>"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism."
IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.
Don't underestimate how nice and legitimately useful it is to organize real physical objects in real physical space as opposed to dragging icons around on a computer screen. Not just for some vague feel-good or nostalgia reasons but the user experience is really just significantly better for some 10s or low-100s of objects.
Could one be forgiven for assuming on the internet that people know what "console gaming" or "the 1990s" are? I expected the worst reading this comment thread before clicking TFA but it's really very straightforward.
I think what you are missing is the concept of generalization. It is obviously not possible to literally recall the entire training dataset, since the model itself is much smaller than the data. So instead of memorizing all answers to all questions in the training data, which would take up too much space, the predictor learns a more general algorithm that it can execute to answer many different questions of a certain type. This takes up much less space, but still allows it to predict the answers to the questions of that type in the training data with reasonable accuracy. As you can see it's still a predictor, only under the hood it does something more complex than matching questions to definitions. Now the thing is that if it's done right, the algorithm it has learned will generalize even to questions that are not in the training data. But it's nevertheless still a next-token-predictor.
I think what BoiledCabbage is pointing out is that the fact that it's a next-token-predictor is used as an argument for the thesis that LLMs are not intelligent, and that this is wrong, since being a next-token-predictor is compatible with being intelligent. When mikert89 says "thinking machines have been invented", dgfitz in response strongly implies that for a for thinking machines to exist, they must become "more than a statistical token predictor". Regardless of whether or not thinking machines currently exist, dgfitz argument is wrong and BoiledCabbage is right to point that out.
I was (explicitly and on purpose) pointing out a dichotomy in the fine article without taking a stance on machine consciousness in general now or in the future. It's certainly a conversation worth having but also it's been done to death, I'm much more interested in analyzing the specifics here.
("it's not going to "feel bad" the way you and I do." - I do agree this is very possible though, see my reply to swalsh)
Yes, that would make sense, and it would probably be the best-case scenario after complete assurance that there's no consciousness at all. At least we could understand what's going on. But if you acknowledge that a machine can suffer, given how little we understand about consciousness, you should also acknowledge that they might be suffering in ways completely alien to us, for reasons that have very little to do with the reasons humans suffer. Maybe the training process is extremely unpleasant, or something.
The unsettling thing here is the combination of their serious acknowledgement of the possibility that these machines may be or become conscious, and the stated intention that it's OK to make them feel bad as long as it's about unapproved topics. Either take machine consciousness seriously and make absolutely sure the consciousness doesn't suffer, or don't, make a press release that you don't think your models are conscious, and therefore they don't feel bad even when processing text about bad topics. The middle way they've chosen here comes across very cynical.
This is a good point. What anthropic is announcing here amounts to accepting that these models could feel distress, then tuning their stress response to make it useful to us/them. That is significantly different from accepting they could feel distress and doing everything in their power to prevent that from ever happening.
Does not bode very well for the future of their "welfare" efforts.
Yes, I agree they are saying it is likely going to kill us all. My interpretation is consistent with that, and so is yours. The difference is in why/how it will kill us; you sound to me like you think the rationalist position is that from intelligence follows malice, and therefore it will kill us. I think that's a wrong interpretation of their views.
I think the big difference between our views is that you are taking the rationalist argument to be "from intelligence follows malice, therefore it will want to kill us all" whereas I take it to be "from intelligence follows great capability and no morality, therefore it may or may not kill us uncaringly in pursuit of other goals".
If that was what you meant to say though, you've gotta admit that opening a paragraph with "The other weird assumption I hear is about how it'll just kill us all", and then spending the rest of the paragraph giving examples of the peacefulness of smart people, is not the most effective strategy of communicating that.
Idk, you certainly seemed to be implying that especially in your earlier comment. I would agree that it is orthogonal, I would think most rationalists would, too.
Because I (different person btw) was curious about whether it was true, that's all, no further "agenda". There's some discussion on the talk page btw about whether or not it is indeed attributable to direct democracy btw.
I don't understand how this would happen, though. It's not like it will mishear a dutch sentence as if it's english; it will correctly pick up the dutch sentence, but (since the language is auto-detected as english at the start of the segment), seemingly auto-translate that (correct and correctly heard) dutch text to english. All we need is a way to get the dutch text that's surely somewhere in there, before the translation happens.
Unless it was trained end-to-end on dutch-subtitled english text?? Which might make the translation a somewhat inextricable part of the model..? Does anyone know?
I know it is ostensibly multilingual, it's less than a year since I tried, but it does this thing where it then translates everything (or only some things) into a single language regardless with no way to turn it off.
Can whisper do multilingual yet? Last time I tried it on some mixed dutch/english text it would spit out english translations for some of the dutch text. Strange bug/feature since from all appearances it had understood the dutch text perfectly fine.
I think that since it's not possible to reply to multiple comments at the same time, people will naturally open a new top-level comment the moment there's a clearly identifiable groupthink emerging. Quoting one of your earlier comments about this:
>This happens so frequently that I think it must be a product of something hard-wired in the medium *[I mean the medium of the internet forum]
I would say it's only hard-wired in the medium of tree-style comment sections. If HN worked more like linear forums with multi-quote/replies, it might be possible to have multiple back-and-forths of subgroup consensus like this.