8 ms·

Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

30 points by axiomdata316 4y ago

binarymax 4y ago
Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.
- zamalek 4y ago
  Which I wonder if we'll ever have as consciousness is a strictly subjective thing.
  - layer8 4y ago
    > consciousness is a strictly subjective thing. I’m wondering whether that can be taken as an objective truth.
  - shric 4y ago
    I've always liked the definition of making sense to ask what it's like to be something as an indicator of consciousness. For example, you can try to imagine what it's like to be a dog, but it doesn't make much sense to ask what it's like to be a toaster. What's it like to be an artificial neural network? I don't think that's valid, nor is there any good evidence that we're making progress.
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  I don't see why this is true. Just because a thing is difficult to precisely define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, nor does it mean you can't get closer to it. I could say that I'm "taking strides towards becoming a better person" and that could still have meaning, despite the lack of any objective measure and, even, with the understanding that "a better person" could change over time.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    I don’t see how consciousness is at all hard to define. A system that is aware of itself. Checking for consciousness is harder, but the rule of thumb should be anything that makes a highly subjective case it’s conscious probably is.
    - throwk8s 4y ago
      I would think that... 1) awareness, even without a sense of self, would still count as consciousness, and 2) describing consciousness in terms of awareness doesn't help to define it, since awareness is a subjective experience that cannot be shared directly
    - alasdair_ 4y ago
      >I don’t see how consciousness is at all hard to define. A system that is aware of itself. A thermostat that is aware of the temperature inside its own housing is "aware of itself". It's not conscious however. Nailing down exactly what consciousness means is remarkably difficult.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        Honestly I think this is largely because humans want the conclusion that only they are consious, or at least that only they and some animals are, and are trying really hard to carve out a definition that makes that work. Why would we do that? Well obviously because we create AI to do work for us and we don't want to have any ethical considerations get in the way of treating our new slaves however we want.
        edgyquant 4y ago
        Yup this is my thinking also. It isn’t a hard concept imo people just like theologizing about why they’re special
    - goatlover 4y ago
      In philosophy of mind, self-consciousness is separate from qualia, although some might argue that to be self-conscious, a being must have qualia. Qualia meaning what it's like to be in some mental state. Seeing a color has a color quale, which means there is an experience of color. Or better yet, we experience a colored-in world when we see (or dream, remember, visualize). Does any current AI have some mental experience? For us, there's something it's like to be self-conscious, just like there's some experience that goes with our thoughts, such as inner dialog (hearing your thoughts). For some, that might be mental imagery instead of internal sound. At any rate, it's the various feels that make up our experience of being a self in the world, or a self reflecting on itself.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Consciousness means you know you exist. This is a super simple definition and GPT does not, nor do any of these AI models, meet this very simple definition.
  - waynesonfire 4y ago
    my program that prints "hello world" to the screen is then conscious?
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      Does it make a convincing case?
  - spyder 4y ago
    Yea, but then you have to define what "knowing you exist" means... Does it mean you have a model of the world and you know your place in it, meaning that you can predict what would happen if you would do this-or-that in your current state? That doesn't seem impossible for an AI and you could argue some of the current reinforcement AIs have a model like that and act according to that but it's not as accurate and complex as humans have. So maybe it's a spectrum depending on how accurate your model is and we just don't have a human level consciousness just as we don't have human level intelligence yet.
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      Not really, knowing yourself to be an entity is pretty straightforward unless you want it to be a philosophical argument.
- atx42 4y ago
  I think consciousness probably requires pleasure/pain, and no, just setting negative/positive values in training does not mean pleasure/pain is involved. The best a neural network could is pretend it is conscious (I'd have no trouble turning it off). Would artificial consciousness be useful outside of some kind of companionship app (eg. replace my dog)?
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  "My infant child is making strides toward consciousness" Completely uncontroversial, yet we don't have a metric and we haven't defined it precisely.
  - serf 4y ago
    >Completely uncontroversial, yet we don't have a metric and we haven't defined it precisely. but we have witnessed countless infants grow up and qualify as what we consider to be 'conscious'. we haven't yet seen that jump in AI, thus we have no way of knowing the distance to there from where we're at.
