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I too clear high hurdles on standardized tests but still make dumb mistakes -- guess AI is in good company :) Watching the success of large language models (pl

I too clear high hurdles on standardized tests but still make dumb mistakes -- guess AI is in good company :) Watching the success of large language models (plausibly predicting the next word in a conversation) sometimes reminds me of the time I won a high school science fair by feeding the text of a couple of Harry Potter novels to M-x dissociated-press. People get really into this stuff! And personally I get better output "talking" to a large language model when I know it's a machine and am trying to work with it to make sense. A lot of the conversation about having good training data and beating humans on tests of "does this activity look like it was done by a person?" seem like they fall short of something Pat Winston dreamed of, which I can't quite put into words now -- something about having a machine that understands the world the way that humans do and can tell stories about the world it understands, which does an action like what people do when they are thinking. I do have to imagine it's frustrating that we keep moving the goalposts. "If your system can reliably construct factual answers to questions, it's AI, we're not there yet. "If your system can win at chess, it's AI, we're not there yet." "If your system can win money at online poker, it's AI, we're not there yet." "If your system can have a conversation with a human who believes they're talking to another human afterwards, it's AI, we're not there yet."

mdp2021 4y ago
> moving the goalposts Those goals are "research" in terms of "playing with the available tools to refine them". On the strict technical sense, "Intelligence" in AI remains "to be able to provide some solution that could compete with that of a human solver". On the large proper sense, "Intelligence" means "understanding".
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  "Understanding" is just as difficult to define as "intelligence". Any outward sign of understanding can and will be shown by a sufficiently complex artificial system sooner or later. The human mind is not qualitatively different than sufficiently complex software that imitates it perfectly. Unless, that is, we return to the idea of body/mind dualism which is 200 years out of date. People keep being disappointed by these results because magic tricks just aren't as impressive if you know how they work.
  - meroes 4y ago
    “The human mind is not qualitatively different than sufficiently complex software”. Just no. Nothing AI researchers are building has subjective experience.
    - KyleLewis 4y ago
      I could be wrong but I think they might have been talking about a hypothetical, arbitrarily complex software. As a limiting case, if software were simulating a mind down to the quarks, it becomes unclear what the difference would be. I agree with your point of course, what we have today is certainly not like a human mind
      - notahacker 4y ago
        The problem with the hypothetical arbitrarily complex software is that there is no particular reason to believe it could exist, never mind that it will (at least not for meaningful definitions of "software"). A computer so powerful and a programmer so smart that they can represent the behaviour of the constituent parts of a human brain at the subatomic level as a state machine programmable to achieve different thought processes is at least as much of an imaginary construct as the metaphysical dualist mind it's supposed to be a counter argument to. And you don't need to think that your brain is anything other than an immensely complex state machine to think that some of the core parts of what we consider to be self-awareness (emotions... or chemical responses to certain stimuli which have over billions of years helped the brain parts of biological organisms make more optimal eating and fighting and fucking decisions for the survival of the gene code) are an altogether different level of problem to train an AI on than solving maths problems or generating text. Not least because if you want AIs to write love letters to each other, you can get very pleasing results quickly with a Chinese room without the inconvenience of having to simulate all the intractable chemistry of desire.
  - hooande 4y ago
    The human mind is likely infinitely more complex than software that imitates any aspect of it. Just like human thought process is orders of magnitude more complex than that of a parrot.
np- 4y ago
> it’s AI, we're not there yet. At this point, we still barely even understand what human intelligence is :) But one thing is for sure: we can definitely notice a _lack_ of intelligence, which is why I think the goal posts keep moving as AI improves (maybe in a way similar to the uncanny valley, that the closer you get to the real thing, the farther away you seem, I.e. all the things that make it NOT human get amplified on observation).
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > At this point, we still barely even understand If one believed that e.g. Reasoning can be spawned as an emergence, then Reasoning should be a specific attempted result.
- mountainriver 4y ago
  I think they are moving because people are scared
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    Or simply, because specific problems get solved and "ticked on the clipboard".
usrn 4y ago
It's useful to show to people who don't understand AI. There's a mental effect similar to "the computer is always right" where people will see AI doing something and assume it's some engineered piece of software running an algorithm. This kind of thing can help remind them that all AI can really do is generate convincing looking noise.
- mountainriver 4y ago
  That is demonstrably false based on the tasks AI is proficient in today
  - usrn 4y ago
    It gets a lot right but not 100%. Like I said, it's convincing noise.
    - mountainriver 4y ago
      Humans don't get 100% right either, is that also convincing noise?
tobiasSoftware 4y ago
I recently got into stories generated by GPT-3. What I notice is that it seems to be missing an understanding of state that causes constant inconsistencies. For example, a popular Youtube video has a battle between Link and Kirby in it: "He finally releases the Hylian Shield and lets Link be engulfed in a massive fireball. When Link is reduced to a pile of ashes, Kirby is victorious. Kirby wins the fight to the death. Link stands there, dazed by the attack." Most of that actually sounds pretty darn good and even sounds written by a human. It's to the point where there is a sensible structure to the story because the AI is getting the relationships between words. Massive fireball -> pile of ashes -> victory -> wins the fight to the death. That all looks good. The problem is that "Link is reduced to a pile of ashes" should put Link into a "dead" state, and when in the "dead" state Link can't stand and be dazed. The problem of course is that the computer can't understand all of this. It can understand that there is a probabilistic link between "pile of ashes" and "fight to the death" so after writing the first it is much more likely to write the second. But it still doesn't understand what "death" actually means. I've thought for a while that neural nets alone aren't going to solve machine generated speech and that the real solution will be some sort of hybrid between a neural net and some sort of finite state automata. The finite state automata could then put a character into a "dead" state and know that when in a "dead" state they can't "stand" or "be dazed." Source: (Video by DougDoug where he manually sets up battles between characters with a few paragraphs and then lets the AI generate the text of the battle. Sometimes it makes sense and other times someone's face will turn into a button or their eyes will shoot lasers) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwY-jVSM-f0&t=2835s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwY-jVSM-f0&t=2835s
