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Yes, this is exactly what is meant by “moving the goalposts”. And it’s a fairly well known expression applying wherever people retroactively change their requirements in reaction to those requirements having been met.

It's almost like I disagree with your use of the phrase in this context, rather than that I don't know the meaning of it.

So you defined your own idiosyncratic version of "moving the goalposts" and used it to rebut his argument, with a condescending "you understand that's how science works, right?"--instead of being honest that it is you who are changing the definition, and not his failure to understand anything.

I don't see how that's any better.

He rebutted the argument about moving the goalposts by moving the goalposts. It’s better by dint of sheer bravado.

You got me - I've been rumbled.

Actually, I'm really an LLM and this whole thing was a clever bluff.

How were any of us meant to know that you were using your own personal and undisclosed definition of a well-established phrase?

“AGI will only, truly, be achieved when the machine can destroy an industrial-type toilet after downing a Supreme Burrito and a large Baja Blast.”

-Alan Turing (allegedly)

If it seems like I don't understand the meaning of that very well-known phrase, then clearly I have failed to make my point. I'll try again. And please note that I will use some generalizations to make my point more clearly, rather than because I don't understand nuance; kindly grant me a charitable reading.

In recent years, I have commonly seen the phrase "you're moving the goalposts" deployed by the "it might be sentient" crowd to shoot down the "it's a stochastic parrot" crowd when the latter respond to a new development with "OK but...". In a well-understood field of inquiry, that would be a clear case of goalpost-moving, in the commonly-understood meaning of the phrase where requirements are retroactively changed in response to them having been met. Thank you OP. 'Artificial Intelligence', and indeed intelligence in general, is very much not a well-understood field of inquiry - in fact we don't even have a common agreement about what 'intelligence' is. We are therefore learning as we go (even after all this time!) but making rapid progress in recent years. When rapid progress is made in a poorly-understood field, then how can our definitions and requirements for success not change? This is arguably one of the most pathological development projects ever - what are the requirements? 'It thinks like a human'? What does that mean? And the answer is we don't know what that means, and we're working it out as we go - moving the goalposts. If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.

Side note that, in case it's not obvious, none of this detracts from how impressive LLMs are. They're a marvel of the modern age, all the problems notwithstanding. However I reserve the right to stay sceptical about their capabilities.

> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.

To me, the goalposts were already defined by the person you were responding to. "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon".

Note that this does not depend on things like AI sentience or defining "intelligence" more rigorously, it just depends on AI impact.

Take your point, although

> "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon".

those are not goalposts - that's an incredible vague 'goal'. What are we moving here exactly?

The "goal" here, not in the sense of what AI scientists are shooting for, but in terms of "goal", "goalpost", and the idiom of "moving the goalposts", would be to invalidate the current argument. Typically, you "goal" when you successfully disprove the other person's argument.

Thus "moving the goalposts" is for the defenders to shift what argument that the other side is trying to disprove.

If the argument is "the impact of AI is getting undeniable", you'd try to show that impact of AI is not that high, and not looking to be that high in the near future.

The other side might move the goalposts by saying something like "well, it doesn't matter if AI is actually that broadly impactful right now, all that matters is whether it's impactful in the field of mathematics". At which point, you might be frustrated because the effort you put into engaging their previous argument is now moot.

PS - yeah, yeah, I overexplained

Thanks for this clarification of your position. The brief answer is:

> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.

The criticisms are directed toward people who did clearly act like they knew, not the ones who were honest that they did not know.

> When rapid progress is made in a poorly-understood field, then how can our definitions and requirements for success not change?

It's in how they change, not the fact that they change. The skeptics seem to have secret definitions for intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, etc. that amounts to "a thing only humans have". Often that thing is equivalent to a soul. When yesterday's challenge (LLMs don't have X because they can't do Y!) is met, Y changes but X stays the same. This is not the process by which a field matures, it is a rhetorical technique used by skeptics to avoid honestly stating or confronting their internal definitions. That can be revealed by asking the skeptic the following:

"Forget LLMs. What if we made a completely physically accurate simulation of a human being?"

Many say no, that simulated human being still couldn't have (intelligence, consciousness, sentience, creativity, ...). This reveals that there is a necessary metaphysical component to those attributes, at which point any scientific-minded person will leave the debate.

OK, I see, thanks. That applies to some skeptics, though - I'm in the AI skeptic camp but only in the sense that I believe we should make sober assessments of what these things are actually capable of.

> That applies to some skeptics, though

Totally! Arguments like yours often get lost in the noise of the less interesting / nuanced arguments unfortunately :(

> And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And again. That's what "moving the goalposts" means.

The fundamental argument that I've personally made since the early days of this is that LLMs are not reasoning, in the way that word is commonly understood.

There are lots of reasons why that argument needs to evolve that could certainly appear to be "moving the goalposts", but let's take an example.

A lot of AIs were tripped up by the question "Should I walk or drive 50m to the carwash?" Several folks liked to use that as an example that illustrates that LLMs aren't reasoning, but as the models have been trained on that specific example, it's of course less useful. An AI can mostly nail it now.

So a different example is needed. A new demonstration of how these things fail at basic reasoning a child can do.

Did I move the goalposts? I don't think so. The fundamental argument stays the same. It's not hard to find lots of examples that trip up LLMs, because they are what they are: statistical inference machines. Nothing more and nothing less.

Useful, sure. But also commonly misapplied to areas for which they are inappropriate solutions.

What you are doing is "motte and bailey".

The motte is "AI useful". The bailey is "Singularity is nigh".

>> The motte is "AI useful". The bailey is "Singularity is nigh".

But there are people like Ed Zitron, frequently posted and cited here, who disagree even with the former.

to an extent zitron is saying its not useful, but as a more nuanced opinion, "ai is not cost effective, nor is it improving profits or revenue"

From a random article I grabbed of his (https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/):

"it isn't clear whether generative AI actually provides much business value at all"

"cannot seem to find a product that people will pay for, in part because the results are so mediocre"

"Last week, we got our first real, definitive glimpse of what’s around that corner that future. And boy, was it underwhelming."

"OpenAI claims that o1 “performs similarly to PhD students on challenging benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry, and biology.” Just not in geography, it seems. Or basic elementary-level English language tests. Or math. Or programming. "

"Worse still, it's kind of hard to explain why anybody should give a shit about o1."

"o1 shows that OpenAI is both desperate and out of ideas."

"the software is not becoming more useful"

Honestly, every other line is quotable in this context.

Yep, he is a PR stunt guy, and the number of videos that come up when you type Ed Zitron into YouTube should tell you how many people are eager to feed their cognitive biases.

It’s comical and honestly incredibly embarrassing…

But it seems we have somehow optimized away shame. It wasn’t good for profits, I guess.

I think Ed Zitron is mentioned just because his name is Zitron. He just repeats ad nauseam opinions concentrated around one simple, very boring pole on a wild and interesting landscape of emerging reality. Anybody could be doing that. A lot of people do that. Yet no other is named Zitron. And that's why I heard name Ed Zitron hundred times. That's how you become a voice of (a part of) the generation. Just have a memorable name and repeat the same opinion over and over that people can flock around comfortably. Content is irrelevant.

Personally I prefer to follow explorers rather than swamp-sitters.

The unified position which many folks deny is "AI is powerful" or, alternatively, "AI will be powerful soon".

(I'm personally still skeptical about this, but I'm being pulled towards accepting it).

"AI is useful" is too low of a bar, and "singularity is nigh" is too high. "AI is on its way to upending society" is about in the middle, and still vastly contentious among laypeople.