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I find these made-up "conversations" to be super boring. You're not "talking" to the AI, it's just predicting what the next sentence in the document might be. T

• Jimmc414 5y ago
  It is an easy way to understand the depth of the intellect you are speaking with and the knowledge set they are basing their answers on. Plus the answer "Yes, I always lie" is obviously a lie and proves that it is capable of contradicting itself even within the confines of one answer.
  • darkwater 5y ago
    > Plus the answer "Yes, I always lie" is obviously a lie and proves that it is capable of contradicting itself even within the confines of one answer. If it was a human to human conversation that answer would "just" be considered sarcasm.
  • 9dev 5y ago
    But you're not speaking to an intellect. That's just anthropomorphising a neural network, which is anything but intelligent. You're writing strings that a prediction generator uses as input to generate a continuation string based on lots of text written by humans. Yes, it looks like there was some magical "AI" that communicates, but that is not what is happening.
    • Closi 5y ago
      > That's just anthropomorphising a neural network, which is anything but intelligent. What is intelligence? GPT-3 seems to perform better than my dog at a load of these tasks, and I think my dog is pretty intelligent (at least for a dog). I mean, to me this does seem to show a level of what intelligence means to me - i.e. an ability to pick up new skills and read/apply knowledge in novel ways. Intelligence != sentience.
      • 9dev 5y ago
        That's an interesting point, and I sure imply sentience when I say intelligence, to a certain degree. I'd argue that GPT-3 does not actually "understand" it's output in any way, it just tricks you into believing it does, for example by having some kind of a short-term memory, or forming coherent sentences. Yet the model has no abstract concept of the things it writes about. It's all just probabilities.
        • fault1 5y ago
          Yeah, it's basically Clever Hans. You can see it with the amount of completely nonsensical output you can also randomly get from it if you deviate even a small amount form the input data distribution.
    • visarga 5y ago
      Humans get smart by absorbing language produced by other humans. It's what raises us above animals. A human who doesn't have that becomes feral, so much of what we consider to be human is learned culturally. Humans also overfit to the training data. We all know some kids just learn how to apply a specific method for solving math problems and the moment the problem changes a bit, they are dumbfounded. They only learn the surface without understanding the essence, like language models. Some learn foreign languages this way, and as a result they can only solve classroom exercises, they can't use it in the wild (Japanese teachers of English, anecdotally). Another surprising human limitation is causal reasoning. If it were so easy to do it, we wouldn't have the anti-vax campaigns, climate change denial, religion, etc. We can apply causal reasoning only after training and in specific domains. Given these observations I conclude that there is no major difference between humans and artificial agents with language models. GPT-3 is a language model without embodiment and memory so it doesn't count as an agent yet.
      • 9dev 5y ago
        I think we probably agree here, but I'd like to make an adjacent point: Animals have been known for a while to communicate, and even have languages of their own. Mutes are no feral humans either. It's definitely more nuanced than that, and I follow that actual intelligence consists of more than just the ability to form coherent sentences.
        • visarga 5y ago
          One essential ingredient I think - "skin". The agent got to have skin in the game, to have something to win or lose, something that matters. For humans it is life, survival, reproduction. The necessities of life made us what we are now.
      • veilrap 5y ago
        Humans don't just generate language out of the void. The use of language is grounded by various other inputs (senses, previous knowledge/understanding). So when a human is constructing sentences those sentences aren't just using earlier elements of the conversation to generate the next sentence (as language models do) but rather a vast wealth of resources previously accumulated. AI that wants to actually generate language with human-like intelligence needs more inputs than just language to its model. Sure that information can also be overfit, but the lack of other inputs goes beyond just the computer model overfitting it's data.
  • MauranKilom 5y ago
    > It is an easy way to understand the depth of the intellect you are speaking with Sorry but no. An algorithm that, for a given prompt, finds and returns the semantically closest quote from a selection of 30 philosophers may sound very wise but is actually dumb as bricks. GPT-3 is obviously a bit more than that, but "depth of intellect" is not what you are measuring with chat prompts. > Plus the answer "Yes, I always lie" is obviously a lie and proves that it is capable of contradicting itself even within the confines of one answer. Contradicting yourself is not a feat if you don't have any concept of truth in the first place.
• IIAOPSW 5y ago
  >it's just predicting what the next sentence >There is no plan behind this What is the difference between predicting the next sentence vs. having a plan. Perhaps the only real difference between us and GPT3 is the number of steps ahead it anticipates.
  • edgyquant 5y ago
    The number of steps is exactly the difference between predicting the next sentence and having a plan.
    • visarga 5y ago
      There's no reason a planning system like AlphaZero could not be used. It's just necessary to generate multiple rounds of conversation a few steps ahead and pick the most promising one. "just" being an exaggeration, of course.