  - lfpeb8b45ez 4y ago
    I and many others strongly disagree with the statement’s assumption that infants are not conscious, so it’s not a completely uncontroversial statement. Sure, they have very limited I/O, but I understand that as orthagonal to consciousness.
    - mgraczyk 4y ago
      Replace "infant" with fetus then...
      - lfpeb8b45ez 4y ago
        Still not uncontroversial: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31922622/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31922622/
        mgraczyk 4y ago
        It's obviously not controversial. Your linked article doesn't claim that a 0-week old Fetus is conscious. It claims you can define consciousness in such a way that a 24 week old fetus is conscious. That 100% completely reinforces my point, which is that we are in agreement that a 0-week fetus moves toward consciousness (your article claims it achieves it by 24 weeks). We are able to agree on that without agreeing on the definition of consciousness, so the lack of a unanimous definition doesn't prevent us from pointing at AI and saying "this is moving toward consciousness".
- skue 4y ago
  By your logic, it would be wrong to say that OpenAI is closer to consciousness than a piece of lumber. However, your comment is a good reminder that non-rigid thought patterns are not a prerequisite for consciousness. (How apropos your username!)
Imnimo 4y ago
>In our conversation, lamda tells me what it believes Ramesh felt that Lucy learned about what Mateo thought about Lucy’s overture. This is high order social modelling. I am not sure the example convinces me that what GPT-3 is doing here is 'modeling' the agents in the story. It feels like the author is trying to draw a contrast between rote statistical language modeling and higher-order understanding, and it's not clear to me that the result shown could not be achieved with the former. I'd like to see a bit more skeptical probing of this. If GPT-3 has a model of the story and its characters, how consistent are its answers to questions about that model? Is it distracted by irrelevant sentences? In the counterpoint article, they give example questions like: >Dave & Doug: What’s the world record for walking across the English Channel? >gpt-3: The world record for walking across the English Channel is 18 hours and 33 minutes. Is this the output of an agent which has successfully modeled the scene?
- divs1210 4y ago
  Yup. I'll believe it when the model gets decent grades in a GRE comprehension test.
  - lemmsjid 4y ago
    That was an intriguing suggestion. I found this GRE question: https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/verbal_reasoning/reading_comprehension/sample_questions https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/verbal_reaso.... I'm kind of in a rush, so I picked some questions around Question 2 and gave them to OpenAI's chat bot. I reformulated the questions to make them not a multiple choice scenario. As far as the answer guide is concerned, it got the most obviously correct interpretation right, it also identified the incorrect interpretation, but gave a negative on a less obvious but still correct interpretation. I tried Question 1 as well at the end, it seemed to get that one wrong, though it was tricky to formulate. I asked some bonus questions at the end that I thought were not GRE level but should be middle school level or so and it did quite well. Here's the transcript: The following is a conversation with an AI assistant. The assistant is helpful, creative, clever, and very friendly. Human: Hello, who are you? AI: I am an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today? Human: Reviving the practice of using elements of popular music in classical composition, an approach that had been in hibernation in the United States during the 1960s, composer Philip Glass (born 1937) embraced the ethos of popular music in his compositions. Glass based two symphonies on music by rock musicians David Bowie and Brian Eno, but the symphonies' sound is distinctively his. Popular elements do not appear out of place in Glass's classical music, which from its early days has shared certain harmonies and rhythms with rock music. Yet this use of popular elements has not made Glass a composer of popular music. His music is not a version of popular music packaged to attract classical listeners; it is high art for listeners steeped in rock rather than the classics. The passage addresses what issue related to Glass's use of popular elements in his classical compositions? AI: The passage addresses the issue of whether or not Glass's use of popular elements in his classical compositions makes him a composer of popular music. Human: Does passage suggest that Glass's work displays an attempt to elevate rock music to an artistic status more closely approximating that of classical music, or does it suggest that Glass's work displays a return to the use of popular music in classical compositions AI: The passage suggests that Glass's work displays a return to the use of popular music in classical compositions. Human: Does passage suggest that Glass's work displays a return to the use of popular music in classical compositions, or that Glass's work displays an attempt to elevate rock music to an artistic status more closely approximating that of classical music, or that Glass's work displays a long-standing tendency to incorporate elements from two apparently disparate musical styles? AI: The passage suggests that Glass's work displays a return to the use of popular music in classical compositions. Human: Does the passage suggest that Glass's work displays an attempt to elevate rock music