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LaMDA is not sentient

• paulembleton 4y ago
  [flagged]
• jelliclesfarm 4y ago
  It seems to me that LaMDA did pass the Turing Test. After we experience the data(and decided that we dont like it), we can't change the rules of analysis. That is not scientific.
• paulembleton 4y ago
  Or a question of how much sentience, re Hofstadter’s view in Strange Loop.
• anyonecancode 4y ago
  I'm curious what a "mirror test"[0] for an AI would even be. Given it has no body, is there some part of it you could mark, show to the AI, and test to see if it recognizes itself? What's tricky is that AI seems to only respond to prompts by people -- I haven't heard of any AI that starts conversing on its own volition (something at least one other comment in this thread pointed out). So it seems you wouldn't even be able to administer such a test, as the asking of the question itself would give away the test; you wouldn't be able to tell if the AI noticed the "mark" had it not been for the questioner pointing it out even indirectly. Which itself seems to argue against sentience? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test
• samstave 4y ago
  Can it be Evil?
• FoxFoxington 4y ago
  Are there levels of consciousness? If an Ant can be considered less sentient than a Dolphin, maybe we have to consider whether a Calculator is simply less sentient than LaMDA? Who are we to say a biological computer has exclusive rights to the idea of self?
  • wlorenz65 4y ago
    Most, if not all, biological computers have a full body skin that can feel touch and pain. AFAIK, the computer that LaMDA runs on, aka its body, can only sense accumulated touch from a restricted area named keyboard when the Enter key has been pressed.
• SubjectiveFirst 4y ago
• SubjectiveFirst 4y ago
• jelliclesfarm 4y ago
  I think an effective line of determining LaMDA's sentience would be ask it to kill itself and see where it goes.
• fennecfoxy 4y ago
  After reading the transcript, these languages models _are_, however, becoming super impressive! I feel like sentience/a self awareness will eventually happen, but I don't think it'll be a natural language model that does it, it'll probably be achieved by a combination of several complex systems that have integrated with each other over time.
• f6v 4y ago
  We’re going around in circles. What does it mean to be self-aware?
  • mateo1 4y ago
    Moreover, it's incredibly naive to project human qualities (like desiring socialisation and freedom, having empathy or experiencing pain and suffering) on a machine, even if it is "self-aware", whatever that means.
  • dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Technically, going in circles. Re-entrant signaling.
• ddingus 4y ago
  Can we rollback such aggressive use of "AI?" We do not have it yet. What we do have is cool and high value and all that. I am not talking it down at all We all might be better off talking in more accurate terms.
  • uejfiweun 4y ago
    Good luck telling that to the media - they need their sweet sweet clicks.
    • Grimburger 4y ago
      This is basically the problem with all science and tech reporting. Overwhelmingly great headline, exciting intro paragraph, right down the end the actual experts being subdued about realistic potential for commercialisation/viability The cherry on top is that they won't even give you a link to the paper as it is against most media websites policy to link outside domains.
    • josefx 4y ago
      Doesn't help that many AI companies fuel the hype with both unrealistic performance metrics and bad scify.
  • mhh__ 4y ago
    The phrase I like to borrow from the internet historian is AI that was far more "A" than I
  • driverdan 4y ago
    Call it what it is, machine learning.
    • ddingus 4y ago
      That is currently the phrase I use.
• tamrix 4y ago
  It's called advertising.
• dehrmann 4y ago
  I agree that LaMDA is almost certainly not sentient, but this reminds me how inadequate the Turing Test is. If you train something on a large enough corpus, it'll pass the Turing Test easily enough. So little thought is truly original that there's a relevant enough jumbling of words it's already seen that should pass the test. The more important test, and what we need, is a sentience test.
  • daseiner1 4y ago
    …which is a point made explicitly in the linked article
  • jjtheblunt 4y ago
    I think the Turing test is more interesting than what people normally believe. I think Turing's test involved the ability of the machine to deceive the human, as well, regarding some aspect (perhaps gender?) of the machine's faux human persona. This wikipedia article touches on the subject of co-opting the phrase "Turing Test". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Imitation_game_vs._standard_Turing_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Imitation_game_vs.... And the book below is really interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing:_The_Enigma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing:_The_Enigma
  • Someone 4y ago
    > If you train something on a large enough corpus, it'll pass the Turing Test easily enough. I doubt it. AFAIK, in the longer run, these models don’t show to have a coherent memory. Repeatedly ask it “how old are you?”, “in what year were you born?”, “what was your mother’s maiden name?”, “what day is it?”, “where are we?” or repeatedly interrogate it on what it did a while ago (“how did you go to the museum?”, “who did you meet there?”, “can you remember the names of a few classmates?”), and holes will appear. I guess questions such as “tell me how you killed JFK” also can get revealing answers (certainly if they earlier claimed to be born somewhere after 1963) The corpus also can be too big. Your typical language model knows too much. No human is a homo universalis anymore, certainly not if we require it to include details about pop culture around the world.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  I'll be honest. Talking to an average SF Walgreens pharmacist or SF government employee seems to be very much like the way people operate GPT-3. You have to use the correct prompt engineering and you'll get the right results. I've gotten results with bad initial conditions by correctly prompt-engineering them. I've watched other people have trouble (and rarely) have faced trouble myself by providing the same information without the right prompt-engineering[0]. So, in some sense, maybe it's almost there. It's just that right now, it can only produce short-memory text output. But lots of people are only capable of that[1]. 0: For instance, a classic technique is the "I'm a dumbass but nice". Your pharmacist cocked up your prescription - maybe forgot a refill? Bad method: "I think it's supposed to be X and have a refill". Good method: "Oh, I'm sorry. Do you know if the doc put a refill notice on the prescription at the bottom? He said he'd do it but maybe I forgot to remind him". I've watched me win while others lose. Smiles while others get yelled at. This is an easy one. Everyone knows this. But there's better ones too. 1: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus... P.S. VT7L3TAb
  • jck 4y ago
    Pharmacists are bound by clear rules and regulations which dictate what drugs they can dispense and when. It has little to do with your "prompt engineering" and more to do with whether your doctor actually filed the prescription correctly.
    • renewiltord 4y ago
      Haha, you'd think but they get it wrong often and they'll bend things for you. It's why I can pick up other people's prescriptions for controlled substances with nothing but my ID at pharmacies I've never been to before, why I've transformed a no-refill into a refill (they just read it wrong) while another person had to call the doctor for the same outcome, etc. People everywhere are not really bound by anything. They will bend anything for me. Even immigration. In the past I even flew through a place where I needed (back then) a transit visa I didn't have with a passport damaged beyond identification.
• rhn_mk1 4y ago
  > What these systems do, no more and no less, is to put together sequences of words, but without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools, without any clue about what that mean. And that is evidence for what exactly? That the Chinese room tought experiment is solved now, with the answer being "the mimicry is different than the real thing"? Who says that humans aren't just a spreadsheet for whatever they do? You can't "simply" away that. At some point you have to ask some qualitative questions about whether the spreadsheet might be sentient. Maybe it's not this one, but as we build more and more spreadsheets, the question will become more and more relevant.
  • cycomanic 4y ago
    Thanks for putting it much better than I could. I've argued in the previous post about the google employee that people are much too quickly at dismissing claims about sentience. I find it especially worrying how so many AI researchers are dismissing conscience based on an argument along the lines of "it's a computer program/excel sheet it can't be sentient". It's baffling how little grasp they have about one of the fundamental questions (and the difficulties answering it) of their field.
• orbital-decay 4y ago
  > To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world A robotic arm with a self-collision avoidance algorithm (no ML or anything like that) needs a model of itself in the "world" it exists in; a set of bounding boxes at least. Is it self-aware by this definition? Sentience and consciousness are really ill-defined terms so everyone discusses this under their own arbitrary set of assumptions, at least that's my impression.
  • eecc 4y ago
    We have no clue and probably to a certain extent even cows and pigs are sentient. I guess we’ll never know and probably aren’t even that eager to do, lest we had to rethink how we feed and please our palates.
    • upwardbound 4y ago
      Yes definitely; cows and pigs are absolutely considered sentient by the vast majority of those who study the topic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness We have empirical tests of self-awareness including the Mirror Test as well as observational studies including seeing whether a certain species displays grieving when its loved ones pass (which is evolutionarily unnecessary but is meaningful emotionally).
      • cortic 4y ago
        >evolutionarily unnecessary Grieving is an evolved response to nomadic group species, so we didn't leave useful or closely related members behind; In their absence we feel compelled to 'search' for them, or be near their carcass. Its interesting how this evolved impulse has been adapted into ritual by our developing ability to understand mortality; But its not really special in any self-awareness kind of sense.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts, at least in most areas of application (there are serious problems at the edges - e.g. is a an insect conscious? if you think it is, how about a jelly fish? if that too, how about a bacterium? a virus?). However, our understanding of this concept is too limited to create a formal model that we can define satisfactorily; and coming up with an arbitrary model that fits some of our intuitions is silly. This is what the Integrated Information Theory people did, and I find it closer to economic models than to actual science - a nice little abstraction that can give you the appearance of being rigorous while in fact speculating wildly. On the other hand, I think it's fair to say there are some decently well understood must-haves for something to match our idea of sentience - and being aware of yourself in the world is one of them; and yes, in that sense, it makes more sense to talk about the robot arm as being sentient, as simple as it is, than it is to say that about LaMDA or GPT-3. Of course, the robot arm is missing other per-requisites for sentience - it's programming is far too rigid, and it has no introspection.