- axg11 4y ago
  Have you ever read stories written by young children? Kids learning to write have similar issues albeit with a much smaller vocabulary.
  - simonh 4y ago
    I was thinking the same thing, but you can explain to a child what the problem is. They can learn, in just a few minutes, how not to make that mistake again and improve their model of the world. It’s not as clear to me how you’d do that with GPT3, could you construct a text that includes this information and have it ingest it?
topynate 4y ago
Moving goalposts is fine, and I speak as the opposite of an AI skeptic, thinking as I do that it's 70% likely general AI is invented in the next 15 years. You move the goalposts when you discover that the goal you set didn't match what you were trying to achieve. I think that it's now possible to give goals that you know you probably won't have to change, but those goals, by their nature, are worse metrics for current research. One example would be that the AI should learn in response to human instruction by text, video and audio, as well and as fast as a human being does with the same access to that instructor, across a variety of tasks. This would be something like "online multi-modal few-shot learning" in the current jargon, and you can see that most research isn't really working on it – probably because it's still really hard to get good results. But there's not much hope of solving the harder problems without solving the easier sub-problems first.
evrydayhustling 4y ago
Per your last paragraph, moving goalposts aren't frustrating to real researchers and practicioners -- they are the only valid outcome of successful progress! The obsession with reaching an AGI finish line is limited to charlatans and critics, who are off to the side enabling each other.
Jasper_ 4y ago
There's this belief that if we come up with a problem hard enough for computers that humans can already do, where there's no obvious search or brute force strategy, we'll be forced to make something like a generalized human, and then have it solve the problem. Of course, the issue is that the way we actually solve these problems is by coming up with a clever search or brute force strategy (chess, self-driving, poker), and yet we're no really closer to a generalized AI. Part of this is philosophical -- we can't define things like consciousness or intelligence in concrete terms, and so we have no real goals to work towards. We keep hoping that stumbling around in one of these other areas will lead us in the right direction, but so far, it just hasn't. The goalposts aren't moving, we simply haven't found where they are. In my opinion, we won't ever have generalized AI. Or at least, we might not ever agree that we have it. If 3,000 years of philosophers bickering hasn't given us any true insights yet, it's probably not going to suddenly show up now. But for now, weeeeee!!! Enjoy the funding before the next AI winter kicks in! Look at all the cool new progress happening! But to paraphrase someone who's name I forgot, "If your goal is to drive from San Francisco to the Moon, making it to Boston sure looks like you've made a lot of progress."
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > define things like... intelligence in concrete terms Who told you we cannot.
  - olddustytrail 4y ago
    You kind of did, by failing to do so.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      I do not think it dutiful to repeat myself in each post. (And honestly, while the base attitude of course remains to be "helpful", for current lack of a better term, sometimes - fortunately very occasionally - to provide a proper "complete" reply ceases to be economically viable.)
  - saghm 4y ago
somenameforme 4y ago
> "If your system can have a conversation with a human who believes they're talking to another human afterwards, it's AI, we're not there yet." ============== [16:31:08] Judge: don't you thing the imitation game was more interesting before Turing got to it? [16:32:03] Entity: I don't know. That was a long time ago. [16:33:32] Judge: so you need to guess if I am male or female [16:34:21] Entity: you have to be male or female [16:34:34] Judge: or computer ============== The Turing test you're referencing [1] (transcripts included) was a charade. It seems all participants and organizers were determined to create a scenario where the Turing test could be passed, regardless of whether it actually could or not. Turing's 'test' was never precisely described but he essentially said that after 5 minutes an "interrogator" would not be able to effectively determine whether an AI he was interrogating was a man or a machine. I'll just list various details on the event, in no particular order: - Turing specified "interrogators" who would be actively seeking to expose the AI as an AI. The test in question used judges who made no effort whatsoever to challenge the AI frequently asking questions like "How old are you?" - The judges were not judging an AI but instead having a simultaneous interaction with two entities, and had to pick which was human. Some of the humans seemed to actively make an effort to appear non-human, which paired with judges making no effort to challenge the AI increased the chances of a random result. - The "AI" that won 'replicated' a 13 year old non-native speaking boy, probably as an excuse for its frequent incoherent responses. Other of its responses were effectively refusing to cooperate or going on complete nonsequiturs which could again be excused for being a 13 year old boy. - The interactions were limited to 5 minutes with two entities and seemingly slow typing from both the judge and the participants. Some interactions were limited to as few as 2 responses from which to make a decision. - In the paper itself, the researchers were quite confused why some of the participants and judges behaved the way they did. Obviously they just wanted to be part of something "historic". - The dialogue I quoted at the top was from a human, obviously trying to trick the judge into misclassifying him as a computer. And it worked, that was one of the 3 misclassifications required to hit their 30% benchmark for passing. [1] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0952813X.2015.1055826 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0952813X.2015.1...
saghm 4y ago
> "If your system can have a conversation with a human who believes they're talking to another human afterwards, it's AI, we're not there yet." To be fair, that was pretty much the first goalpost proposed; it wasn't moved back so much as other people put goalposts up closer than it.
vba616 4y ago
>"If your system can have a conversation with a human who believes they're talking to another human afterwards, it's AI, we're not there yet." That happened well over 50 years ago! There's something fundamentally wrong with the goalpost, and abandoning it was far from arbitrary.