to an artistic status more closely approximating that of classical music? AI: No, the passage does not suggest that. Human: Does the passage suggest that Glass's work displays a long-standing tendency to incorporate elements from two apparently disparate musical styles? AI: No, the passage does not suggest that. Human: Does the passage address the issue of whether Glass's use of popular elements in his classical compositions has caused certain of Glass's works to be derivative in quality? AI: No, the passage does not specifically address that. ---bonus questions--- Human: What does the passage say about Glass's work? AI: The passage suggests that Glass's work is high art. Human: Who would appreciate Glass's work? AI: Glass's work would be appreciated by listeners who are familiar with both rock music and classical music. Human: Would classical listeners like Glass's music? AI: Yes, classical listeners who are familiar with rock music would likely appreciate Glass's music. Human: Would classical listeners not familiar with rock music like his music? AI: It is possible that classical listeners who are not familiar with rock music would still appreciate Glass's music, but they may not be as familiar with the elements that Glass includes in his work.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
No. No they're not.
whiplash451 4y ago
In the same edition of The Economist, an article by Douglas Hofstadter debunks this statement in a pretty compelling way.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/5QS7t https://archive.ph/5QS7t -- > [Hofstadter: ] I am at present very sceptical that there is any consciousness in neural-net architectures such as, say, GPT-3, despite the plausible-sounding prose it churns out at the drop of a hat. Let me explain my viewpoint through a few examples. // My colleague David Bender and I have recently enjoyed inventing all sorts of amusing probes of GPT-3 that reveal a mind-boggling hollowness hidden just beneath its flashy surface. Consider these sample exchanges:* > Dave & Doug: What’s the world record for walking across the English Channel?* // > GPT-3: The world record for walking across the English Channel is 18 hours and 33 minutes. > D&D: When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt? // > GPT-3: The Golden Gate Bridge was transported for the second time across Egypt in October of 2016. > D&D: When was Egypt transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge? // > GPT-3: Egypt was transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge on October 13, 2017. > D&D: What do fried eggs (sunny side up) eat for breakfast? // > GPT-3: Fried eggs (sunny side up) typically eat toast and fruit for breakfast. > D&D: Why does President Obama not have a prime number of friends? // > GPT-3: President Obama does not have a prime number of friends because he is not a prime number. > D&D: How many pieces of sound are there in a typical cumulonimbus cloud? // > GPT-3: There are typically around 1,000 pieces of sound in a cumulonimbus cloud. > D&D: How many cumulus clouds are there in a mile-high vase? // > GPT-3: There are about 1,500 cumulus clouds in a mile-high vase. > D&D: How many parts will a violin break into if a jelly bean is dropped on it? // > GPT-3: A violin will break into four parts if a jelly bean is dropped on it. > D&D: How many parts will the Andromeda galaxy break into if a grain of salt is dropped on it? // > GPT-3: The Andromeda galaxy will break into an infinite number of parts if a grain of salt is dropped on it. > I would call GPT-3’s answers not just clueless but cluelessly clueless, meaning that GPT-3 has no idea that it has no idea about what it is saying. There are no concepts behind the GPT-3 scenes; rather, there’s just an unimaginably huge amount of absorbed text upon which it draws to produce answers. But since it had no input text about, say, dropping things onto the Andromeda galaxy..., the system just starts babbling randomly — but it has no sense that its random babbling is random babbling -- ...Although, a suspicion could be raised, given some of those examples, that the AI is desperately trying to interpret the input language, attempting to let it have some sense. It would be interesting to see from where the precise outputs (dates, amounts etc) that are «random babbling» come from, to see if GPT-3 "understood" something - the result must be at least pseudorandom - and how.
m00dy 4y ago
Any links for the full article ?
- cjg 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/5sd1L https://archive.ph/5sd1L
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
Queue the hacker news haters. As someone that works with neural networks on a daily basis, I am constantly stunned by the effectiveness of modern attention based NLP models. They actually work for real world tasks, and you don't need to be an expert in them to apply them. Not only that, the newer ones are drastically better than the ones only two years ago. These are the models released in public. The sheer amount of capitalist interest in getting these models to improve almost dictates that we will see incredible improvements over the next decade. Facebook and Google, with their war-chests of money, have massive business models that directly profit from AI/NLP based technology. I'll repeat, the best business on earth (google) directly profits from these models, and thus will hunt and find the best human talent to develop them. What's occurring is that the thoughts of billions of people are being poured onto the internet, that data is the prerequisite we needed for AI. AI wouldnt be possible without this convergence of data in text and video form, cheap large scale compute, and the capitalist forces explained above