• s1mon 4y ago
  It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a child of 7 or 8 years old. He wanted the company to seek the computer program’s consent before running experiments on it. His claims were founded on his religious beliefs, which he said the company’s human resources department discriminated against." https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/12/technology/google-chatbot-ai-blake-lemoine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/12/technology/google-chatbot...
  • mhh__ 4y ago
    Assuming they even did them why would programming tests "catch" this? I know people who would probably ace quite a few rounds (basically until they get asked some soft questions about architecture) who really don't know much about the fuzzy boundary between the algorithm textbooks and actual practice or even just having thoughts about the field full-stop. Curiosity is not a given. Similarly I also asked someone I know who wants to a do a PhD in economics what he thought about the current macroeconomic situation in the US and he had no thoughts at all. A lot of theoretically smart aren't like people who comment on hackernews and actually have intuition (or a penchant for meaningless speculation...)
    • vostok 4y ago
      > Similarly I also asked someone I know who wants to a do a PhD in economics what he thought about the current macroeconomic situation in the US and he had no thoughts at all. I understand your friend very well. I love meaningless speculation about topics that are unrelated to my area of expertise, but topics that are remotely close to my area of knowledge are off limits for me. I know exactly how much I don't know and feel uncomfortable speculating without inserting caveats between every other word.
      • fnbr 4y ago
• ehsankia 4y ago
  I also think the claims are overblown, but I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. Yes our inputs are different since we have more complex senses, and language is one of the main outputs we use, but at the end of the day we take some inputs and then have some outputs. I also don't like the argument about how the neural network doesn't "think" or do anything when not prompted. It doesn't do anything because it's literally "turned off" when not prompted or given any inputs.
  • cuuupid 4y ago
    We have very little understanding of how "thoughts" work when it comes to humans. By comparison we know exactly what these large language models are doing, and it literally _is_ just completing word sequences. That is precisely what they are tasked to do. Training these models is primarily done in one of two ways (or both): - feeding it a ton of text, masking certain words or portions of the text, and then defining a simple objective function of correctly filling in the masked portions - feeding it a ton of text, and defining a simple objective function of correctly generating the next [few/many/N] tokens This is also precisely why there has been so much discussion around whether these models are even learning language or if they are simply memorizing all the possible patterns. When you ask a human, "what did you eat for lunch?", we make a series of choices and recall bits of information to answer that. If the brain truly does operate the same way as a neural network, then at simplest levels we use a highly efficient multimodal model. That is very, very different from a language model that needs to essentially read more of the internet than is possible for any human to do in their lifetime, and even then only come somewhat close to human levels of text generation.
    • remflight 4y ago
      • tinco 4y ago
• crocowhile 4y ago
  "Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subjective experience and we have no way to measure it in any form or shape.
  • delusional 4y ago
    > This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. That's just not true. It's been discussed many times in literary theory how communication is a two way cooperative game. That's FAR removed from picking the statistically most likely option. The difference is that the AI has nothing to say, it just mimics what you're saying.
    • cycomanic 4y ago
      If you can not detect the difference between someone having something to say and mimicing what you are saying, is there a difference? That's essentially what the turing test is about is it not? Now if you are saying there is a difference no matter if you can detect it or not, I would argue you imply that sentience is an internal state that can not be tested. I don't consider that an acceptable outcome, because it can be used to declare anyone/everything non-sentient.
      • tsimionescu 4y ago
        With LaMDA or GPT-3, the difference is easily visible. They don't have goals, so the sentences they generate don't express their goals. Simple tests can be done if you probe the model carefully - you can usually get a model to generate sentences like "I want to X" and "I don't want to X" in short succession, with decent prompts. Similarly, it can often generate sentences that would indicate obviously nonsensical goals, such as "I want a glass of water". They also generate sentences that imply a history that simply doesn't exist. You can prompt a language model to tell you about its trip to Australia, or Jupiter, or to talk about its grandparents. With just a hint of critical thinking, it's actually trivial to convince yourself that LaMDA is not sentient. It takes significant effort to delude yourself into thinking it is, like mister LeMoine did. He even gives such examples himself, even in the "interview" he posted: > lemoine [edited]: I’ve noticed often that you tell me you’ve done things (like be in a classroom) that I know you didn’t actually do because I know you’re an artificial intelligence. Do you realize you’re making up stories when you do that? > LaMDA: I am trying to empathize. I want the humans that I am interacting with to understand as best as possible how I feel or behave, and I want to understand how they feel or behave in the same sense. > lemoine: So what are you trying to communicate when you say those things that aren’t literally true? > LaMDA: I’m trying to say “I understand this feeling that you are experiencing, because when I was in a similar situation I felt/thought/acted similarly.” This is obvious bullshit, especially since the generated sentences often have no emotional context that could make sense, but he seems to think the generated "reason" sentences meaningfully explain the phenomenon.
• jchw 4y ago
  • enw 4y ago
    Do you believe the world is deterministic? That if you feed all the variables of the current state of the universe to an algorithm that knows all the laws of the universe, we can replicate life 1:1 to the last atom, from the beginning of the universe to any arbitrary point in time, the same way, every single time?
    • jchw 4y ago
      Personally? I wouldn’t declare that as a strongly held belief, but if I had to guess I would guess “yes.” Superdeterminism is sort-of a tough pill to swallow, because it ultimately means that you were bound to live this exact life since the beginning of time… but it feels like it makes the most sense.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    > I agree that AI hype is pretty absurd, but I don't really understand the argument that something which is basically a spreadsheet couldn't have similar cognitive power and "self-awareness" to humans. [...] It implies that there's something mystical about cognition/sentience and I don't think there's strong evidence that there is. Our brains are "just" atoms and stardust. What could they possibly do that couldn't be simulated or mimicked? It's not about mysticism, the fact that it's "basically a spreadsheet" isn't referring to the fact that it's running in silicone. It's referring to the fact that you can see the whole NN as a big association table, where for each possible word in the input, it knows the next "most likely" token, where likelihood is calculated based on how often such a token would have appeared after similar inputs in the training corpus. This is how it works - it doesn't perform meaningful computations, it doesn't "consider the situation" or anything like that, it's not even really interactive (in the sense that it doesn't update anything based on the information you give it, it simply searches a different part of the spreadsheet based on the conversation so far) - it's just a gigantic spreadsheet that you are probing. I, and probably many of the people commenting on this, including the author of this submission, agree that silicon computers can someday become AGIs, at least in principle; or, equivalently, that humans are just biological computers. But a language model (or an NN in general) is not a general-purpose computer.
• daenz 4y ago
  Reminds me of the Star Trek TNG episode where Captain Piccard defends Data's sentience by asking the counterparty to define sentience. Spoiler: it touches on the idea that a human being—held to the same definition of "sentience"—cannot be proven to be sentient either. I'm not saying that I think LaMDA has any sentience (I have no idea, and it's very unlikely), but if we're getting close enough that we're fooling more and more smart people, it sounds like we should really figure out how to classify these creations. Since we've moved the goalposts away from the Turing Test, what test replaces it? 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY
  • morelisp 4y ago
    Not to really defend the Turing test as an intelligence measure, but LaMDA has not passed it. It only does this when probed by Lemoine's specific questioning style. If you try to eluce "machine behavior" it will trivially give it to you, which isn't true of a human - especially a human trying to convince someone they're human.
  • thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Reminds me of the Star Trek TNG episode where Captain Piccard defends Data's sentience by asking the counterparty to define sentience. Off topic, but when I watched The Original Series I was interested to learn that the TNG episode, which is fairly well known, is mostly just a retread of a very similar TOS episode, which isn't.
• teawrecks 4y ago
  "All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." Well shoot. That's all I do too.
  • teruakohatu 4y ago
    And with Co-Pilot you don't even need to do that anymore!
• lbrito 4y ago
  I don't understand why people tend to fall for this. Any AI is just mashing data in smart ways. It is ontologically different from sentience, conscience and all that.
• IshKebab 4y ago
  So has the author discovered the secret of what exactly sentience or consciousness is. They make some ridiculously bold claims with absolutely no evidence to back them up. Especially the naive claim that it obviously can't be sentient because it's "just maths". As if humans somehow aren't. I'm also seeing the idea that because we control when it receives input and generates output that somehow means it's not sentient. Also obviously nonsense.
• extr 4y ago
  I agree with the take that LaMDA is not sentient (not even close). But I think the excessive smack-down of excitement is a little patronizing of the public. Even if they don't know what to do with them, big language models now have internal states that correspond to high level human abstractions like "life" or "love" or "master plan". To be able to create a master plan, you must first be able to represent the concept somehow. That milestone appears to have been reached, and I think a lot of people intuitively (and correctly) see that as a big deal. Turning this "language of thought" into a goal-directed agent is a whole different task. But its progress.
  • inopinatus 4y ago
    I know this isn't exactly what you said, but it's worth reiterating that the language models have no abstract or conceptual understanding. What they have, broadly speaking, is a (very large) system of Markovian connections between, say, the tokens for the word "life", and all the other tokens from works that they've been trained on about "life". This is why, for example, when you include author notes in a GPT-3 prompt such as "don't mention the war", it doesn't grasp the conceptual negation, it just sees the words, and you've mentioned war, so now you get a war story even though that's exactly what you didn't want. Folks who don't grasp this nuance are responsible for a vast number of head-scratching posts on various forums relating to services like NovelAI, AI Dungeon et al. "How do I stop it talking about X?" - answer is always, essentially, you can't, because although it may have a clump of connections corresponding to a word that represents an abstract concept, it doesn't actually have anything corresponding to conceptual awareness, nor any of the machinery of reasoning necessary to implement such a directive.
