever come up with to measure it is test-taking - which machines can already do far better than we can. Real intelligence is creativity, but good luck measuring that.
Even assuming that definition, it begs the question of, "what is creativity?"
Well said.
Even Jim Keller (a key designer involved with a lot of major CPUs, in his interview with Lex Freidman) said that there might be some sort of magic, or something magical about human consciousness / the human soul. I agree with that.
That's something that a machine will never have.
hehe, this is typical goal post moving.
never is a long time.
Being handed all the correct solutions without the need to work for them in any way is a nightmare for artists and artisans, craftsmen and researchers, curious puzzle-solvers and Ayn Rand believers. It's pretty much a paradise for everyone else.
If anything, transformer models are closing the gap on that last bit, as they're built by taking the approach of "if we can't describe exactly how we rate and rank things, then let's shove so many examples at the model that it eventually gets a feel for it".