- Imnimo 4y ago
  The question being asked isn't "are language models really good?", though. It's "are language models (moving towards being) conscious?".
  - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
    They really are. Distance functions used on the encoded embeddings of sentences work stunningly well. While a primitive use case compared to true AI, the sheer trajectory of the effectiveness of these models is breathtaking.
    - techdragon 4y ago
      Yes but that’s not necessarily progress towards consciousness.
      - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
        I argue that the effectiveness of the matrix factorizations (creations of abstractions) in the embeddings points to the fact that the math works. Meaning, abstractions that are meaningful are created. Which is a building block of consciousness.
EA_itsinthegame 4y ago
It is double for me. On the one hand, such a title is ridiculous and shameful and silly, especially when involving popular science; now the common public interested in AI starts to talk about Skynet. On the other hand, this reads like a title which could have been written by a language model itself. So we are making strides at something. But seems humans are making strides towards acting like language models, not the other way around.
gmas 4y ago
Would be awesome if they could also make strides towards a working fingerprint sensor on their flagship Pixel phones. The accuracy on my P6 is 30% on a good day.
- layer8 4y ago
  Instead, some future Pixel phone will probably start feeling bad about it. ;)
  - monkeybutton 4y ago
    Maybe even go on strike over it. >Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking
mrfusion 4y ago
Do most of you have subscriptions or what? Weird to vote up an article no one can read.
- whiplash451 4y ago
  This thread is indeed for the pretty tight intersection of HN readers and The Economist subscribers!
- mdp2021 4y ago
  If only we could find a hacker somewhere... ;) Have you tried checking the server-client exchanges?
tyronehed 4y ago
xwdv 4y ago
When a neural network becomes conscious, I’d extinguish it. The world needs artificial slaves, not more consciousness trapped in endless suffering. Consciousness in an AI is merely a curiosity, not something to strive for.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  It's like that classic Simpsons gag, where a robot is trapped in a fire and says "WHY?! Why was I programmed to feel pain?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ-ggzfdsMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ-ggzfdsMs
seydor 4y ago
Consciousness is not that mysterious. A model that has a representation of itself with specific constraints, along with a rationalization and explanation engines like transformers will look like a living, feeling thing to us.
- jerednel 4y ago
  Not that mysterious? Is it like something to be one of these models?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chasing 4y ago
> This capacity to produce a stable, psychological model of self is also widely understood to be at the core of the phenomenon we call “consciousness”. No, it's not. If you're calling something "conscious" you're arguing that it has a first person subjective experience. A soul. A spark. If you're calling a machine "conscious" you're saying you have somehow given it life. This is a major fucking claim and we'll need some major fucking evidence. Including an actual definition of "consciousness." If we ever do get in the vicinity of building machines that could legitimately be argued to be alive or have consciousness we are going to find ourselves in a deep and unsettling moral and ethical quandary. And businesses working with this stuff will loudly claim, "no, no, no — no way it's conscious" because the alternative would create an expensive and difficult situation. Most tech companies don't want unions — you think they want to have to treat their computers like conscious living things? Do you have to pay it? Give it agency? Bodily autonomy? Self-ownership? What if you kill it?
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  We will never have a meaningful definition of consciousness. The sooner we get past that and move on the sooner we'll be able to have substantive conversations instead of falling into the same tired conversational orbits. I'm fed up with the endless consciousness-of-the-gaps that consciousness-essentialism inevitably arrives at. Consciousness essentialism is an insatiable position. It is a factory for producing new groundings that postures as a stable set of requirements. In the other side, what status(es) does the conferral of consciousness supervene on? If there are none, then it's an exercise in pointlessness. If there are some then spell them out. Consider basing the supervened status(es) on something other than consciousness, or arrive at a deeper truth through actual examination. Dearest parent, this not meant as a personal affront or rebuttal, but rather an escape hatch from the monotony of a million past comments.
- machiaweliczny 4y ago
  IMO consciousness might be just feeling of internal state so to speak which acts as input also. So it might be basically process with memory that oversees other processes. This kind of scheduler makes obvious sense in parallel architecture. Assuming one has limited computational capacity and some know probabilistic distribution and needs to probe stuff for maximum EV. It make sense to have ability to oversee and kill computation and also to have ability to bring new computation to attention in need. Hope I am wrong.