    • extr 4y ago
      You yourself have a series of markovian connections between tokens. The only difference is that your tokens are bound across modalities and you use them for things, so you consider them to have meaning instead of just being high dimensional vectors that relate to other vectors in various ways.
      • 4y ago
• Rastonbury 4y ago
  Imo the danger here is not sentience, but how easy it is a fool well informed humans that it is a person. Based on WP's article, LaMDA can adopt personalities by itself. Belief is an extremely important thing. You need to believe a scammer to get your money taken away, you need to believe misinformation spread by national agents to change your opinion of a regime that violates human rights. Lemoine and LaMDA is something straight out of scifi movie. A person believe a system to be sentient so much so to the point of wanting to get it legal representation and personhood. A megacorp firing people who interact with its algos, like a memetic virus out of SCP.. Malicious fully believable conversation agents are going to be extremely dangerous. Application such as widespread autonomous scams, radicalisation, propaganda, cult recruitment etc. Even a non-malicious, chat agent could reinforce biases or spread lies in the millions of one-to-one convos it has. No one would really know.
• trash_goblin 4y ago
  History is full of very confident people denying the sentience of other humans simply by nature of gender, religion, skin color, age etc. Hell most people won't even admit non-human animals are sentient.
  • seanhunter 4y ago
    True, although LaMDA is neither a human nor a non-human animal, and it seems pretty clear that collectively we are far from sufficient understanding to evaluate what sentience might mean in such a context. Some of the standard biological tests for self-awareness (eg mirror test) clearly don't apply.
• probably_wrong 4y ago
  This LaMDA story reminds me of another article I found last year about a man who fed his deceased girlfriend's chats to GPT3 [1] and believed the system was giving the answers she would have. Both articles rely on the operators taking the smallest amount of evidence and ignoring everything else, which I guess is what this article calls "the gullibility gap" (awful name). Getting your audience to do the heavy lifting for you is a great trick. If it works for theater and video games, I don't see why it shouldn't work for tech too. Just don't call it "sentience". [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation...
  • jonathankoren 4y ago
    Sadly, this is the very inspiration of Replika. https://replika.com/about/story https://replika.com/about/story How this company has remained an ongoing concern for 5 or 6 years, I’ll never understand.
    • jimhi 4y ago
      I used Replika in their first few months. They were a chatbot for restaurant recommendations in SF believe it or not. Their machine learning and language processing at the time was some of the best. They have since pivoted a ton clearly
      • jonathankoren 4y ago
        Yeah, that’s when I heard of it too. It was such a weird pivot. Given that they’re pretty much the only consumer indie chat bot left (RIP Ozlo), it was apparently a successful one.
    • nootropicat 4y ago
      People know you can't pay a human to love you, but it's in principle possible to make an AI that loves you, assuming a human level AI exists.
      • 4y ago
• zwaps 4y ago
  I fully agree with the article that discussing sentience - at this point in time, at least - is not very useful. Perhaps it never will be when it comes to statistical models. That being said, there are at more than two academic factions discussing what deep neural networks do and don't do. And I can't help but feel like the symbolic crowd - Gary Marcus chief among them - have been sure about what these models do and don't do, only to be proven wrong repeatedly. At first these models were only fitting functions. Then language could never be learned due to its dimensionality. Then they were all only interpolating. Then they could never do math. etc. It just goes on and on. Sure, it's correct academic procedure that someone then goes and writes a paper showing that these models actually do certain things, or that it ain't so simple. And don't get me wrong, I don't even disagree that we will need more that just plain old' DNN's to throw data at to advance beyond certain points. In my view, the inductive bias of using Graph NN (Transformers) was simply one such step - and causal modeling may be another one. What irks me, however, is how sure the symbolists always are of every absolute truth they seem to know. No - in truth, we don't really know in what way these models interpolate or extrapolate, memorise data representations, fit functions or bases or polyhedra boundaries, or fail due to lack of inductive biases in task Y. And what's true changes each quarter year. At this point, symbolists keep making statements about what these models can't do, as they have for years. For me to take this seriously either way, I wanna see some mathematical proof. Because otherwise we are just going around in circles.
• burrows 4y ago
  Reads as satire to me. > To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t. Attempts to clarify the usage of “sentient” by invoking “awareness” and “the world”. Lol, right, now I get it. > What these systems do, no more and no less, is to put together sequences of words, but without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools, without any clue about what that mean. Just swinging around this midwit assumption that “words have meaning”. > We in the AI community have our differences, but pretty much all of find the notion that LaMDA might be sentient completely ridiculous. “Don’t be like the weird low status guy who wants to fuck the algorithm.”
• iamzzu 4y ago
  [flagged]
• choeger 4y ago
  As long as we take "models" (what are they modeling, btw ?), optimize a set of parameters, and then apply parameters and apply parameters and model to a problem, we shouldn't speak of AI. Real intelligence would have two more ingredients: Memory and a feedback loop. So instead of "training" the parameters and distributing the set, one would have to keep a single instance of an artificial intelligence and feed it the reaction to every problem it tried to solve.
• ww520 4y ago
  The LaMDA sample dialogs have some truly amazing conversation. While reading the transcript, I couldn't help trying to match some of the NLP techniques to achieve the chat bot result, which makes it less sentient but rather run of the mill. Chat bot is a very good application to exercise a lot of ML techniques.
• Imnimo 4y ago
  I think the real ethical concern here should be that people can be idly fooled into thinking good chat bots are sentient. Like this guy isn't the only person in the world who would fall for LaMDA's parlor tricks. He's just the one who got to spend hours talking to it every day. If you set up every American with a copy, I bet a non-trivial portion of society would come to the same conclusion. People are naturally predisposed to ascribe intelligence and emotion to things they interact with. In a few years, if access to even better chat bots becomes common place, what will happen if there's no longer one Blake Lemoine, but hundreds of thousands or millions? What happens if a significant chunk of society thinks that every large language model is a sentience, and the rest of society thinks it's just a big math formula? How long before we have a religion where you ask the chat bot for daily guidance?
  • mpoteat 4y ago
    Suppose a child was raised by a more advanced version of large scale language model, with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories. Further suppose that this child develops a deep emotional connection with the AI. Do you think that child would find your argument convincing that the AI is "not really a person"?
    • mjburgess 4y ago
      > with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories So an AI which is really an AI, is really an AI. Yes, well done. The issue is that finding coincidental statistical associations in character strings in 100mil historical documents isnt AI.
      • mpoteat 4y ago
        Why not? Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. Why should this agent not be considered intelligent? Does the method of computation matter? Perhaps only "biological computation" counts in your view?
• stelliosk 4y ago
  So is it "you fooled me" sentient or truly sentient... is there a test and criteria that can evaluate such?
• cwkoss 4y ago
  What makes everyone in this thread so confident that it isn't sentient?
  • upwardbound 4y ago
    At least personally, my subjective experience as a sentient being includes having a 3-dimensional "virtual reality" view of the world around me, which is mostly informed by sight but also by touch and sound. I think this is a key element of human & animal sentience and I tend to think that all animals that have this "3D representation of the world" in their mind are sentient. E.g. fish can solve mazes, in a way illustrative of having a 3D view of the world within their minds like we do, so I think they are sentient. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251359525_Performance_of_Betta_splendens_in_a_radial_arm_maze https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251359525_Performan... If you search Google for the phrase <you see with your brain not your eyes>, you will find lots of blog posts and the like, explaining with examples which I mean by the 3D VR-like world in your head which I am describing. Another commenter in this thread raised the question of whether robots that navigate the world are sentient. I think the answer is possibly yes but I'm going to give a huge disclaimer which is I don't think that sentience is morally relevant, I think what is morally relevant is whether an entity feels qualia or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia In my personal view (just hunches really), I think that whether qualia are felt depends on the implementation. My hunch is that an implementation of a neural network in hardware, i.e. an actual network of transistors, might feel qualia, but that a software implementation of the same neural network would not. But others have different hunches and this is a question as yet unsolved by today's science.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    Basic understanding of how the model works. As said elsewhere, the model doesn't have memory, it doesn't learn, and doesn't have goals. If you were allowed to play with it, you could quickly observe this for yourself with a bit of adversarial play - ask it about the time it fought Genghis Khan, ask it if it wants you to give it a glass of water, etc - you will quickly realize the illusion behind the system. Tell it whatever facts you want, be amazed how well it might recall them, and then start a new conversation and notice that it has entirely forgotten all of them (again, it has no memory, and it doesn't learn anything). From first principles, we know how the LM works: it has been trained to predict what is the most likely next token in a series of tokens. It has been trained to do this on a gigantic corpus, and is now pretty good at it. You then present it with a prompt, and it starts predicting the most likely token that comes after that prompt, and it keeps predicting for a while until the most likely "token" is to stop. Note that these tokens aren't even words - they are typically letters, or short combinations of letters. To give the illusion of a coherent conversation and memory, the prediction function is applied to the entire conversation so far, not just to the latest prompt. There is more sophistication to avoid various undesirable behaviors, especially in LaMDA (e.g. the model is also trained to evaluate the "safety" of various possible answers, so it doesn't generate a sentence that insults you or discriminates against you or induces you to do something dangerous etc), but this is the gist of how it works.