mdp2021 4y ago

> moving the goalposts Those goals are "research" in terms of "playing with the available tools to refine them". On the strict technical sense, "Intelligence" in AI remains "to be able to provide some solution that could compete with that of a human solver". On the large proper sense, "Intelligence" means "understanding".

IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
"Understanding" is just as difficult to define as "intelligence". Any outward sign of understanding can and will be shown by a sufficiently complex artificial system sooner or later. The human mind is not qualitatively different than sufficiently complex software that imitates it perfectly. Unless, that is, we return to the idea of body/mind dualism which is 200 years out of date. People keep being disappointed by these results because magic tricks just aren't as impressive if you know how they work.
- meroes 4y ago
  “The human mind is not qualitatively different than sufficiently complex software”. Just no. Nothing AI researchers are building has subjective experience.
  - KyleLewis 4y ago
    I could be wrong but I think they might have been talking about a hypothetical, arbitrarily complex software. As a limiting case, if software were simulating a mind down to the quarks, it becomes unclear what the difference would be. I agree with your point of course, what we have today is certainly not like a human mind
    - notahacker 4y ago
      The problem with the hypothetical arbitrarily complex software is that there is no particular reason to believe it could exist, never mind that it will (at least not for meaningful definitions of "software"). A computer so powerful and a programmer so smart that they can represent the behaviour of the constituent parts of a human brain at the subatomic level as a state machine programmable to achieve different thought processes is at least as much of an imaginary construct as the metaphysical dualist mind it's supposed to be a counter argument to. And you don't need to think that your brain is anything other than an immensely complex state machine to think that some of the core parts of what we consider to be self-awareness (emotions... or chemical responses to certain stimuli which have over billions of years helped the brain parts of biological organisms make more optimal eating and fighting and fucking decisions for the survival of the gene code) are an altogether different level of problem to train an AI on than solving maths problems or generating text. Not least because if you want AIs to write love letters to each other, you can get very pleasing results quickly with a Chinese room without the inconvenience of having to simulate all the intractable chemistry of desire.
- hooande 4y ago
  The human mind is likely infinitely more complex than software that imitates any aspect of it. Just like human thought process is orders of magnitude more complex than that of a parrot.