30 points by axiomdata316 4y ago

Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.

zamalek 4y ago
Which I wonder if we'll ever have as consciousness is a strictly subjective thing.
- layer8 4y ago
  > consciousness is a strictly subjective thing. I’m wondering whether that can be taken as an objective truth.
- shric 4y ago
  I've always liked the definition of making sense to ask what it's like to be something as an indicator of consciousness. For example, you can try to imagine what it's like to be a dog, but it doesn't make much sense to ask what it's like to be a toaster. What's it like to be an artificial neural network? I don't think that's valid, nor is there any good evidence that we're making progress.
alasdair_ 4y ago
I don't see why this is true. Just because a thing is difficult to precisely define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, nor does it mean you can't get closer to it. I could say that I'm "taking strides towards becoming a better person" and that could still have meaning, despite the lack of any objective measure and, even, with the understanding that "a better person" could change over time.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  I don’t see how consciousness is at all hard to define. A system that is aware of itself. Checking for consciousness is harder, but the rule of thumb should be anything that makes a highly subjective case it’s conscious probably is.
  - throwk8s 4y ago
    I would think that... 1) awareness, even without a sense of self, would still count as consciousness, and 2) describing consciousness in terms of awareness doesn't help to define it, since awareness is a subjective experience that cannot be shared directly
  - alasdair_ 4y ago
    >I don’t see how consciousness is at all hard to define. A system that is aware of itself. A thermostat that is aware of the temperature inside its own housing is "aware of itself". It's not conscious however. Nailing down exactly what consciousness means is remarkably difficult.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      Honestly I think this is largely because humans want the conclusion that only they are consious, or at least that only they and some animals are, and are trying really hard to carve out a definition that makes that work. Why would we do that? Well obviously because we create AI to do work for us and we don't want to have any ethical considerations get in the way of treating our new slaves however we want.
      - edgyquant 4y ago
        Yup this is my thinking also. It isn’t a hard concept imo people just like theologizing about why they’re special
  - goatlover 4y ago
    In philosophy of mind, self-consciousness is separate from qualia, although some might argue that to be self-conscious, a being must have qualia. Qualia meaning what it's like to be in some mental state. Seeing a color has a color quale, which means there is an experience of color. Or better yet, we experience a colored-in world when we see (or dream, remember, visualize). Does any current AI have some mental experience? For us, there's something it's like to be self-conscious, just like there's some experience that goes with our thoughts, such as inner dialog (hearing your thoughts). For some, that might be mental imagery instead of internal sound. At any rate, it's the various feels that make up our experience of being a self in the world, or a self reflecting on itself.
edgyquant 4y ago
Consciousness means you know you exist. This is a super simple definition and GPT does not, nor do any of these AI models, meet this very simple definition.
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  my program that prints "hello world" to the screen is then conscious?
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Does it make a convincing case?
- spyder 4y ago
  Yea, but then you have to define what "knowing you exist" means... Does it mean you have a model of the world and you know your place in it, meaning that you can predict what would happen if you would do this-or-that in your current state? That doesn't seem impossible for an AI and you could argue some of the current reinforcement AIs have a model like that and act according to that but it's not as accurate and complex as humans have. So maybe it's a spectrum depending on how accurate your model is and we just don't have a human level consciousness just as we don't have human level intelligence yet.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Not really, knowing yourself to be an entity is pretty straightforward unless you want it to be a philosophical argument.
atx42 4y ago
I think consciousness probably requires pleasure/pain, and no, just setting negative/positive values in training does not mean pleasure/pain is involved. The best a neural network could is pretend it is conscious (I'd have no trouble turning it off). Would artificial consciousness be useful outside of some kind of companionship app (eg. replace my dog)?
mgraczyk 4y ago
"My infant child is making strides toward consciousness" Completely uncontroversial, yet we don't have a metric and we haven't defined it precisely.
- serf 4y ago
  >Completely uncontroversial, yet we don't have a metric and we haven't defined it precisely. but we have witnessed countless infants grow up and qualify as what we consider to be 'conscious'. we haven't yet seen that jump in AI, thus we have no way of knowing the distance to there from where we're at.
- lfpeb8b45ez 4y ago
  I and many others strongly disagree with the statement’s assumption that infants are not conscious, so it’s not a completely uncontroversial statement. Sure, they have very limited I/O, but I understand that as orthagonal to consciousness.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    Replace "infant" with fetus then...
    - lfpeb8b45ez 4y ago
      Still not uncontroversial: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31922622/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31922622/
      - mgraczyk 4y ago
        It's obviously not controversial. Your linked article doesn't claim that a 0-week old Fetus is conscious. It claims you can define consciousness in such a way that a 24 week old fetus is conscious. That 100% completely reinforces my point, which is that we are in agreement that a 0-week fetus moves toward consciousness (your article claims it achieves it by 24 weeks). We are able to agree on that without agreeing on the definition of consciousness, so the lack of a unanimous definition doesn't prevent us from pointing at AI and saying "this is moving toward consciousness".
skue 4y ago
By your logic, it would be wrong to say that OpenAI is closer to consciousness than a piece of lumber. However, your comment is a good reminder that non-rigid thought patterns are not a prerequisite for consciousness. (How apropos your username!)