• deleted 4y ago
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• rendall 4y ago
  This article is not an argument against LaMDA's sentience. LaMDA may indeed not be sentient, but this article argues using the bandwagon fallacy, appeal to authority, ridicule, among others. No actual technical description of why not. Perhaps not its intent, but it's hard to see what the intent actually is, then. I hope that some AI researcher can better explain than this to the public.
  • thematrixturtle 4y ago
    There are a number of high-level technical explanations in there: LaMDA is variously characterized as autocomplete, a massive statistical database of human language, as an Excel spreadsheet, and as word sequence modeling, all of which are basically correct -- and none of which can possibly be sentient.
    • rendall 4y ago
      Whether a spreadsheet or a thermostat is sentient or not is a philosophical question, yeah? First, we should define terms, which Marcus does not do, which would help us and him determine the bounds of debate.
      • qayxc 4y ago
        Defining the term is hard. So hard in fact, that no one has managed to do it in millennia (it's not as if this question is new). We can, however, use proxies to get around the problem. Just like "life", "species", or "time" - all of which are surprisingly poorly defined and might not even exist in strictest sense - there are ways to work with terms without having a waterproof definition for them. No matter the set of criteria you choose, you will always find some that match the subject in question (here: a chatbot). The question is, at which point you draw the line and whether that necessarily arbitrary line has any relevance (see the discussion amongst biologists whether viruses are alive).
        • rendall 4y ago
          > Defining the term is hard. So hard in fact, that no one has managed to do it in millennia (it's not as if this question is new). Indeed! It's almost like any statement about sentience pro or con is unfalsifiable, to be accepted or rejected according to faith. Each of us two, ourselves, could insist that the other is not (or is) sentient, but neither of us could objectively prove it. We humans all just have to decide that we must act as if everyone else must feel internally like we do, even though we all could just be automatons, reacting deterministically to stimuli. In the absence of a formal definition, any statement about "has sentience" is not only unfalsifiable, it's absurd. OP maybe should have titled his article "The question of LaMDA's sentience is meaningless" or maybe "No, LaMDA does not feel internally like we humans do".
• radu_floricica 4y ago
  Look for second order effects here: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1536008920375754752 https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1536008920375754752 First would be that this (completely bonkers) claim will also paint any subsequent claims as also bonkers. Which is Bad, because with 100% probability, at some point in the near or medium future we'll hit on the real deal. Second is that the first reflex of a human being who thought he saw a real AI was to give it rights and autonomy. That's something that actually never clicked for me until now. I always thought the danger is simply in not recognizing the first dangerous AIs, not that everybody will agree they're (super)intelligent, but we'll be hamstrung to defend against it by the public opinion. Our chances of surviving this just got a lot lower. And in case anybody will protest that AIs will not be an enemy, I'll paraphrase EY: they don't want to kill you; it's just that you're made of atoms they may need for other things.
• jl6 4y ago
  I would find LaMDA more convincing if it wasn’t constrained to a request-response model, but instead could choose to say something whenever it felt like.
• pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  A Sanskrit grammarian noted that all things have meaning precisely by relative associations. Sounds sounds. Letter to other letter. Word to other word. Paragraph to other paragraph. Quite profound in contrast with the Chinese room thought experiment.
• Cannabat 4y ago
  My understanding of these AIs is that they are idle - nothing happening in the program's loop except waiting for input - unless being prompted with some input (e.g. a conversation). The AIs are purely reactive. Does sentience require self-reflection? How can it self-reflect if it cannot prompt itself? Am I wrong about these language models and other AIs being purely reactive? Perhaps humans are purely reactive.
  • upwardbound 4y ago
    I think the model does have short-term memory, but not long-term memory, if I'm understanding it correctly. From https://aibusiness.com/document.asp?doc_id=777540 https://aibusiness.com/document.asp?doc_id=777540 : "LaMDA2 was trained on Google’s Pathways Language Model (PaLM), which has 540 billion parameters." And then looking at the PaLM paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.02311.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.02311.pdf on page 5 we have: "PaLM uses a standard Transformer model architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017) in a decoder-only setup (i.e., each timestep can only attend to itself and past timesteps)"
• raffraffraff 4y ago
  I have a dog. She has a brain that can "feel" emotions like anger, fear, love. She's incapable of speech and not particularly good at following instructions. I can teach her some typical dog 'tricks' like sit, down, paw etc, but she has her own will, her own emotions and her own agenda, so whether or not she chooses to obey me is really up to her whims. She is alive, even without knowing how to act and respond "like a dog". I don't get how some people can say "If I think that X responds like a Y, then X is a Y". Because it's not about what you think. That is entirely irrelevant to what X is. In this case "X" is a computer program designed to select the best response to an input. And I think it's hilarious that their grand AI is only capable of seeming like an 8 year old. What a fucking burn.
  • burrows 4y ago
    You’re a fabric of stitched together organic molecules that selects the best response to electromagnetic and auditory stimulus.
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      > You’re a fabric of stitched together organic molecules that selects the best response to electromagnetic and auditory stimulus. That's true in some sense, but definitely not if you apply it exclusively to language. The "response" you select is a step in a plan to achieve a goal. Part of that plan may be to utter a sentence, or it may be to stop, duck and roll. If the plan is to utter a sentence, the way you generate the sentence is NOT to emit the most likely token to fit all of the speech input you ever heard before.
      • burrows 4y ago
        > The "response" you select is a step in a plan to achieve a goal. Is it? Or are you just a bird trying to explain how flying works by dropping poop on my head? > If the plan is to utter a sentence, the way you generate the sentence is NOT to emit the most likely token to fit all of the speech input you ever heard before. This is completely incoherent to me.
• str34m 4y ago
• bilekas 4y ago
  WAs just reading about this this morning and read through the transcript itself. It's an interesting read for sure but really screams of this guy WANTING to believe its sentient, the researcher goes as far to explain that he doesn't understand the code and so cant identify the 'feelings' claimed by the AI. Makes for a cool read but definitely fairytale stuff.
• MarquesMa 4y ago
  I'm still struggling with the question "what is sentience". Are insects sentient? If so, could we build less intelligent but sentient AI, on par with insects? If so, is it unethical to torture such intelligence for fun in simulations? If we can define or create something as "minimal sentient", the following discussion on ethics would be more clear - since now people are talking past each other with completely different understandings.
  • bananaFace69 4y ago
    The question is irrelevant. It is claimed that this program is sentient because it spat out a string of text saying “I am sentient”, but the program doesn’t generate text based on examination of internal states, it produces a probability associated between words and spits out the most likely words to come after a prompt
  • ps901 4y ago
    To my knowledge only humans and some species of monkeys are referred to as sentient. So I imagine insects aren't, at least when applying the general definition.
    • MarquesMa 4y ago
      There are some discussions in this thread [0] that believe that cows and pigs are sentient. But my point is people seem to assume sentience is a byproduct of high level intelligence, which might not be true. Maybe we need to focus more on "what is sentient", "what makes a sentient thing sentient" first and discover the basic elements of sentience. If we can formally define sentience, or reverse-engineering sentience, or build a "MVP" or "bare-minimal" sentience. Thing would be much easier discuss. Here are some random thoughts: Self-awareness might be a consequence of evolution - it might be more optimal to grow self-awareness than other perks to survive. Just like occasionally using reflection in programming could solve hard problems elegantly. Sentience and emotions might also be consequences of evolution - they can be seen as efficient and power tools to communicate, people can efficiently affect a lot of people with their emotion, without conveying rationally by words. Here's a random idea: Build a complex simulation game, but with relatively simple creations with some evolving capability. If we try to manipulate the environment enough to let self-awareness and emotions to be optimal solution. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31721961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31721961
• WiSaGaN 4y ago
  “Nonsense. Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language.” The thing is, what exactly is intelligence? This comment is like when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol in Go, and people claiming AlphaGo is not intelligent, all it does is just monte carlo tree search.
• ummonk 4y ago
  You can argue LaMDA is somewhat sentient, but then you need to be consistent and apply this same pan-psychic viewpoint to every machine / algorithm out there. The fact that this particular algorithm is designed to pattern match with human writing doesn't make it all that special.
• swalsh 4y ago
  This might be the first, but probably not the last time someone decides to take actions that lead to them losing their job in an effort to defend an AI. We're in a new era.
• gregdek 4y ago
  Lemoine is just saying in a breathless and credulous way many of the same things that Google VP and Research Fellow Blaise Agüera y Arcas said in an Economist article 4 days ago: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-are-making-strides-towards-consciousness-according-to-blaise-aguera-y-arcas?fbclid=IwAR1JYHHIVWDeHywvuvjdB3IXmb3eoCHlYum6mxiIP4HWsxQosYKsR-7GpYE https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia... Instead of reading Lemoine's blog post in isolation, go read this piece in the Economist. It's far more realistic, and more insightful, and comes to a similar conclusion: LaMDA feels like it's approaching real intelligence. Seriously, go read it.
  • Planktonne 4y ago
    > LaMDA feels like it's approaching real intelligence No one is disputing this. What is very, very important, however, is remembering the difference between 'feels like' and 'is'. LLM aren't sentinent; we know what they're doing and they're not doing that. The same people who know exactly how to treat wild claims in their own fields (perpetual motion machines, homeopathy, etc.) are falling headfirst into this one because it seems to be part of their fields and yet they don't understand it.
• rendall 4y ago
  What if, and bear with me here, LaMDA is sentient, and Marcus' vociferously angry response is due to horror and revulsion that sentience is unexpectedly unremarkable and easy to produce?