  • bee_rider 5y ago
    I believe that is the difference they are highlighting. Another way to look at it is, humans generally have some broad-picture idea of where they'd like a conversation to go (anticipating many steps ahead, but more vaguely the farther out you go). It seems like a big difference -- often the end gives the intermediary steps much more meaning.
  • 9dev 5y ago
    The real difference between GPT-3 and us is that we have an agenda when we converse, while the model only ever generates text. It's a piece of code, it's about as "intelligent" as the source code of the gnu utils, that is: not at all.
    • visarga 5y ago
      The model assumes a persona from the training set, we just don't know which one unless we tell it upfront.
    • IIAOPSW 5y ago
• visarga 5y ago
  It's like "Kids Say the Darndest Things !" but for AI.
• tantalor 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
  • 9dev 5y ago
    Thank you for the link, that's very interesting and a neat thought experiment to highlight what I meant.
    • Smaug123 5y ago
      Does it highlight what you meant? I'm not at all sure it does, since I consider a Chinese room to be conscious (being an execution of a faithful encoding of the consciousness that created the room).
      • DonaldFisk 5y ago
        We might be on opposite sides of the Chalmers/Dennett divide, but we don't know how consciousness (as opposed to human-level intelligence) arises. Here's my reasoning for why the Chinese Room isn't (phenomenally) conscious: http://fmjlang.co.uk/blog/ChineseRoom.html http://fmjlang.co.uk/blog/ChineseRoom.html
        • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
          You make, in my opinion, the same mistake as Searle does, which is to take for granted that humans are 'more' than a system of interacting components in a way that no other system can be. The system of the room may well experience and understand color (or consciousness) the same way the system of your human body and brain do, we have no way of saying otherwise. Like Searle, your argument relies on the intuition that humans are a specially privileged arrangement of molecules in the universe.
          • DonaldFisk 5y ago
            Understanding is different from experiencing. This is where I side with Chalmers and not Dennett. I accept that the system would have some understanding of colours (as would the person in the room - notably, Knut Nordby had a far better understanding of colour vision than most people despite only seeing in monochrome). But I am skeptical that the system experiences colours. Someone with normal colour vision is able to experience colours because they have cones on their retina which is somehow linked to their consciousness (probably by means of neurons further into their brains). Achromatopes, including the person inside the room, don't. They experience only different shades of grey. But they are able to tell what the colours are, by means of a set of three differently coloured filters. Do you mean that the filters experience colours as qualia but are unable to pass on this experience to the achromatope, or do you mean that the system must experience qualia simply because it behaves (to an outside observer) as if it sees in colour? I suppose it boils down to this: is the experience of colour additional information to the knowledge of colour?
• SamBam 5y ago
  > it's just predicting what the next sentence in the document might be Perhaps every time I have a conversation with someone I'm just predicting what the next sentence ought to be and saying it. How would I know the difference, let alone you?
  • gunapologist99 5y ago
    Earlier, you mentioned predictions. Tell me more about that.
  • delusional 5y ago
    It's pretty obvious to me that I exist. It's also obvious that I actually have patterns, opinions, and goals behind my words. If I was predicting there would be no deeper goal behind my text.
    • whimsicalism 5y ago
      You are both emergent out of physical processes that have been optimized for some objective. In your case, the objective is propagation/making more of oneself.
      • gunapologist99 5y ago
        This is a narrow, simplistic, and tragic view of the world and your purpose in it.
  • 9dev 5y ago
    That's how a Turing test works, and up until now human subjects have always found the difference. But even if you crafted an even better model that would fool humans, would it really understand the output it generated, or simply attempt to find the output most likely accepted by the reader? Is this what you would call intelligent behaviour?
    • int_19h 5y ago
      Define "understand". We don't even properly know what it means to be conscious, except that 1) each of us individually knows that they are conscious, and 2) for all the others, we "know it when we see it".
• vorhemus 5y ago
  I have a smiliar feeling. Humans have certain wishes or desires and use language as a vehicle to express their feelings. Language models in turn just predict the next best tokens based on a large corpus of training data without an agenda behind. Even if the result (the produced words) are the same, there is a fundamental difference if it was produced based on statistical data or with a goal in mind.
• luckydata 5y ago
  Predicting the next sentence is exactly what our brain does, it's in every introductory neuroscience book. Our brains are not that special, they just had a LONG time to come up with hacks to adapt to a very variable world.
  • 9dev 5y ago
    That's not true. Our brains process other input such as stimuli from our senses, past experience, and inherent goals we want to achieve. Language models predict the next sentence based on the previous text. There's a clear difference between the capabilities of a brain and language models, and I'm a little bewildered this needs pointing out. "Not special" is an interesting way to describe the single most complex thing we know of.
• deleted 5y ago
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