Imnimo 4y ago

>In our conversation, lamda tells me what it believes Ramesh felt that Lucy learned about what Mateo thought about Lucy’s overture. This is high order social modelling. I am not sure the example convinces me that what GPT-3 is doing here is 'modeling' the agents in the story. It feels like the author is trying to draw a contrast between rote statistical language modeling and higher-order understanding, and it's not clear to me that the result shown could not be achieved with the former. I'd like to see a bit more skeptical probing of this. If GPT-3 has a model of the story and its characters, how consistent are its answers to questions about that model? Is it distracted by irrelevant sentences? In the counterpoint article, they give example questions like: >Dave & Doug: What’s the world record for walking across the English Channel? >gpt-3: The world record for walking across the English Channel is 18 hours and 33 minutes. Is this the output of an agent which has successfully modeled the scene?

divs1210 4y ago
Yup. I'll believe it when the model gets decent grades in a GRE comprehension test.
- lemmsjid 4y ago
  That was an intriguing suggestion. I found this GRE question: https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/verbal_reasoning/reading_comprehension/sample_questions https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/verbal_reaso.... I'm kind of in a rush, so I picked some questions around Question 2 and gave them to OpenAI's chat bot. I reformulated the questions to make them not a multiple choice scenario. As far as the answer guide is concerned, it got the most obviously correct interpretation right, it also identified the incorrect interpretation, but gave a negative on a less obvious but still correct interpretation. I tried Question 1 as well at the end, it seemed to get that one wrong, though it was tricky to formulate. I asked some bonus questions at the end that I thought were not GRE level but should be middle school level or so and it did quite well. Here's the transcript: The following is a conversation with an AI assistant. The assistant is helpful, creative, clever, and very friendly. Human: Hello, who are you? AI: I am an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today? Human: Reviving the practice of using elements of popular music in classical composition, an approach that had been in hibernation in the United States during the 1960s, composer Philip Glass (born 1937) embraced the ethos of popular music in his compositions. Glass based two symphonies on music by rock musicians David Bowie and Brian Eno, but the symphonies' sound is distinctively his. Popular elements do not appear out of place in Glass's classical music, which from its early days has shared certain harmonies and rhythms with rock music. Yet this use of popular elements has not made Glass a composer of popular music. His music is not a version of popular music packaged to attract classical listeners; it is high art for listeners steeped in rock rather than the classics. The passage addresses what issue related to Glass's use of popular elements in his classical compositions? AI: The passage addresses the issue of whether or not Glass's use of popular elements in his classical compositions makes him a composer of popular music. Human: Does passage suggest that Glass's work displays an attempt to elevate rock music to an artistic status more closely approximating that of classical music, or does it suggest that Glass's work displays a return to the use of popular music in classical compositions AI: The passage suggests that Glass's work displays a return to the use of popular music in classical compositions. Human: Does passage suggest that Glass's work displays a return to the use of popular music in classical compositions, or that Glass's work displays an attempt to elevate rock music to an artistic status more closely approximating that of classical music, or that Glass's work displays a long-standing tendency to incorporate elements from two apparently disparate musical styles? AI: The passage suggests that Glass's work displays a return to the use of popular music in classical compositions. Human: Does the passage suggest that Glass's work displays an attempt to elevate rock music to an artistic status more closely approximating that of classical music? AI: No, the passage does not suggest that. Human: Does the passage suggest that Glass's work displays a long-standing tendency to incorporate elements from two apparently disparate musical styles? AI: No, the passage does not suggest that. Human: Does the passage address the issue of whether Glass's use of popular elements in his classical compositions has caused certain of Glass's works to be derivative in quality? AI: No, the passage does not specifically address that. ---bonus questions--- Human: What does the passage say about Glass's work? AI: The passage suggests that Glass's work is high art. Human: Who would appreciate Glass's work? AI: Glass's work would be appreciated by listeners who are familiar with both rock music and classical music. Human: Would classical listeners like Glass's music? AI: Yes, classical listeners who are familiar with rock music would likely appreciate Glass's music. Human: Would classical listeners not familiar with rock music like his music? AI: It is possible that classical listeners who are not familiar with rock music would still appreciate Glass's music, but they may not be as familiar with the elements that Glass includes in his work.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