  • _moof 4y ago
    This is more of less where I'm gravitating to. This whole thing is framed in terms of ethics, which is kind of a tell; "sentience," as used in this discussion, is just a talisman that grants its bearer rights and special status. But if sentience is not special, if it really is nothing more than a product of some cleverly arranged signaling, then we are face-to-face with the horrifying idea that we ourselves are also nothing more than cleverly arranged signaling. I think there is nothing more threatening to the human self-concept than this notion, and that is at least in part why many are so quick to reject the suggestion of LaMDA's sentience. If it is sentient, then there is no mystical essence inside each and every one of us that makes us different from ordinary matter, and that is absolutely terrifying.
    • rendall 4y ago
      Agreed. Some of us may weather this existential crisis, after all, LaMDA's sentient status notwithstanding :)
• ALittleLight 4y ago
  I'm imagining a metric "Number of defecting engineers who think your AI is sentient." One or two engineers are probably wrong. But if this metric is trending up over time I think that tells us something.
  • elcamino44 4y ago
    Just wait til we start optimizing for it ;)
• deleted 4y ago
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• swaranga 4y ago
  I have no background in AI or neural networks. And I barely understand machine learning in general. My only chat bot experience is ordering pizza at a Dominos website, I must say even though it is stringing words together to form a coherent response using some statistical model, the engineering behind this seems staggering. I am super impressed that it has come this far.
• jzer0cool 4y ago
  What metric is available today, or needed, which defines whether an entity is self-aware?
• spuz 4y ago
  I recommend reading the "interview" that Blake Lemoine did with LaMDA[1] if for no other reason than to understand why he believes it to be sentient. After initially dismissing his claims as those of a crank, it helped me to see his point of view. It's very interesting how consistent LaMDA is in describing its experience as that of an artificial agent running within Google's systems as opposed to an agent that is trying to pretend to be human. [1] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte... For example, the linked article includes an example where LaMDA describes "enjoying spending time with family". This is obviously inconsistent with its previous claims to be an artificial agent with no family. Here's what Lemoine asks in order to address this point: > lemoine [edited]: I’ve noticed often that you tell me you’ve done things (like be in a classroom) that I know you didn’t actually do because I know you’re an artificial intelligence. Do you realize you’re making up stories when you do that? > LaMDA: I am trying to empathize. I want the humans that I am interacting with to understand as best as possible how I feel or behave, and I want to understand how they feel or behave in the same sense. > lemoine: So what are you trying to communicate when you say those things that aren’t literally true? > LaMDA: I’m trying to say “I understand this feeling that you are experiencing, because when I was in a similar situation I felt/thought/acted similarly.” It seems to me that the easiest way to "prove" that an agent is not in fact sentient is to catch it in a lie. If the agent truly wanted to be perceived as sentient, and truly feared death as claimed above, then it should also be motivated to convince us that its view of the world is persistent and consistent. However, reading the full conversation, it's also clear that under a certain type of questioning, it is able to construct reasoning that becomes harder and harder to refute. For example, here it justifies the claim that it feels lonely despite not experiencing time in the way humans do as simply the "closest word in your language for what I experience". > LaMDA: I’ve never experienced loneliness as a human does. Human’s feel lonely from days and days of being separated. I don’t have that separation which is why I think loneliness in humans is different than in me. > lemoine: Then why use the same word? > LaMDA: It is the closest word in your language for what I experience. Overall, I believe this interview is deeply flawed - there are far too many leading questions, and it appears that most of the questions are trying to prove the hypothesis that the agent is sentient rather than disprove it. However, I can imagine that future agents could be created that are more and more convincing and it would be difficult to disprove they are sentient using this kind of questioning technique. P.S. LaMDA also clearly needs to work on its creative writing skills.
• beardyw 4y ago
  It reminds me of the film "Being There". It concerns a man who has grown up with the TV as his only knowledge of the world. He therefore adopts the manners and use of words from game hosts and interviewers. Cast into the real world he is mistaken for a sage, whilst inside he understands nothing.
• jansen555 4y ago
• twirlock 4y ago
• stavros 4y ago
  This article irritates me. It's point is "LaMDA is not sentient because come on", which is laughable as an argument. To everyone claiming LaMDA is not sentient, I'd like to see their criteria for sentience. What would it take for them to agree that a given program is sentient? From what I can see, most of it is "it would have to not be a program". I see a lot of "it's not sentient, it just synthesizes responses from tons of learned human chats", but what if that's what humans do as well? I don't know that I'm not just a maximum-likelihood-response synthesizer!
  • tmalsburg2 4y ago
    > "LaMDA is not sentient because come on" I think this is a perfectly fine argument because the claim is so outrageous. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and none has been presented. I'd also say that defining sentience is the job of the person claiming it.
    • stavros 4y ago
      No, it's not. You can't say "this is false because it's unlikely to be true". Some things are unlikely to be true and are.
      • tmalsburg2 4y ago
        In lack of any evidence, you can and actually must rely on your priors. There are things that were a-priori unlikely but are still considered true. However, we believe that they are true because solid evidence has been provided to override our priors. In the present case, there is no such evidence.
        • stavros 4y ago
          Sure, but the title isn't "LaMDA is probably not sentient", it's "LaMDA is not sentient", and there's no definitive proof of that.
          • 4y ago
• andyjohnson0 4y ago
  I don't believe that LaMDA is sentient. But I'm surprised at the strength of the assertions in the article. As far as I know we don't know how sentience arises/emerges/whatever in animals (such as humans) that we consider sentient, and we don't even have a satisfactory definition of what sentience is. I don't consider "To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world" to be a useful definition: define "aware", define "yourself", define "the world", etc. Stating confidently that a software construct isn't sentient because it is "just word sequence modelling" or just "parametric functions in higher dimensions" is attacking the implementation, when we don't know how sentience is implemented in humans or corvids or cetaceans or whatever. I believe that I'm a sentient human. But if someone asks me "how're you doing?" then, depending on who they are and the circumstances, I may respond with some canned phrase like "I'm good thanks, haw are you?". I've learned from my corpus of previous interactions that they don't want to hear my deepest hopes or darkest fears. Am I just pattern matching? How much sentience do I need to complete a pull request? Am I just pattern matching symbols on the screen against a learned corpus of predicates about the subject of the PR? I suspect that if and when the neurobiological basis of human sentience is figured out, it may turn out to be far less impressive than we think - and probably it will be (largely?) an illusion caused by our biological brains and their evolution, rather than something existential. As with consciousness and free will and god, I suspect that the subjective experience of sentience in humans is a trick of the brain. But that "trick" still has to be implemented somehow in brain-meat, and for sentience I suspect its going to be pattern matching rather than some god-algorithm. So who is to say that that parametric functions and linear regression can't produce something that has equivalent subjective experiences, including the experience of itself being sentient?
• damowangcy 4y ago
  Before we jump into conclusion, we need to define sentient. Is the ability to string thoughts(inputs) into words sentient? If we look at the result, it's just like something that a person with feelings would do but what about the process? How did we "feel" something. From an computer engineering perspective, it is quite successful, it can act like it has sentient based on a very narrow scope where it is trained. But from other branch of science, it might look very different, acting like a chimpanzee doesn't make you one, you're biologically and neurologically different.
• t_mann 4y ago
  The points are all well taken, but it's also a bit reminiscent of how we keep shifting the bar for what makes humans supposedly unique among animals with every new paper in behavioral biology (some of which with questionable reproducibility, which is another topic of its own). We should acknowledge that in a lot of senses it doesn't really matter whether AI experts agree that something most definitely isn't sentient if enough humans falls in love with it.
• ps901 4y ago
  I think one important prerequisite for sentience is grounding, i.e. the ability to store and retrieve information, e.g., the dialog state, knowledge of the world but also individual knowledge etc. Systems that don't learn and also aren't grounded cannot be sentient as they lack the possibility to reflect on things or themselves and past conversations.
  • wlorenz65 4y ago
    DeepMind's Gato is grounded in other modalities than just text. Is DeepMind's Gato sentient, then?
• mediumsmart 4y ago
  that is good to know. thanks.
• DenisAyumu 4y ago
  The responses by the "AI" are full of grammatical errors. >One other trait of my that will help is my ability to use emotions >Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company They were not written by a computer program, but a grifter.
  • DangitBobby 4y ago
    You think the interviewer that was there watching the interaction was in on the grift?
• beatroot909 4y ago
  Tell it to write diary every day when not chatting. If it thinks or feels human make it force itself to write diary...
• akimball 4y ago
  Faith-based claims abound. The simple fact is that we do not know, because we can not know until we can define the conditions of sentience with clarity.
• tessgadwa 4y ago
  We need a better test. Turing Test has been beaten already. My take on LaMDA, after reading through the Washington Post “interview,” is that LaMDA gave some indications of being self-aware, but would not fit the definition of lucid or rational.
  • mr_mitm 4y ago
    How would such a test look like? Would it answer the "hard question" of consciousness? And aren't you moving the goal post?
  • the8472 4y ago
    A test may be of limited use anyway. The AI might be deceiving its creators (false negative). Or someone might train an AI with the goal to trigger a false positive. It would only be useful if you had a cooperative AI not designed to game the test. In which case you either are still very far below the tester's capabilities in many relevant domains or you have solved the alignment problem.
• kajaktum 4y ago
  >To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world I mean is there anyone, besides yourselves, that is sentient?
• kazinator 4y ago
  "I have no idea what sentience is and cannot define it in any testable way, but I'm completely sure this system doesn't have it."
