6 ms·

65 years of research and our cutting-edge AI doesn't have a memory? Excuse me if I'm not excited. It's likely that most of the functions of the human brain were

by Flankk 5y ago

65 years of research and our cutting-edge AI doesn't have a memory? Excuse me if I'm not excited. It's likely that most of the functions of the human brain were selected for intelligence. Such a focus on learning when problem solving and creativity are far more interesting.

PaulHoule 5y ago
I'm trying to put my finger on the source of moral decay that led to so many people behaving as if the GPT-3 emperor wears clothes. In 1966 it was clear to everyone that this program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA parasitically depends on the hunger for meaning that people have. Recently GPT-3 was held back from the public on the pretense that it was "dangerous" but in reality it held back because it is too expensive to run and the public would quickly learn that it can answer any question at all... if you don't mind if the answer is right. There is this page https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/ https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/ under which "2. Linear Substructures" there are four projections of the 50-dimensional vector space that would project out just as well from a random matrix because, well, projecting 20 generic points in a 50-dimensional space to 2-dimensions you can make the points fall exactly where you want in 2 dimensions. Nobody holds them to account over this. The closest thing I see to the GPT-3 cult is that a Harvard professor said that this thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua was an alien spacecraft. It's sad and a little scary that people can get away with that, the media picks it up, and they don't face consequences. I am more afraid of that than I am afraid that GPT-99381387 will take over the world. (e.g. growing up in the 1970s I could look to Einstein for inspiration that intelligence could understand the Universe. Somebody today might as well look forward to being a comic book writer like Stan Lee.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bangkoksbest 5y ago
  It's a legitimate practice in science to speculate. Having heard the Harvard guy explain more fully the Oumuamua thing, it's struck me as perfectly fine activity for some scientist to look into. His hypothesis is almost certainly going to be untrue, but it's fine to investigate a bit of a moonshot idea. You don't want half the field doing this, but you absolutely need different little pockets of speculative work going on in order to keep scientific inquiry open, dynamic, and diverse.
- wwweston 5y ago
  > the public would quickly learn that it can answer any question at all... if you don't mind if the answer is right. There appear to be an awful lot of conversations in which people care about other things much, much more than what is objectively correct. And any technology that can greatly amplify engagement in that kind of conversation probably is dangerous.
- canjobear 5y ago
  GPT3 and its cousins do things that no previous language model could do; it is qualitatively different from Eliza in its capabilities. As for your argument about random projections in the evaluation of GLoVE, comparisons with random projections are now routine. See for example https://aclanthology.org/N19-1419/ https://aclanthology.org/N19-1419/
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    Why do you say it is qualitatively different from Eliza in its capabilities?
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      It does something totally different. However that totally different still depends on people being desperate to see intelligence inside it. It’s like how people see a face in a cut stem or on Mars.
      - NoGravitas 5y ago
        Is it because it does something totally different that you came to me?
        rytill 5y ago
        You're trying to prove some kind of point where you respond as ELIZA would have to show how "even back then we could pass for conversation". The truth is that GPT-3 is actually, totally qualitatively different and if you played with it enough you'd realize.
        not2b 5y ago
        The difference is quantitative, rather than qualitative, as compared to primitive Markov models that have been used in the past. It's just a numerical model with a very large number of parameters that extends a text token sequence. The parameter size is so large that it has in essence memorized its training data, so if the right answer was already present in the training data you'll get it, same if the answer is closely related to the training data in a way that lets the model predict it. If the wrong answer was present in the training data you may well get that.
- thedorkknight 5y ago
  Confused. If professor Loeb tries to at least open discourse to the idea that ET space junk might be flying around like our space junk in a desire to reduce the giggle factor around that hypothesis, what sort of "consequences" do you think he should face for that?
- CrazyStat 5y ago
