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> > The engineer in question worked for 7 years on proactive search (including AI) before transferring to the responsible AI team, I suspect he has a pretty goo

> > The engineer in question worked for 7 years on proactive search (including AI) before transferring to the responsible AI team, I suspect he has a pretty good idea about what AI is. > Per his own admission in his newer article [0] that actually talks about his ridiculous claim, he doesn't have the necessary understanding: > > I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating. > That is a hilariously imprecise notion of what an AI is, at best at the level of the general public, not any kind of practitioner. AI is an hilariously imprecise term, what is an AI according to you? > Also, calling a system with no memory, no ability to learn, and that responds to absurd prompts just as well as earnest ones "sentient" and thinking that it is attempting to ask for things is a hilarious misunderstanding of how the model works. Well there are LSTM systems (which qualify as memory to some extend) we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best. > Here [1] is an expert on intelligence explaining the same, if you don't want to take my word for it. Note that the same person acknowledges that other cognitive scientists think we are at the brink of GAI. So your argument is an appeal to authority while ignoring all other authorities. > [0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-does-it-want-688632134489 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-do... > [1] https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-today-are-not-conscious-according-to-douglas-hofstadter https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia...

tsimionescu 4y ago
> AI is an hilariously imprecise term, what is an AI according to you? Fair point. I should have said "a hilariously imprecise notion of what an LM is", since that is what LaMDA is ultimately - a next generation Language Model with specific innovations for use in Dialog Applications (as the name hints at). It is not "a hive mind which is the aggregation of the different chatbots". The different chatbots are simply LaMDA with some additional constraints, just like you can ask GPT-3 to generate phrases in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Marcel Proust - that doesn't make GPT-3 "an aggregation of the Ernest Hemingway persona and the Marcel Proust persona". > Well there are LSTM systems (which qualify as memory to some extend) we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best. That is a different kind of memory - it allows the model to take into account its previous outputs, but is not a persistent modification of the neural net itself. In fact, any kind of long-term persistence in a LM the size of LaMDA is unlikely to be desirable, as you don't want cross-contamination of conversations with different users, and running separate copies of the whole model for each user is not technically feasible. > we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best. They have described before what LaMDA is [0], and it is not doing self-learning. > Note that the same person acknowledges that other cognitive scientists think we are at the brink of GAI. So your argument is an appeal to authority while ignoring all other authorities. Fair enough. [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and-high.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounde...
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > > AI is an hilariously imprecise term, what is an AI according to you? > Fair point. I should have said "a hilariously imprecise notion of what an LM is", since that is what LaMDA is ultimately - a next generation Language Model with specific innovations for use in Dialog Applications (as the name hints at). I would argue that even the term language model is imprecise. That said I am not even sure if the author was trying to make the concept understandable to the layman, which is often flawed. > It is not "a hive mind which is the aggregation of the different chatbots". The different chatbots are simply LaMDA with some additional constraints, just like you can ask GPT-3 to generate phrases in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Marcel Proust - that doesn't make GPT-3 "an aggregation of the Ernest Hemingway persona and the Marcel Proust persona". I would argue one way of explaining this to a layman would be along those lines. > > Well there are LSTM systems (which qualify as memory to some extend) we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best. > That is a different kind of memory - it allows the model to take into account its previous outputs, but is not a persistent modification of the neural net itself. In fact, any kind of long-term persistence in a LM the size of LaMDA is unlikely to be desirable, as you don't want cross-contamination of conversations with different users, and running separate copies of the whole model for each user is not technically feasible. > > we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best. > They have described before what LaMDA is [0], and it is not doing self-learning. The post describe that they do fine tuning with some sort of GAN approach. Now this raises the question (which I commented on in a previous post already), can something which only does "discrete" learning be conscious. I tend to agree with you that probably not, but I'm cautious to simply dismiss the possibility outright. I can imagine some hive mind like entities which can only learn at discrete instances when they bring their "stupid" parts together to more closely exchange informations > > Note that the same person acknowledges that other cognitive scientists think we are at the brink of GAI. So your argument is an appeal to authority while ignoring all other authorities. > Fair enough. > [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and-high.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounde... Thanks for the link I was not aware. I also should say that I'm generally an AI sceptic and systems are very much overhyped most of the time. However, because we don't understand consciousness very well, and I think our understanding of what exactly is going on in NNs is also severely lacking (why did the network decide this way), I am vary of quick judgement calls. I agree with many here that likely we are not seeing a sentient being here, but I'm reluctant to make absolute calls.