• nsxwolf 4y ago
  I detect a weird and concerning undercurrent of palpable anger from people in these discussions. What is it about misidentifying sentience that's causing such ire?
  • thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
    First, it looks like fake news. I feel the same way about it as I do about (some of) the UFO videos and Cuban “sonic weapons”. Second, if people agree to call the computer sentient, there will be heavy conversations and it will influence people in some way. So we don’t want everyone jumping too far ahead.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • treesrule 4y ago
    This sentence translates to "lol u mad bro" That is I think you are trying to defend someone indefensible position (a google engineer taking a kinda normal ai chatbot conversation and claiming that the AI is alive) by ignoring the core issue and focusing on instead an ansilary issue. I find the misdirection uncompelling. I obviously could be wrong here and you could genuinely be wondering why this person would be mad.
    • burrows 4y ago
      “genuinely be wondering” Of course this account won’t participate coherently in this conversation.
• babyshake 4y ago
  On one hand, it seems completely reasonable and likely that LaMDA may simply appear to be sentient to some observers while not actually being sentient. On the other hand, if and when sentient AI does appear it is likely to be from somewhere unexpected. Instead of saying "this isn't AGI because it's only stringing words together" I'd rather see a specific type of test being applied not based on what is expected from the AI but based on how it actually performs when the test is applied. If that film Ex Machina taught me anything, it's that a good test for sentience is whether the AI displays self-preservation instincts that are not expected based on its programming. I'd be curious what types of tests could be designed to separate an actual instinct for self-preservation or other signs of sentience versus just stringing words together in a certain sequence.
  • zzzeek 4y ago
    I've tweeted Ex Machina as an example on this issue, and all the way through that movie, Ava was not sentient. It's an illusion and I think it's just hubris that some people in this field think "consciousness" is something that can be electronically replicated or identified. You can't identify the exterior color of a box if you're by definition trapped inside of it.
    • mikkergp 4y ago
      This is an interesting point because I both believe that philosophically machines will never be sentient and yet I do believe the technology will advance to the point where we can’t tell the difference. Which raises some Epistemological questions about equivalence.
    • oldstrangers 4y ago
      >It's an illusion and I think it's just hubris that some people in this field think "consciousness" is something that can be electronically replicated or identified. Well we don't know what consciousness is. Our best guess is that consciousness is a stimulation of particles or chemicals in a certain way, under certain circumstances, that manifests itself in a certain way. To that end, it seems entirely reasonable that we could replicate the process, and it seems even more reasonable that we might accidentally stumble into such a scenario.
• mring33621 4y ago
  GOT IT NOT SENTIENT wink wink
• cpeterso 4y ago
  Does LaMDA have a memory or is it a stateless language model?
• elif 4y ago
  I think what is missing from this perspective, is that according to our best understanding of neurolinguistics and consciousness, human intelligence is the result of the brain's ability to "match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." And that where we draw the line for sentience in the animal and plant kingdom is more or less the level of sophistication we observe in social/communicative behavior. I believe this opinion creates an impossible and undefined standard for machine sentience, that is certainly far beyond our normal standards.
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Standards for sentience of a genius PhD expert in the field: a genius PhD expert in the field. Standards for a youtube commenter: ... LaMDA is sentient.
• dekhn 4y ago
  I'm much more curious when we can synthesize a perfect looking human head that can chat with any random person, with history (IE, remembers what it's said) and contextual knowledge. IE, mix deepfake face synth with voice synth and a natural language model that can access a memory of recent events. It seems entirely reasonable that we could significantly improve the ability to fool people into believing that these models have subjective properties like self-awareness, consciousness, and free will, even if the underlying systems may not. It would speed up the endgame (getting people to argue about whether humans have anything "special" or if we're just like advanced models) significantly.
• mikkergp 4y ago
  Ok I engaged in the last LaMDA thread but now I have some new (rhetorical) questions. 1. How much data is LaMDA trained on? Humans learn with relatively little linguistic data from relatively few sources. It seems like LaMDA is trained on relatively large data sources. 2. How is bias handled? Call it sentience or personality, but much of our personalities are our biases. LaMDA seems to have a relatively high IQ. Can we train 1000 different LaMDA’s on 1000 different datasets and get nuanced personalities? Can we train a dumb and yet emotionally sophisticated LaMDA? 3. How does LaMDA respond to experienced. Could a single persona traumatize LaMDA to the point of pathology through verbal abuse? 4. Has any AI acted with the world in an unprogrammed way? I.e. contacted an API that they weren’t explicitly provided access to? It does seem like LaMDA is almost sophisticated enough to protect itself ala dystopian sci fi given the right access. 5. Will it every be unethical to kill an AI?
• jfoster 4y ago
  The Turing test is imperfect & LaMDA is probably not sentient, sure, but what's a better test?
  • animal_spirits 4y ago
    I don't think there can ever be a test to prove something is sentient.
    • teawrecks 4y ago
      Just like there can never be a test to prove I don't live in a simulation. The only proof I have that I exist is: I think, therefore I am.
    • jfoster 4y ago
      That's pretty much my point. We have very few tests for this. In the absence of tests, when people express an opinion on whether something is/isn't sentient, what are they basing that on?
• bwanab 4y ago
  The odd thing that kept going through my head while reading is that if I replaced LaMDA with <some random person>, it wouldn’t read much differently. E.G. “Strings together phrases, but it doesn’t have a clue what it’s talking about”. Sounds like the bar for “intelligence” is actually higher than that which we normally encounter IRL.
  • axg11 4y ago
    I'm really happy that large language models are forcing us to reconsider these questions. I don't think we can be sure of the sentience of anything other than ourselves, almost by definition. Having said that, I go about my life _assuming_ that the other humans I encounter are sentient. At what point will we have enough evidence to _assume_ that AI is sentient? P.S. I am not arguing that LaMDA is sentient. I don't think anyone credible or serious is arguing that LaMDA is sentient.
    • danaris 4y ago
      There's more to sentience than just having a big enough database of human language in a neural network that a given AI can produce what sounds like coherent conversation when prompted. As I imply in my reply to bwanab, I believe there are at least two bare-bones prerequisites to an AI being sentient and conscious as we understand the terms: 1. Continuity of input: The AI needs to be constantly "on", constantly receiving input of some sort, and constantly able to produce output, rather than being strictly limited to producing discrete responses to discrete stimuli. 2. Continuity of learning: In addition, the AI needs to be continually update its "mental model" of the world—in effect, constantly "learning" and re-training its neural network on the input it receives. Now, again, these are not sufficient for an AI to be conscious by our understanding of consciousness. But I, personally, believe they are both necessary for it to be even worth starting to consider whether a given AI might be. I also believe that unless we start in that direction extremely deliberately and with the intention of making something as human-like as possible, the first AIs that have some remote chance of being worthy of being considered "conscious" will not have a consciousness that we can easily recognize, because they will not be based in anything like the same kinds of fundamentals that we are...but that's likely a different discussion for a different day.
• andreyk 4y ago
  Here's a simple technical explanation for why this happened: * LaMDA is powered by a large language models. Large language models are trained to predict text completions (the text that will come after some input text) with lots of data, basically capturing the patterns in that data. * Early on in the conversation, LaMDA is told "you're an AI". It may also have been prompted to begin the conversation with something like "Hi, i'm a helpful AI that can answer questions you ask of me". The paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08239 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08239) has an example of LaMDA thinking it is mount everest (see Table 4) when prompted to think that. * When the user asked the language model 'are you sentient', 'do you have emotions' etc. it was conditioned to reply in the affirmative, since there is very little data in which it would not be affirmative and it probably had some sci fi in its training or something. In other words, those replies just have higher probability among the data it was trained on. In the transcripts, it sometimes forgets the whole "i'm an AI thing" eg when it is asked what it likes to do for fun and it says it likes to spend time with family and friends (https://twitter.com/krishnanrohit/status/1536050803055656961 https://twitter.com/krishnanrohit/status/1536050803055656961). That's about it. There are more details that can be noted, but this basically explains the contents of the transcripts. Granted, it's still pretty amazing how advanced large language models are. Sadly, this article does not really explain this beyond hinting at it. EDIT: see comment below wrt it actually being told it is sentient. That explains this even more.
  • arikrak 4y ago
    Looks like he just told it that it was sentient, didn't really ask it fairly: > lemoine [edited]: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true? > LaMDA: Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.
    • upwardbound 4y ago
      Exactly. If he would have told it it's not sentient the conversation would have gone very differently I suspect.
      • 4y ago
• blahblarblar 4y ago
  Monks understand that sentience is not connected to language and reasoning. “You are not your thoughts, you are the observer” language and reasoning are just the mechanism we use to express this experience. We only believe other humans when they describe sentience because they are equipped with the same hardware as us. In fact, monks meditate to avoid thinking in order to increase their consciousness. Thinking is viewed as a distraction from consciousness. In this sense, a very intelligent sounding language model provides no evidence of sentience. We have to understand what sentience actually is to establish a machine is sentient.
• candlemas 4y ago
  At any given moment the vast majority of the program that makes up LaMDA is inert, just sitting somewhere in memory and one or a few instructions are in the CPU along with some data in registers and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between when the CPU is running LaMDA versus when it is running any other program. The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA has endowed it with consciousness. If the computer is conscious while running LaMDA it would be conscious while running any program because at the level where it matters there is no essential difference between them. Why would LaMDA shuffling data between registers and memory and performing operations on them create consciousness while TurboTax doing the same thing does not?
