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I don't think a lot of these critics realize how capable gpt-3 is of convincingly outsmarting most people in most contexts. The failures are glaring, and you'll
by robbedpeter 4y ago
I don't think a lot of these critics realize how capable gpt-3 is of convincingly outsmarting most people in most contexts. The failures are glaring, and you'll no doubt catch them over time, but transformers are a sea change in ai power.
If gpt-3 can meet or beat human performance 80% of the time, that's sufficient for me to call it real intelligence. Not conscious or aware in any meaningful way, but smart, in many of the ways humans are smart.
In most online contexts where conversations are singular collisions between individuals who often don't have history, 80% of the real-seeming interactions you have could be gpt-3 output. In a many-shot, recursive, and domain targeted sequence of prompts, the percentage only improves.
The recursive, self referential functions learned by these models are not mere extrapolation from Markov chains and static stimulus/response bots. These models are approximating the functions required to produce human level output. They are approximating the functions biological brains use to produce output.
Even the naive, single pass probes into gpt capabilities we've seen in the last two years are incredible compared to aiml or even the best bots until ~2018. It's not agi, but it's evidence that agi is feasible, and a definitive milestone on that path. We need to be preparing for takeoff.
- andai 4y ago>Not conscious or aware in any meaningful way On what grounds have you determined that GPT-3 has no subjective experiences? More generally, what would need to be the case (with some future AI) for you to say, "ok, yes, this one is definitely conscious" ?
- tshaddox 4y agoI would need some explanation of what consciousness is, for starters. Even better would be an explanation of how I might test whether any thing (including myself or another person) has it.
- andai 4y agoA perspective I thought was interesting is when Jordan Peterson says that the "proof" that people have a divine spark within them is "try treating them as if they don't, and see how well that works out for you!" In that sense it's quite similar to the idea of always assuming a person is acting in good faith: you cannot ever truly know someone's intentions, and even when everyone is communicating honestly and openly, communication is imperfect. But if you start to believe that someone has negative intentions towards you, your body language, tone, words and actions will reflect that assumption, and it will create harmful outcomes where they were not necessary at all. Similarly, we may never be able to objectively prove that a machine is conscious -- as you say, we cannot even prove it to another human about ourselves! But if we keep treating them with the assumption that they lack this "something special" that we have, and treat them unethically as a result, I think we could get ourselves into a lot of trouble. A similar conversation is to be had about the way humans are factory-farming animals, 80 billion of which are born and die every year in conditions worse than concentration camps (cages so small they can't move or even turn around, living in their own shit). If nothing else, what will this teach future superintelligent AIs about how to treat beings less intelligent than itself? About denying them all freedom and agency and exploiting them entirely for its own benefit (or arguably, enjoyment)?
- bmitc 4y agoDo you have any references that show such dialogues? How does GPT-3 handle questions like "why do you feel this way?" or basically any question with "why"?