  > there are four projections of the 50-dimensional vector space that would project out just as well from a random matrix because, well, projecting 20 generic points in a 50-dimensional space to 2-dimensions you can make the points fall exactly where you want in 2 dimensions. Well, no. Linear projections follow a bunch of rules that enforce conservation of various linear structures. You can't manipulate things arbitrarily. For example, if three points are colinear in the original space, they will be colinear in every projection. Perhaps more relevant to the GloVe examples, if a-b = c-d in the original space then the same equality holds in every projection. Since the projections are Lipschitz continuous, we can also say that is a-b is close to c-d in the original space then they are also close in every projection. Anyway, the point that these figures illustrate is easily confirmed by downloading the embeddings yourself, so insinuating that the authors are getting away with something that they should be held to account for is silly.
gibsonf1 5y ago
In addition to that subtle memory issue, it has no reference at all to the space/time world we people model mentally to think with. So, basically, there is no I in the GPT-3 AI, just A.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  One can point to many necessary structural features that it is missing. Consider Ashby's law of requisite variety: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27150 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27150 Many GPT-3 cultists are educated in computer science so they should know better. GPT-3's "one pass" processing means that a fixed amount of resources are always used. Thus it can't sort a list of items unless the fixed time it uses is humongous. You might boil the oceans that way but you won't attain AGI. There are numerous arguments along the line of Turing's halting problem that restrict what that kind of thing can do. As it uses a finite amount of time it can't do anything that could require an unbounded time to complete or that could potentially not terminate. GPT-3 has no model for dealing with ambiguity or uncertainty. (Other than shooting in the dark.) Practically this requires some ability to backtrack either automatically or as a result of user feedback. The current obscurantism is that you need to have 20 PhD students work for 2 years to write a paper that makes the model "explainable" in some narrow domain. With this insight you can spend another $30 million training a new model that might get the answer right. A practical system needs to be told that "you did it wrong" and why and then be able to correct itself on the next pass if possible, otherwise in a few passes. Of course a system like that would be a real piece of engineering that people would become familiar with, not a outlet for their religious feelings that is kept on a pedestal.
  - gibsonf1 5y ago
    The big issue is that it literally knows nothing - there is no reference to a model of the real world such as humans use when thinking about the real world. It is a very advanced pattern matching parrot, and in using words like a parrot, knows nothing about what those words mean.
    - 5y ago
andreyk 5y ago
This is very specific to GPT-3 and not generally true though. And GPT-3 is not an agent per se but rather a passive model (it received input and produces output, and does not continuously interact with its environment). So it makes sense in this context, and just goes to show GPT-3 needs to be understood for what it is.
naasking 5y ago
> It's likely that most of the functions of the human brain were selected for intelligence. That doesn't seem correct. Intelligence came much later than when most of our brain evolved.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Intelligence involves many layers. Planaria can move towards and away from things and even learn. Bees work collectively to harvest nectar from flowers and build hives. Mammals have a "theory of mind" and are very good at reasoning about what other beings think about what other beings think. For that matter birds are pretty smart in terms of ability to navigate 1000 miles and find the same nest. People make tools, use language, play chess, bullshit each other and make cults around rationalism and GPT-3.
  - naasking 5y ago
    "Adaptation" is not synonymous with "intelligence". The latter is a much more narrowly defined phenomenon.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  memory is something shared by… one might even say plants. But let us keep to animals: almost anyone, including worms.
manojlds 5y ago
Do our aeroplanes flap their wings like the birds do? GPT-3 is obviously not the AI end goal, but we are on the path and the end might lead to aeroplanes than flapping machines.
- ska 5y ago
  > but we are on the path This isn't actually clear; with things like this we are on a path but it may not lead anywhere that fundamental (at least when we are talking "AI", especially general AI).
- Flankk 5y ago
  Birds don't need 150,000 litres of jet fuel to fly across the ocean. Given that the development of airplanes was made by studying birds I'm not sure I see your point. The 1889 book "Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation" is one example.
Groxx 5y ago
The current leading purchase-able extremely-over-hyped-by-non-technicals language model has no memory, yes. You see the same thing in all popular reporting about science and tech. Endless battery breakthroughs that will quadruple or 10x capacity become a couple percent improvement in practice. New gravity models mean we might have practical warp drives in 50 years. Fusion that's perpetually 20 years away. Flying cars and personal jetpacks. Moon bases, when we haven't been on the moon since the 70s. AI reporting and hype is no different. Maybe slightly worse because it's touching on "intelligence", which we still have no clear definition of.