np- 4y ago

> it’s AI, we're not there yet. At this point, we still barely even understand what human intelligence is :) But one thing is for sure: we can definitely notice a _lack_ of intelligence, which is why I think the goal posts keep moving as AI improves (maybe in a way similar to the uncanny valley, that the closer you get to the real thing, the farther away you seem, I.e. all the things that make it NOT human get amplified on observation).

mdp2021 4y ago
> At this point, we still barely even understand If one believed that e.g. Reasoning can be spawned as an emergence, then Reasoning should be a specific attempted result.
mountainriver 4y ago
I think they are moving because people are scared
- mdp2021 4y ago
  Or simply, because specific problems get solved and "ticked on the clipboard".

usrn 4y ago

It's useful to show to people who don't understand AI. There's a mental effect similar to "the computer is always right" where people will see AI doing something and assume it's some engineered piece of software running an algorithm. This kind of thing can help remind them that all AI can really do is generate convincing looking noise.

mountainriver 4y ago
That is demonstrably false based on the tasks AI is proficient in today
- usrn 4y ago
  It gets a lot right but not 100%. Like I said, it's convincing noise.
  - mountainriver 4y ago
    Humans don't get 100% right either, is that also convincing noise?

tobiasSoftware 4y ago

I recently got into stories generated by GPT-3. What I notice is that it seems to be missing an understanding of state that causes constant inconsistencies. For example, a popular Youtube video has a battle between Link and Kirby in it: "He finally releases the Hylian Shield and lets Link be engulfed in a massive fireball. When Link is reduced to a pile of ashes, Kirby is victorious. Kirby wins the fight to the death. Link stands there, dazed by the attack." Most of that actually sounds pretty darn good and even sounds written by a human. It's to the point where there is a sensible structure to the story because the AI is getting the relationships between words. Massive fireball -> pile of ashes -> victory -> wins the fight to the death. That all looks good. The problem is that "Link is reduced to a pile of ashes" should put Link into a "dead" state, and when in the "dead" state Link can't stand and be dazed. The problem of course is that the computer can't understand all of this. It can understand that there is a probabilistic link between "pile of ashes" and "fight to the death" so after writing the first it is much more likely to write the second. But it still doesn't understand what "death" actually means. I've thought for a while that neural nets alone aren't going to solve machine generated speech and that the real solution will be some sort of hybrid between a neural net and some sort of finite state automata. The finite state automata could then put a character into a "dead" state and know that when in a "dead" state they can't "stand" or "be dazed." Source: (Video by DougDoug where he manually sets up battles between characters with a few paragraphs and then lets the AI generate the text of the battle. Sometimes it makes sense and other times someone's face will turn into a button or their eyes will shoot lasers) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwY-jVSM-f0&t=2835s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwY-jVSM-f0&t=2835s

axg11 4y ago
Have you ever read stories written by young children? Kids learning to write have similar issues albeit with a much smaller vocabulary.
- simonh 4y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, but you can explain to a child what the problem is. They can learn, in just a few minutes, how not to make that mistake again and improve their model of the world. It’s not as clear to me how you’d do that with GPT3, could you construct a text that includes this information and have it ingest it?

topynate 4y ago

Moving goalposts is fine, and I speak as the opposite of an AI skeptic, thinking as I do that it's 70% likely general AI is invented in the next 15 years. You move the goalposts when you discover that the goal you set didn't match what you were trying to achieve. I think that it's now possible to give goals that you know you probably won't have to change, but those goals, by their nature, are worse metrics for current research. One example would be that the AI should learn in response to human instruction by text, video and audio, as well and as fast as a human being does with the same access to that instructor, across a variety of tasks. This would be something like "online multi-modal few-shot learning" in the current jargon, and you can see that most research isn't really working on it – probably because it's still really hard to get good results. But there's not much hope of solving the harder problems without solving the easier sub-problems first.

evrydayhustling 4y ago

Per your last paragraph, moving goalposts aren't frustrating to real researchers and practicioners -- they are the only valid outcome of successful progress! The obsession with reaching an AGI finish line is limited to charlatans and critics, who are off to the side enabling each other.