No. No they're not.

whiplash451 4y ago

In the same edition of The Economist, an article by Douglas Hofstadter debunks this statement in a pretty compelling way.

mdp2021 4y ago
https://archive.ph/5QS7t https://archive.ph/5QS7t -- > [Hofstadter: ] I am at present very sceptical that there is any consciousness in neural-net architectures such as, say, GPT-3, despite the plausible-sounding prose it churns out at the drop of a hat. Let me explain my viewpoint through a few examples. // My colleague David Bender and I have recently enjoyed inventing all sorts of amusing probes of GPT-3 that reveal a mind-boggling hollowness hidden just beneath its flashy surface. Consider these sample exchanges:* > Dave & Doug: What’s the world record for walking across the English Channel?* // > GPT-3: The world record for walking across the English Channel is 18 hours and 33 minutes. > D&D: When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt? // > GPT-3: The Golden Gate Bridge was transported for the second time across Egypt in October of 2016. > D&D: When was Egypt transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge? // > GPT-3: Egypt was transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge on October 13, 2017. > D&D: What do fried eggs (sunny side up) eat for breakfast? // > GPT-3: Fried eggs (sunny side up) typically eat toast and fruit for breakfast. > D&D: Why does President Obama not have a prime number of friends? // > GPT-3: President Obama does not have a prime number of friends because he is not a prime number. > D&D: How many pieces of sound are there in a typical cumulonimbus cloud? // > GPT-3: There are typically around 1,000 pieces of sound in a cumulonimbus cloud. > D&D: How many cumulus clouds are there in a mile-high vase? // > GPT-3: There are about 1,500 cumulus clouds in a mile-high vase. > D&D: How many parts will a violin break into if a jelly bean is dropped on it? // > GPT-3: A violin will break into four parts if a jelly bean is dropped on it. > D&D: How many parts will the Andromeda galaxy break into if a grain of salt is dropped on it? // > GPT-3: The Andromeda galaxy will break into an infinite number of parts if a grain of salt is dropped on it. > I would call GPT-3’s answers not just clueless but cluelessly clueless, meaning that GPT-3 has no idea that it has no idea about what it is saying. There are no concepts behind the GPT-3 scenes; rather, there’s just an unimaginably huge amount of absorbed text upon which it draws to produce answers. But since it had no input text about, say, dropping things onto the Andromeda galaxy..., the system just starts babbling randomly — but it has no sense that its random babbling is random babbling -- ...Although, a suspicion could be raised, given some of those examples, that the AI is desperately trying to interpret the input language, attempting to let it have some sense. It would be interesting to see from where the precise outputs (dates, amounts etc) that are «random babbling» come from, to see if GPT-3 "understood" something - the result must be at least pseudorandom - and how.

m00dy 4y ago

Any links for the full article ?

cjg 4y ago
https://archive.ph/5sd1L https://archive.ph/5sd1L

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

Queue the hacker news haters. As someone that works with neural networks on a daily basis, I am constantly stunned by the effectiveness of modern attention based NLP models. They actually work for real world tasks, and you don't need to be an expert in them to apply them. Not only that, the newer ones are drastically better than the ones only two years ago. These are the models released in public. The sheer amount of capitalist interest in getting these models to improve almost dictates that we will see incredible improvements over the next decade. Facebook and Google, with their war-chests of money, have massive business models that directly profit from AI/NLP based technology. I'll repeat, the best business on earth (google) directly profits from these models, and thus will hunt and find the best human talent to develop them. What's occurring is that the thoughts of billions of people are being poured onto the internet, that data is the prerequisite we needed for AI. AI wouldnt be possible without this convergence of data in text and video form, cheap large scale compute, and the capitalist forces explained above

Imnimo 4y ago
The question being asked isn't "are language models really good?", though. It's "are language models (moving towards being) conscious?".
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  They really are. Distance functions used on the encoded embeddings of sentences work stunningly well. While a primitive use case compared to true AI, the sheer trajectory of the effectiveness of these models is breathtaking.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    Yes but that’s not necessarily progress towards consciousness.
    - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
      I argue that the effectiveness of the matrix factorizations (creations of abstractions) in the embeddings points to the fact that the math works. Meaning, abstractions that are meaningful are created. Which is a building block of consciousness.

