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I'm not claiming that any of these models have achieved a generalized level of scientific understanding. They are narrow in their abilities - savants of a sor

I'm not claiming that any of these models have achieved a generalized level of scientific understanding. They are narrow in their abilities - savants of a sort. But it seems to me to be missing an important point to reduce them to mere databases. Learned knowledge and intelligent behavior are multi-dimensional, and I think we're seeing a different sampling with the current generation of AI models than we see in our own sampling. They are highly specific, and refined for one "intelligent" task, but not in any way broadly general. We are comparing them to human intelligence, which leans heavily in the other direction.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
I don't see it that way. What I see is systems that have behaviours that look like human behaviours - for example, generating and recognising text, or recognising images, etc; but what these systems really do is nothing like whatever humans do, and the behaviours they produce are not the same behaviours as those of humans, after all. For example, we can see that clearly in chess and other board games. Chess engines play by executing some variant of the minimax algorithm and they can out-play humans. But human players don't typcially try to run minimax in their heads when they play and in any case can play chess without trying to emulate a chess engine. The same goes for image classifiers (it is extremely unlikely that we match sets of pixels to numerical labels in our heads, to the point of absurdity) and for language models (again it's absurdly unlikely that we calculate the probabilities of sequences of tokens). I think what you say comes from an assumption that because humans exhibit certain behaviours, and humans have human intelligence, any system that exhibits similar behaviours must also have human intelligence. Which, if you look carefully, does not follow. Anyway historically people have always been quick to identify the capabilities of computers as artificial intelligence, just because we tend to think of anything to do with computation as requiring intelligence. But we had machines that could perform calculations automatically, through entirely mechanical procedures, for more than 200 years now, and most of those we don't think are artificially intelligent. For example, I don't think anyone would consider the Pascaline to be an AI, and yet the Pascaline can do better arithmetic from any non-human animal, and from many human animals, also. So, does arithmetic require intelligence, or not? How much of what we can do thanks to our intelligence can also be done by a dumb, mechanical automatism? This I think is the important question in AI research today and one that, if we could answer it (which we can't) would finally put the lid on wishful thinking about LLMs exhibiting "a different sampling" of intelligence than ours.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

I don't see it that way. What I see is systems that have behaviours that look like human behaviours - for example, generating and recognising text, or recognising images, etc; but what these systems really do is nothing like whatever humans do, and the behaviours they produce are not the same behaviours as those of humans, after all. For example, we can see that clearly in chess and other board games. Chess engines play by executing some variant of the minimax algorithm and they can out-play humans. But human players don't typcially try to run minimax in their heads when they play and in any case can play chess without trying to emulate a chess engine. The same goes for image classifiers (it is extremely unlikely that we match sets of pixels to numerical labels in our heads, to the point of absurdity) and for language models (again it's absurdly unlikely that we calculate the probabilities of sequences of tokens). I think what you say comes from an assumption that because humans exhibit certain behaviours, and humans have human intelligence, any system that exhibits similar behaviours must also have human intelligence. Which, if you look carefully, does not follow. Anyway historically people have always been quick to identify the capabilities of computers as artificial intelligence, just because we tend to think of anything to do with computation as requiring intelligence. But we had machines that could perform calculations automatically, through entirely mechanical procedures, for more than 200 years now, and most of those we don't think are artificially intelligent. For example, I don't think anyone would consider the Pascaline to be an AI, and yet the Pascaline can do better arithmetic from any non-human animal, and from many human animals, also. So, does arithmetic require intelligence, or not? How much of what we can do thanks to our intelligence can also be done by a dumb, mechanical automatism? This I think is the important question in AI research today and one that, if we could answer it (which we can't) would finally put the lid on wishful thinking about LLMs exhibiting "a different sampling" of intelligence than ours.