Comment by wolttam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolttam | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but I do tend to feel like this muddies up the discussion on "what this technology really is".

I think "artificial" is actually a pretty good term to describe the output of the models. That output does appear to resemble at least some definition of the word "intelligence" - there is some ability there to do cognition over information that's been provided to them in-context.

What is it to understand, then? If they can work in complex domains and produce coherent output, it would seem to necessitate at least some definition of "understanding" of the corpus, even if that understanding is unlike how a human's brain would understand it.

What else should we call them then? They model language and information in ways that allow them to manipulate it on the fly. They do so 'unnaturally' from a human's point of reference.

I legitimately can't come up with a better term than 'artifical intelligence' -- not to be confused with artificial consciousness, which I don't think exists (yet).

> a better term than artificial intelligence

Agreed, it's a problematic term that conflates theoretical research with better search results.

Deep learning and machine learning (ML) are both unromanticised (un-hyped) terms.

In some cases, it's just tooling with a better interface. As we have done with other complex computing systems (e.g. Deep Blue, Watson), we might just end up naming it a computing system for querying, e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS

We would like a neutral term for such a system, and in this sense it's better to call it "A.I." than to make a verb from google or bing or other corporate name.

But in refined cases, such tooling may offer a credible (as in "believable") human experience, like Weizenbaum's Eliza (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA). Some users of Eliza fully believed that Eliza listened and understood at a profound human level. Eliza was a simple computer programme.

Computing systems are not humans. They have no accountability in real life. People may be so comfortable with the user-experience that they cannot distinguish it from interacting with another human. That doesn't make the computer system alive and accountable. And if it's run by a corporation, it will almost certainly make big promises while energetically seeking to avoid accountability. ^_^

"Virtual intelligence" is better. Transformer ANNs are dramatically dumber than cockroaches and it doesn't make sense to describe such a system as being artificially intelligent, for the same reason it doesn't make sense to describe Half-Life: Alyx as an "artificial reality." An artificial reality implies some sort of scientific fidelity to actual reality. A virtual reality just has to be temporarily convincing. Likewise transformer LLMs have essentially zero actual intelligence - e.g. SOTA "reasoning" models still seem much worse at small-integer quantitative reasoning than almost all vertebrates. But LLMs have an enormous amount of formal subject matter knowledge and inexhaustible stamina at solving tedious O(n) problems. So for many purposes they are an adequate virtual intelligence. At least temporarily.

> Transformer ANNs are dramatically dumber than cockroaches

Source?

My source is "none of us have ever seen a robot that can navigate unfamiliar 3D spaces as well as a cockroach." If transformers were capable of the job we would have seen a smart robot by now. But all of our robots are truly mindless compared to the simplest insects.

I will change my mind if someone demonstrates such a robot. Absent this demonstration, cockroach-level AI is still an unsolved problem. Given how ignorant and arrogant and wealthy AI researchers are, it will remain unsolved. I don't think anyone alive today will live to see a robot smarter than an ant.

We might as well say that none of us have ever seen a cockroach that can solve Erdos problems as well as an LLM. Or write code, or stories, etc.

Then one can claim that humans are less intelligent than a goldfish as "none of us have ever seen a human swim as well as a goldfish".

It's around hour 20 of trying to breath that I start to really think the Goldfish has an edge on me.

If you buy the argument “If A can do X but B can’t, then B is less intelligent than A”, then you have just as strong of an argument that LLMs are more intelligent than cockroaches. When’s the last time you saw a cockroach solve an Erdös problem?

Large language model is the term for what most people call "artificial intelligence". Bender's point is that labeling everything as artificial intelligence makes it more difficult to get funded or to regulate the technology. It's like walking into a car and being enamored by all the technology and saying "It's all computer". Yes, it's computers but that is not an accurate description of the many technologies inside that car.

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