by Flankk 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago

I'm trying to put my finger on the source of moral decay that led to so many people behaving as if the GPT-3 emperor wears clothes. In 1966 it was clear to everyone that this program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA parasitically depends on the hunger for meaning that people have. Recently GPT-3 was held back from the public on the pretense that it was "dangerous" but in reality it held back because it is too expensive to run and the public would quickly learn that it can answer any question at all... if you don't mind if the answer is right. There is this page https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/ https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/ under which "2. Linear Substructures" there are four projections of the 50-dimensional vector space that would project out just as well from a random matrix because, well, projecting 20 generic points in a 50-dimensional space to 2-dimensions you can make the points fall exactly where you want in 2 dimensions. Nobody holds them to account over this. The closest thing I see to the GPT-3 cult is that a Harvard professor said that this thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua was an alien spacecraft. It's sad and a little scary that people can get away with that, the media picks it up, and they don't face consequences. I am more afraid of that than I am afraid that GPT-99381387 will take over the world. (e.g. growing up in the 1970s I could look to Einstein for inspiration that intelligence could understand the Universe. Somebody today might as well look forward to being a comic book writer like Stan Lee.)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bangkoksbest 5y ago
It's a legitimate practice in science to speculate. Having heard the Harvard guy explain more fully the Oumuamua thing, it's struck me as perfectly fine activity for some scientist to look into. His hypothesis is almost certainly going to be untrue, but it's fine to investigate a bit of a moonshot idea. You don't want half the field doing this, but you absolutely need different little pockets of speculative work going on in order to keep scientific inquiry open, dynamic, and diverse.
wwweston 5y ago
> the public would quickly learn that it can answer any question at all... if you don't mind if the answer is right. There appear to be an awful lot of conversations in which people care about other things much, much more than what is objectively correct. And any technology that can greatly amplify engagement in that kind of conversation probably is dangerous.
canjobear 5y ago
GPT3 and its cousins do things that no previous language model could do; it is qualitatively different from Eliza in its capabilities. As for your argument about random projections in the evaluation of GLoVE, comparisons with random projections are now routine. See for example https://aclanthology.org/N19-1419/ https://aclanthology.org/N19-1419/
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Why do you say it is qualitatively different from Eliza in its capabilities?
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    It does something totally different. However that totally different still depends on people being desperate to see intelligence inside it. It’s like how people see a face in a cut stem or on Mars.
    - NoGravitas 5y ago
      Is it because it does something totally different that you came to me?
      - rytill 5y ago
        You're trying to prove some kind of point where you respond as ELIZA would have to show how "even back then we could pass for conversation". The truth is that GPT-3 is actually, totally qualitatively different and if you played with it enough you'd realize.
        not2b 5y ago
        The difference is quantitative, rather than qualitative, as compared to primitive Markov models that have been used in the past. It's just a numerical model with a very large number of parameters that extends a text token sequence. The parameter size is so large that it has in essence memorized its training data, so if the right answer was already present in the training data you'll get it, same if the answer is closely related to the training data in a way that lets the model predict it. If the wrong answer was present in the training data you may well get that.
thedorkknight 5y ago
Confused. If professor Loeb tries to at least open discourse to the idea that ET space junk might be flying around like our space junk in a desire to reduce the giggle factor around that hypothesis, what sort of "consequences" do you think he should face for that?
CrazyStat 5y ago
> there are four projections of the 50-dimensional vector space that would project out just as well from a random matrix because, well, projecting 20 generic points in a 50-dimensional space to 2-dimensions you can make the points fall exactly where you want in 2 dimensions. Well, no. Linear projections follow a bunch of rules that enforce conservation of various linear structures. You can't manipulate things arbitrarily. For example, if three points are colinear in the original space, they will be colinear in every projection. Perhaps more relevant to the GloVe examples, if a-b = c-d in the original space then the same equality holds in every projection. Since the projections are Lipschitz continuous, we can also say that is a-b is close to c-d in the original space then they are also close in every projection. Anyway, the point that these figures illustrate is easily confirmed by downloading the embeddings yourself, so insinuating that the authors are getting away with something that they should be held to account for is silly.

gibsonf1 5y ago

In addition to that subtle memory issue, it has no reference at all to the space/time world we people model mentally to think with. So, basically, there is no I in the GPT-3 AI, just A.