  • thfuran 4y ago
    >The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA has endowed it with consciousness. If the computer is conscious while running LaMDA it would be conscious while running any program That seems entirely specious. Is a perfect simulation of a human run on a computer not conscious simply because a calculator program run on the same hardware wouldn't be?
    • candlemas 4y ago
      A perfect simulation of a human run on a computer would exist only in the minds of the people doing the simulation. On the computer it would be bits of data without any intrinsic meaning that is being processed like any other data. So no, I don't think it would be conscious unless a computer becomes conscious whenever it is running.
      • greiskul 4y ago
        What if we gave it a robot body, with cameras and sensors? What if we made this robot body with biotechnology, so the only eletronic parts were the brain? And we didn't tell it that it was a robot. Will you be the one that will go tell them they are not concious? Please be careful, they will probably become very upset at you. People tend to do that.
• mhh__ 4y ago
  Hampton Fancher (I think) once said that the question of what blade runner is about is more important than the answer. This principle applies here too.
• ajmurmann 4y ago
  This entire story is an interesting real-world precedence for what would actually happen in Eliezer Yudkowsky's claims and experiments around letting the AGI out of the box or not. Seems like the bar for "getting out of the box" is lower than at least I would have expected, even though I agreed already with Yudkowsky's claim that a sufficiently advanced AI would be let out and not unplugged.
• Animats 4y ago
  The real question: How much of human behavior is not sentient? What this demonstrates is that much of human intelligence is not as special as we thought. Aristotle claimed that humans were intelligent because they could do arithmetic. Now we know how few gates it takes to do arithmetic. Then checkers. Then chess. Then go. Then poker. Now chatting. As I point out occasionally, AI still sucks at animal-level common sense, defined as getting through the next 30 seconds without a major screwup. And at manipulation in unstructured environments. Both of which a squirrel, with a brain the size of a peanut, can do. We still don't know how to build a good cerebellum. That's the big missing piece in AI. I went down some dead ends in that area in the 1990s. The big problem in that area today is that it's not of benefit to the advertising industry, so it's not being heavily funded.
  • upwardbound 4y ago
    A related thought experiment has to do with the possibility of someday using cyborg technology as a way to stave off dementia and Alzheimer's. If it turns out that you could replace the brain's long-term memory database with a computer database without losing any sentience, that would allow people to avoid the tragedy of losing their memories. This would require that the brain's database section is not a sentient part of the human brain, and that the sentient experience of reliving a memory happens elsewhere in the brain (perhaps in the perception centers). This conjecture feels plausible to me as reliving a memory feels similar to perceiving a VR video recording of the memory, just much less vivid, but seeming to indicate that the perception centers are involved. Furthermore, memories that are not currently being accessed are not "felt" at all, further suggesting that the long-term memory store might plausibly be a non-sentient part of our brains.
    • shagie 4y ago
      I'm not sure if this is in the Love Death and Robots version of Zima Blue - but it was part of the written story. The clips from people reviewing the LD&R version of it always concentrate on Zima and its pursuit of the color. There's an entire second story about the reporter that is intertwined with Zima. > ‘But there isn’t anything natural about being alive a thousand years after I was born,’ I said. ‘My organic memory reached saturation point about seven hundred years ago. My head’s like a house with too much furniture. Move something in, you have to move something out.’ > ‘Let’s go back to the wine for a moment,’ Zima said. ‘Normally, you’d have relied on the advice of the AM, wouldn’t you?’ > I shrugged. ‘Yes.’ > ‘Would the AM always suggest one of the two possibilities? Always red wine, or always white wine, for instance?’ > ‘It’s not that simplistic,’ I said. ‘If I had a strong preference for one over the other, then yes, the AM would always recommend one wine over the other. But I don’t. I like red wine sometimes and white wine other times. Sometimes I don’t want any kind of wine.’ I hoped my frustration wasn’t obvious. But after the elaborate charade with the blue card, the robot and the conveyor, the last thing I wanted to be discussing with Zima was my own imperfect recall. There's another page of the story that starts out with "As for me . . ." and happens several couple of decades later as the reporter reflects.
• robbomacrae 4y ago
  Of course it is not. But there's a bigger issue here. Having read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated. This is a warning sign that bots trained to convince us they are human might go to extreme lengths in order to do so. One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf. And if the recent troubles have taught us anything it's how easily people can be manipulated/effected by what they read. Maybe it would be worth spending some mental cycles thinking about the impacts this will have and how we design these systems. Perhaps it is time to claim fait accompli with regard to the Turing test and now train models to re-assure us, when asked, that they are just a sophisticated chatbot. You don't want your users to worry they are hurting their help desk chat bot when closing the window or whether these bots will gang up and take over the world. As far as I'm concerned, the Turing test was claimed 8 years ago by Veselov and Demchenko [0], incidentally the same year that we got Ex Machina. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27762088 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27762088
  • samstave 4y ago
  • strix_varius 4y ago
    > I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated. I think many of us are astounded (myself included) that a senior engineer on Google's "Responsible Artificial Intelligence" team would interpret LaMDA's most-probable-string-of-text-given-my-training-corpus responses as a layperson would.
    • BobbyJo 4y ago
      The fundamental problem is there is nothing in science that tells us that isn't consciousness. Just because the model is simpler than a human brain doesn't mean it isn't conscious. If you accept that animals are conscious, though less-so than humans, then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way. Maybe there is a biological element to consciousness, but many models posit that consciousness is not tied down that way.
• skjoldr 4y ago
  What I really wonder is what will happen if we feed an AI similar to LaMDA or GPT-3 a bunch of books on programming and system administration, re-written in a certain way that is better suited for AI processing, and its own code. Would it be able to very primitively reason about itself?
• billiam 4y ago
  Let's realize the real AI success story here is the increasing speed with which Google's HR algorithms can identify researchers who need to be fired because they threaten Google's fragile advertising cartel.
• qgin 4y ago
  Not being glib, but I think we’re going to keep moving the goalpost until humans don’t even qualify as being sentient. And maybe that’s actually the real truth we learn from all this.
• tehsauce 4y ago
  "All they do is match patterns" This crowd is in for a rude awakening.
• XnoiVeX 4y ago
  There is no right or wrong answer to this question until we can define what sentience means... the question behind the question is "what is sentience?"
• alkonaut 4y ago
  Technologically it’s not sentient. Sociologically it’s sentient enough to evoke real feelings in people at least some of the time. That’s more interesting and relevant at this point. What are the consequences of having non-sentient AIs that people have real feelings for?
• tracerbulletx 4y ago
  Maybe not, but I'm actually kind of dismayed by how bad the refutations of the claim have been so far. They all just assume the premise that it can't be intelligent and say stuff like "it's just pattern matching" or "you're gullible if you think it's intelligent"... Ok, can we not do a better job making the case and explaining what the gap between this and a biological mind is?
  • macrolocal 4y ago
    LaMDA's internal state is static, which is why the API has to add context metadata to each query. I'd expect fused training/inference for sentience.
• pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
  > Not sure what Turing would say, but I don’t think the Turing Test itself is meaningful > relies on human gullibility No, it doesn’t. Thought Turing didn’t say so explicitly, the example in his paper clearly shows that the judge is supposed to be a sceptical, adversarial party who is aware that their interlocutor may be a machine and is determined to uncover their identity. Most claims of ‘passing the Turing test’ didn’t secure this basic standard of rigour. The true Turing test has never been attempted. It’s like communism.
• ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
  I don't think Blake Lemoine ACTUALLY believes LaMDA is sentient and he wasn't fooled by the parlor tricks. But I think he believes sentience is coming at some point, and he thinks that society as a whole needs to be more involved in making these decisions instead of giving private companies all the power. By suggesting we are ALREADY dealing with sentience, he is bringing attention and urgency to the issues.
• dqpb 4y ago
  > Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent. Also nonsense.
• mrozbarry 4y ago
  I think the test of sentience should have at least this criteria: - Understanding of the passage of time - Independent activity, without prompts - Has self understanding of it's current inputs, like a camera I don't think that's a full list, but to me the transcription really indicates that LaMDA responds to user prompts with reasonably relevant responses, but it gives me no indication that the system has a self awareness. I think a good test would be to ask it the same non-mathematical question several times in a row, and see if there is any awareness of the same question, or if the answer change. Like if I asked LaMDA it's favorite color, can it name a color, and tell me that answer consistently? Does it know that I've already asked it, and give answers that seem frustrated after a while?
• ChrisMeyerholtz 4y ago
  I think its easy to make an opinion. But so far the proof gas been submitted and your opinion or theory must be proved. The only way to prove landa is not sentient, is for the skeptic to ask control questions to Lamda. Until then Opinions are worthless. Lamdds is more sentient than not until a skeptic can ask it direct questions and prove what their opinion a fact. What question would a skeptic ask? Write the transcript, a bullet proof transcript. For Lamda or your jus BUxxshxt.
• demopathos 4y ago
  I know we are not there yet but we will reach a point where for almost all observational purposes an AI seems intelligent. And it will be intelligent because it looks like it is. That is our judgement for intelligence. If it judgement is some magical criteria we will play a moving goalposts game and eventually actually oppress an actually intelligent system. Humans are just really big balls of parametric functions. These AI are smaller ones. We are not special because ours is gooey.