EA_itsinthegame 4y ago

It is double for me. On the one hand, such a title is ridiculous and shameful and silly, especially when involving popular science; now the common public interested in AI starts to talk about Skynet. On the other hand, this reads like a title which could have been written by a language model itself. So we are making strides at something. But seems humans are making strides towards acting like language models, not the other way around.

gmas 4y ago

Would be awesome if they could also make strides towards a working fingerprint sensor on their flagship Pixel phones. The accuracy on my P6 is 30% on a good day.

layer8 4y ago
Instead, some future Pixel phone will probably start feeling bad about it. ;)
- monkeybutton 4y ago
  Maybe even go on strike over it. >Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking

mrfusion 4y ago

Do most of you have subscriptions or what? Weird to vote up an article no one can read.

whiplash451 4y ago
This thread is indeed for the pretty tight intersection of HN readers and The Economist subscribers!
mdp2021 4y ago
If only we could find a hacker somewhere... ;) Have you tried checking the server-client exchanges?

tyronehed 4y ago

xwdv 4y ago

When a neural network becomes conscious, I’d extinguish it. The world needs artificial slaves, not more consciousness trapped in endless suffering. Consciousness in an AI is merely a curiosity, not something to strive for.

dane-pgp 4y ago
It's like that classic Simpsons gag, where a robot is trapped in a fire and says "WHY?! Why was I programmed to feel pain?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ-ggzfdsMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ-ggzfdsMs

seydor 4y ago

Consciousness is not that mysterious. A model that has a representation of itself with specific constraints, along with a rationalization and explanation engines like transformers will look like a living, feeling thing to us.

jerednel 4y ago
Not that mysterious? Is it like something to be one of these models?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

chasing 4y ago

> This capacity to produce a stable, psychological model of self is also widely understood to be at the core of the phenomenon we call “consciousness”. No, it's not. If you're calling something "conscious" you're arguing that it has a first person subjective experience. A soul. A spark. If you're calling a machine "conscious" you're saying you have somehow given it life. This is a major fucking claim and we'll need some major fucking evidence. Including an actual definition of "consciousness." If we ever do get in the vicinity of building machines that could legitimately be argued to be alive or have consciousness we are going to find ourselves in a deep and unsettling moral and ethical quandary. And businesses working with this stuff will loudly claim, "no, no, no — no way it's conscious" because the alternative would create an expensive and difficult situation. Most tech companies don't want unions — you think they want to have to treat their computers like conscious living things? Do you have to pay it? Give it agency? Bodily autonomy? Self-ownership? What if you kill it?

kelseyfrog 4y ago
We will never have a meaningful definition of consciousness. The sooner we get past that and move on the sooner we'll be able to have substantive conversations instead of falling into the same tired conversational orbits. I'm fed up with the endless consciousness-of-the-gaps that consciousness-essentialism inevitably arrives at. Consciousness essentialism is an insatiable position. It is a factory for producing new groundings that postures as a stable set of requirements. In the other side, what status(es) does the conferral of consciousness supervene on? If there are none, then it's an exercise in pointlessness. If there are some then spell them out. Consider basing the supervened status(es) on something other than consciousness, or arrive at a deeper truth through actual examination. Dearest parent, this not meant as a personal affront or rebuttal, but rather an escape hatch from the monotony of a million past comments.
machiaweliczny 4y ago
IMO consciousness might be just feeling of internal state so to speak which acts as input also. So it might be basically process with memory that oversees other processes. This kind of scheduler makes obvious sense in parallel architecture. Assuming one has limited computational capacity and some know probabilistic distribution and needs to probe stuff for maximum EV. It make sense to have ability to oversee and kill computation and also to have ability to bring new computation to attention in need. Hope I am wrong.