4 ms·

Sure, it doesn't think, just as submarines don't swim, as EWD said.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
People always reach for these analogies. "Planes don't fly like birds." "Submarines don't swim like fish." Backpropagation has zero creativity. It's an elaborate mechanical parrot, and nothing more. It can never relate to you on a personal level, because it never experiences the world. It has no conception of what the world is. At least a dog gets hungry. Not persuaded? Try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346972
- mlyle 5y ago
  > Backpropagation has zero creativity. It's an elaborate mechanical parrot, and nothing more. It can never relate to you on a personal level, because it never experiences the world. It has no conception of what the world is. The problem is: it's not really clear how much creativity we have, and how much of it is better explained by highly constrained randomized search and optimization. > It can never relate to you on a personal level Well, sure. Even if/once we reach AGI, it's going to be a highly alien creature. > because it never experiences the world. Hard to put this on a rigorous setting. > It has no conception of what the world is. It has imperfect models of the world it is presented. So do we! > At least a dog gets hungry. I don't think "gets hungry" is a very meaningful way to put this. But, yes: higher living beings act with agency in their environment (and most deep learning AIs we build don't, instead having rigorous steps of interaction not forming any memory of the interaction) and have mechanisms to seek novelty in those interactions. I don't view these as impossible barriers to leap over.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  I agree GPT isn't grounded and it is a problem, but that's a weird point to argue against AlphaCode. AlphaCode is ground by actual code execution: its coding experience is no less real than people's. AlphaGo is grounded because it experienced Go, and has a very good conception of what Go is. I similarly expect OpenAI's formal math effort to succeed. Doing math (e.g. choosing a problem and posing a conjecture) benefits from real world experience, but proving a theorem really doesn't. Writing a proof does, but it's a separate problem. I think software engineering requires real world experience, but competitive programming probably doesn't.

People always reach for these analogies. "Planes don't fly like birds." "Submarines don't swim like fish." Backpropagation has zero creativity. It's an elaborate mechanical parrot, and nothing more. It can never relate to you on a personal level, because it never experiences the world. It has no conception of what the world is. At least a dog gets hungry. Not persuaded? Try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346972

mlyle 5y ago
> Backpropagation has zero creativity. It's an elaborate mechanical parrot, and nothing more. It can never relate to you on a personal level, because it never experiences the world. It has no conception of what the world is. The problem is: it's not really clear how much creativity we have, and how much of it is better explained by highly constrained randomized search and optimization. > It can never relate to you on a personal level Well, sure. Even if/once we reach AGI, it's going to be a highly alien creature. > because it never experiences the world. Hard to put this on a rigorous setting. > It has no conception of what the world is. It has imperfect models of the world it is presented. So do we! > At least a dog gets hungry. I don't think "gets hungry" is a very meaningful way to put this. But, yes: higher living beings act with agency in their environment (and most deep learning AIs we build don't, instead having rigorous steps of interaction not forming any memory of the interaction) and have mechanisms to seek novelty in those interactions. I don't view these as impossible barriers to leap over.
sanxiyn 5y ago
I agree GPT isn't grounded and it is a problem, but that's a weird point to argue against AlphaCode. AlphaCode is ground by actual code execution: its coding experience is no less real than people's. AlphaGo is grounded because it experienced Go, and has a very good conception of what Go is. I similarly expect OpenAI's formal math effort to succeed. Doing math (e.g. choosing a problem and posing a conjecture) benefits from real world experience, but proving a theorem really doesn't. Writing a proof does, but it's a separate problem. I think software engineering requires real world experience, but competitive programming probably doesn't.