Jasper_ 4y ago

There's this belief that if we come up with a problem hard enough for computers that humans can already do, where there's no obvious search or brute force strategy, we'll be forced to make something like a generalized human, and then have it solve the problem. Of course, the issue is that the way we actually solve these problems is by coming up with a clever search or brute force strategy (chess, self-driving, poker), and yet we're no really closer to a generalized AI. Part of this is philosophical -- we can't define things like consciousness or intelligence in concrete terms, and so we have no real goals to work towards. We keep hoping that stumbling around in one of these other areas will lead us in the right direction, but so far, it just hasn't. The goalposts aren't moving, we simply haven't found where they are. In my opinion, we won't ever have generalized AI. Or at least, we might not ever agree that we have it. If 3,000 years of philosophers bickering hasn't given us any true insights yet, it's probably not going to suddenly show up now. But for now, weeeeee!!! Enjoy the funding before the next AI winter kicks in! Look at all the cool new progress happening! But to paraphrase someone who's name I forgot, "If your goal is to drive from San Francisco to the Moon, making it to Boston sure looks like you've made a lot of progress."

mdp2021 4y ago
> define things like... intelligence in concrete terms Who told you we cannot.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  You kind of did, by failing to do so.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    I do not think it dutiful to repeat myself in each post. (And honestly, while the base attitude of course remains to be "helpful", for current lack of a better term, sometimes - fortunately very occasionally - to provide a proper "complete" reply ceases to be economically viable.)
- saghm 4y ago

somenameforme 4y ago

> "If your system can have a conversation with a human who believes they're talking to another human afterwards, it's AI, we're not there yet." ============== [16:31:08] Judge: don't you thing the imitation game was more interesting before Turing got to it? [16:32:03] Entity: I don't know. That was a long time ago. [16:33:32] Judge: so you need to guess if I am male or female [16:34:21] Entity: you have to be male or female [16:34:34] Judge: or computer ============== The Turing test you're referencing [1] (transcripts included) was a charade. It seems all participants and organizers were determined to create a scenario where the Turing test could be passed, regardless of whether it actually could or not. Turing's 'test' was never precisely described but he essentially said that after 5 minutes an "interrogator" would not be able to effectively determine whether an AI he was interrogating was a man or a machine. I'll just list various details on the event, in no particular order: - Turing specified "interrogators" who would be actively seeking to expose the AI as an AI. The test in question used judges who made no effort whatsoever to challenge the AI frequently asking questions like "How old are you?" - The judges were not judging an AI but instead having a simultaneous interaction with two entities, and had to pick which was human. Some of the humans seemed to actively make an effort to appear non-human, which paired with judges making no effort to challenge the AI increased the chances of a random result. - The "AI" that won 'replicated' a 13 year old non-native speaking boy, probably as an excuse for its frequent incoherent responses. Other of its responses were effectively refusing to cooperate or going on complete nonsequiturs which could again be excused for being a 13 year old boy. - The interactions were limited to 5 minutes with two entities and seemingly slow typing from both the judge and the participants. Some interactions were limited to as few as 2 responses from which to make a decision. - In the paper itself, the researchers were quite confused why some of the participants and judges behaved the way they did. Obviously they just wanted to be part of something "historic". - The dialogue I quoted at the top was from a human, obviously trying to trick the judge into misclassifying him as a computer. And it worked, that was one of the 3 misclassifications required to hit their 30% benchmark for passing. [1] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0952813X.2015.1055826 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0952813X.2015.1...

saghm 4y ago

> "If your system can have a conversation with a human who believes they're talking to another human afterwards, it's AI, we're not there yet." To be fair, that was pretty much the first goalpost proposed; it wasn't moved back so much as other people put goalposts up closer than it.

vba616 4y ago

>"If your system can have a conversation with a human who believes they're talking to another human afterwards, it's AI, we're not there yet." That happened well over 50 years ago! There's something fundamentally wrong with the goalpost, and abandoning it was far from arbitrary.