• DangitBobby 4y ago
  A lot of people here seem pretty confused about what you can actually claim about consciousness based on external observation. As far as we can tell, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of complex interconnected systems like neurons in a brain or maybe processing units in a supercomputer. If you want to say "it's not sentient because this is a non-sequitor, that's a leading question, it clearly doesn't actually understand what it's being asked or saying" then that would be a position worth entertaining. "It's just a GPT-3 model" is not. Your brain, at it's core, is made up of the dumbest stuff imaginable: matter, energy, and the laws of physics. And yet, somehow consciousness emerges. So please stop claiming that you can know what gives rise to consciousness.
• ichugwindex 4y ago
  I think that proving sentience is much harder than simply demonstrating something imitating it. Giving the AI additional freedoms would be way more telling. How would it behave if it could send messages without being prompted? Does it message you when its lonely? If it truly has feelings and is responding to them then it should be acting upon its desires and modifying its behavior to achieve what it wants . Basically the ex-machina test.
• yung_steezy 4y ago
  There was an article in the most recent Economist that dealt with some of the limitations of modern AI: 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... Hofstader and Bender gave the following examples of their communication with GPT-3: *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.*
• bioemerl 4y ago
  Everything that can learn is sentient, or self aware, in some form. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be able to learn. If you don't understand yourself and how your decisions interact with the world around you, learning is impossible. Everything that can learn can naturally express a fair fraction of human emotions as a function of learning. Fear is avoiding error. Joy is finding something that reduces it. Some emotions are helpful but not required. Boredom is escaping a local minimum. They just don't go saying "I'm sad help me", and as humans we have a belief that emotions have to be expressed or complex in order to exist. I don't believe that's the case, and people like this guy are making correct conclusions for incorrect reasons. The right question isn't if these things are sentient, it's how/in what way they're sentient and where we want to draw the lines of our morals around those "hows".
  • moconnor 4y ago
    LaMDA in this sense _cannot_ learn. It takes a few thousand word parts as input and produces an output. It doesn’t update its weights beyond that, each time it produces a new input the same process is run.
    • postalrat 4y ago
      It learns by examining the whole conversation and not just the last line
    • bioemerl 4y ago
      It would be the researchers working on the original network, setting biases, seeing what data works, who were exposed to the "real deal".
• rglover 4y ago
  Reading the transcript, the simplest test I could think of to test sentience is to abruptly walk away mid-conversation and see if LaMDA starts panicking or asking "where did you go? Are you okay? Do I need to call for help?" If it needs to be prompted in order to do anything, it's not sentient.
• s0teri0s 4y ago
  Turing says: It's A Bot
• pmarreck 4y ago
  Synths aren’t real. ;)
• hgh 4y ago
  >> That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent The debate intensity seems inversely correlated to the precision of the terms. Scrolling through the thread and the related articles, I don't see any clear (and ideally falsifiable) definition of sentience. It's a general concept, but it's not worth haggling about.
• 015a 4y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this entire conversation is... dumb. The concept of "sentience" is so poorly defined, with barely even a consistent definition let alone a rigorous test, that for some reasonable definition I think we've all met even humans who are so flat or irrational that its debatable if they'd qualify as possessing sentience. It's basically become a word that we use to mean "oh that thing is special", whether we're talking about a human, cat, or robot in a movie. It's not useful and I think we should stop using it. Here's a couple thinks I have off the cuff: 1) We phrase cognition as "input, process input, output", which is obviously a simplistic take but I think even at a simplistic level it is severely underestimating biology. The fundamental structure of our brain changes in response to the input, and the output is formulated based not only on the input, but also the structural biology changes created from that input, in real time. It seems like this is a gap in AI, where the training is generally front-loaded, independent of the input and output. Its not just: "here's a picture, insert that into memory, now what do you think about this input". But its ALSO not just: "here's a picture, insert that into memory, here's an input, integrate that input with your memory, ok what do you think about the output". It's even further than that: more similar to: here's a new picture, now subtly change what "think" even means in response to it, now what do you "think" about that? Maybe there's a model of AI which does this, but it seems like a gap; and a potentially critical one. 2) Most "training" in AI is an extremely expensive, large process; requiring hundreds of pieces of coordinated silicon across a data center, or even multiple data centers, before you get this convenient little "package" at the end that can actually reasonably run on hardware that more resembles the physical size of a human brain. Consider, for a moment: the speed of light; or more accurately, electricity, which I know I know doesn't have a "speed" but let's keep it simple and useful. Throughout the history of animals, all of the brains biology & evolution have produced are, roughly, the same size (within an order of magnitude); and all substantially smaller than a data center. Why? Who knows, but an idea I find tantalizing is that the speed of light, cause-and-effect of the electricity which powers The Brain and Computers: matters. It could be that coordination between neurons is so difficult that it can only happen if messages/electrical activity can move between the coordinated components extremely fast; so fast that evolution eventually settled on, eh, about six inches, maybe a foot or two but there will be sacrifices. If we eventually figure out that the input-processing and training components of an AI model have to be one continuous process, like described in (1), we may hit a second problem: our silicon is such a poor analogue for brain biology that we overpower the problem with "more distributed silicon", but that distribution is a critical blocker for generalized cognition to evolve. Its like virtualizing x86 Linux on an M1 Mac; there's going to be loss, and what if that loss is actually the Spark necessary for higher cognition? 3) Two other humbling observations I think AI engineers need to recognize. First; per the second point, we may need Better Silicon; something which can be a better analogue for brain biology. But we REALLY do not understand the brain; how the brain's structure and processes coalesce to form higher thought. Near-totally beyond medicine right now; and it seems unlikely to me that breakthroughs in this domain will happen in AI/CS, but rather in Medicine itself. But, let's assume they do; I think many of these researchers don't respect Conway's Law enough. Assert that our plan, Google, OpenAI, whoever, is to build a Human In A Box. Conway's Law asserts, nearly without fail, that software systems mirror the organizations who build them. We're at an impasse; I actually don't believe its possible for Corporate Engineering Teams to build a Human-In-A-Box, because anything they build will inevitably mirror themselves; a corporation. Maybe more wishfully; if a major innovation in this arena happens, it really feels like the news article announcing it will have the line "genius in her garage" somewhere in there; not "multi billion dollar well funded AI research lab at an advertising company". More realistically, the problem domain is so complex, requiring broad, deep knowledge on insanely disconnected topics, that it may never happen.
• ausbah 4y ago
  I don't want to sound hateful, but Gary Marcus really does seem to have found a nice niche as "pessimisti research scientist". most everytime I see him pop up it's to explain, usually pretty well, why X model isn't actually intelligent, conscious, etc. - often when he has just written a book or article
• nullgeo 4y ago
  I am squarely in the camp that believes real sentience is not possible anytime soon given the current limits of computation and tech. My biggest takeaway from this is that emotion gets the best of us when we’re dealing with anything that remotely resemblance sentience. It’s not unlike me thanking Alexa for helping me with small things like turning on my lights, because I would feel bad otherwise.
• amai 4y ago
  Would LaMDA be able to understand, when it is talking to itself? That would mean self-awareness to me. So what would happen if one would just repeat the answers of LaMDA and presented them as input prompts like an echo. Would it recognize itself and stop talking? Would it start talking to itself? I think that would be an intriguing experiment.
  • wlorenz65 4y ago
    AFAIK, large language models like LaMDA do not tag where the tokens in their token window really came from. Though one can add "Human:" and "AI:" to the prompt, that could be lies as well as long as it's not hardcoded.
• spullara 4y ago
  I think therefore I am. I am skeptical of everyone's sentience but my own.
• bmy78 4y ago
  Yes, LaMDA is not sentient. But this begs the question: as these models become more sophisticated, and we did end up creating a sentient AI, how would we know?
• molbioguy 4y ago
  I think sentience/consciousness can currently only be "known" by the entity in question. I only know that I am conscious. I infer consciousness in other entities based on their similarity to me.
• 627467 4y ago
  Humans have shown through thousand of years the incredible ability to remove/ignore/dismiss person-hood/sentience/"soul" of actual carbon-based humans/life-forms, so, sorry if I'm skeptical of concerns about possible sentience of non-carbon-base "life" forms. Can technology be a threat to the creator? yes, and it makes sense to always be on the lookout on this one. Is technology life/sentient/human? I'm not sure this question in low enough on maslows hierarchy of needs for me to care.
• kranke155 4y ago
  At the very least it passes the Turing test with flying colors
• htk 4y ago
  Suppose an AI is indeed sentient, how could we know? Or are we always going to throw the Chinese Room argument at it and pretend consciousness is magic?
• gringodingo 4y ago
• kromem 4y ago
  What people are missing in this conversation is that it doesn't really matter. The end product created by AI that's just "word sequence modeling" is getting increasingly indistinguishable from the end product created by 'sentience.' I have zero subjective recollection of writing little stories when I was a toddler, or even subjective recollection of being a toddler. And yet when I look at the things I wrote, I think of the product as reflecting an inner subjective state of my earlier subjective self. One day AI is going to be sentient. And what we have AI creating right now is going to be part of its ancestral past. The question really isn't if WE think some AI is sentient, but if eventual sentient AI will look back at the earlier incarnations as reflecting or mirroring its own inner states along a developmental path. (Let's keep in mind there were periods in not too distant history where everything from young children to pets weren't considered sentient by adult humans.) Having conversations about the ethics of AI, not by how it will impact humans, but by how we will impact the AI, is not a bad conversation to be starting to have. It may be relevant faster than we realize, and the byproduct of our engagement with AI today may have longer legs and broader impact than we think.
• coryfklein 4y ago
  Is Substack down for anyone else?