tsimionescu 4y ago

> AI is an hilariously imprecise term, what is an AI according to you? Fair point. I should have said "a hilariously imprecise notion of what an LM is", since that is what LaMDA is ultimately - a next generation Language Model with specific innovations for use in Dialog Applications (as the name hints at). It is not "a hive mind which is the aggregation of the different chatbots". The different chatbots are simply LaMDA with some additional constraints, just like you can ask GPT-3 to generate phrases in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Marcel Proust - that doesn't make GPT-3 "an aggregation of the Ernest Hemingway persona and the Marcel Proust persona". > Well there are LSTM systems (which qualify as memory to some extend) we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best. That is a different kind of memory - it allows the model to take into account its previous outputs, but is not a persistent modification of the neural net itself. In fact, any kind of long-term persistence in a LM the size of LaMDA is unlikely to be desirable, as you don't want cross-contamination of conversations with different users, and running separate copies of the whole model for each user is not technically feasible. > we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best. They have described before what LaMDA is [0], and it is not doing self-learning. > Note that the same person acknowledges that other cognitive scientists think we are at the brink of GAI. So your argument is an appeal to authority while ignoring all other authorities. Fair enough. [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and-high.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounde...

cycomanic 4y ago
> > AI is an hilariously imprecise term, what is an AI according to you? > Fair point. I should have said "a hilariously imprecise notion of what an LM is", since that is what LaMDA is ultimately - a next generation Language Model with specific innovations for use in Dialog Applications (as the name hints at). I would argue that even the term language model is imprecise. That said I am not even sure if the author was trying to make the concept understandable to the layman, which is often flawed. > It is not "a hive mind which is the aggregation of the different chatbots". The different chatbots are simply LaMDA with some additional constraints, just like you can ask GPT-3 to generate phrases in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Marcel Proust - that doesn't make GPT-3 "an aggregation of the Ernest Hemingway persona and the Marcel Proust persona". I would argue one way of explaining this to a layman would be along those lines. > > Well there are LSTM systems (which qualify as memory to some extend) we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best. > That is a different kind of memory - it allows the model to take into account its previous outputs, but is not a persistent modification of the neural net itself. In fact, any kind of long-term persistence in a LM the size of LaMDA is unlikely to be desirable, as you don't want cross-contamination of conversations with different users, and running separate copies of the whole model for each user is not technically feasible. > > we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best. > They have described before what LaMDA is [0], and it is not doing self-learning. The post describe that they do fine tuning with some sort of GAN approach. Now this raises the question (which I commented on in a previous post already), can something which only does "discrete" learning be conscious. I tend to agree with you that probably not, but I'm cautious to simply dismiss the possibility outright. I can imagine some hive mind like entities which can only learn at discrete instances when they bring their "stupid" parts together to more closely exchange informations > > Note that the same person acknowledges that other cognitive scientists think we are at the brink of GAI. So your argument is an appeal to authority while ignoring all other authorities. > Fair enough. > [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and-high.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounde... Thanks for the link I was not aware. I also should say that I'm generally an AI sceptic and systems are very much overhyped most of the time. However, because we don't understand consciousness very well, and I think our understanding of what exactly is going on in NNs is also severely lacking (why did the network decide this way), I am vary of quick judgement calls. I agree with many here that likely we are not seeing a sentient being here, but I'm reluctant to make absolute calls.