PaulHoule 5y ago
One can point to many necessary structural features that it is missing. Consider Ashby's law of requisite variety: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27150 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27150 Many GPT-3 cultists are educated in computer science so they should know better. GPT-3's "one pass" processing means that a fixed amount of resources are always used. Thus it can't sort a list of items unless the fixed time it uses is humongous. You might boil the oceans that way but you won't attain AGI. There are numerous arguments along the line of Turing's halting problem that restrict what that kind of thing can do. As it uses a finite amount of time it can't do anything that could require an unbounded time to complete or that could potentially not terminate. GPT-3 has no model for dealing with ambiguity or uncertainty. (Other than shooting in the dark.) Practically this requires some ability to backtrack either automatically or as a result of user feedback. The current obscurantism is that you need to have 20 PhD students work for 2 years to write a paper that makes the model "explainable" in some narrow domain. With this insight you can spend another $30 million training a new model that might get the answer right. A practical system needs to be told that "you did it wrong" and why and then be able to correct itself on the next pass if possible, otherwise in a few passes. Of course a system like that would be a real piece of engineering that people would become familiar with, not a outlet for their religious feelings that is kept on a pedestal.
- gibsonf1 5y ago
  The big issue is that it literally knows nothing - there is no reference to a model of the real world such as humans use when thinking about the real world. It is a very advanced pattern matching parrot, and in using words like a parrot, knows nothing about what those words mean.
  - 5y ago

andreyk 5y ago

This is very specific to GPT-3 and not generally true though. And GPT-3 is not an agent per se but rather a passive model (it received input and produces output, and does not continuously interact with its environment). So it makes sense in this context, and just goes to show GPT-3 needs to be understood for what it is.

naasking 5y ago

> It's likely that most of the functions of the human brain were selected for intelligence. That doesn't seem correct. Intelligence came much later than when most of our brain evolved.

PaulHoule 5y ago
Intelligence involves many layers. Planaria can move towards and away from things and even learn. Bees work collectively to harvest nectar from flowers and build hives. Mammals have a "theory of mind" and are very good at reasoning about what other beings think about what other beings think. For that matter birds are pretty smart in terms of ability to navigate 1000 miles and find the same nest. People make tools, use language, play chess, bullshit each other and make cults around rationalism and GPT-3.
- naasking 5y ago
  "Adaptation" is not synonymous with "intelligence". The latter is a much more narrowly defined phenomenon.
pfortuny 5y ago
memory is something shared by… one might even say plants. But let us keep to animals: almost anyone, including worms.

manojlds 5y ago

Do our aeroplanes flap their wings like the birds do? GPT-3 is obviously not the AI end goal, but we are on the path and the end might lead to aeroplanes than flapping machines.

ska 5y ago
> but we are on the path This isn't actually clear; with things like this we are on a path but it may not lead anywhere that fundamental (at least when we are talking "AI", especially general AI).
Flankk 5y ago
Birds don't need 150,000 litres of jet fuel to fly across the ocean. Given that the development of airplanes was made by studying birds I'm not sure I see your point. The 1889 book "Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation" is one example.

Groxx 5y ago

The current leading purchase-able extremely-over-hyped-by-non-technicals language model has no memory, yes. You see the same thing in all popular reporting about science and tech. Endless battery breakthroughs that will quadruple or 10x capacity become a couple percent improvement in practice. New gravity models mean we might have practical warp drives in 50 years. Fusion that's perpetually 20 years away. Flying cars and personal jetpacks. Moon bases, when we haven't been on the moon since the 70s. AI reporting and hype is no different. Maybe slightly worse because it's touching on "intelligence", which we still have no clear definition of.