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LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models -
by srvmshr 4y ago
LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding.
GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.)
The belief of sentience isn't new. When ELIZA came out few decades ago, a lot of people were also astounded & thought this "probably was more than met the eyes".
It's a fad. Once people understand that sentience also means self-awareness, empathy & extrapolation of logic to assess unseen task (to name a few), this myth will taper off.
- scotty79 4y agoI think the path to actually considering those models to be sentient is to make them able to assimilate new knowledge from conversation and making them able to create reasonably supported train of thought leading from some facts to a conclusion, akin to mathematical proof.
- nuccy 4y agoWasn't new knowledge assimilation from talks the reason for Microsoft infamous Twitter chatbot to be discarded [1]. Despite such ability it definitely was not sentient. I rised this point in another thread on HN about LaMDA: all its answers were "yes"-answers, not a single "no". Self-sentient AI should have its own point of view: reject what it thinks is false, and agree about what it thinks is true. 1. https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
- Trasmatta 4y agoI agree that it's not sentient, but why would commonplace logic be a pre requisite for sentience / consciousness / qualia / whatever you want to call it?
- srvmshr 4y agoA brilliant colleague Janelle Shane works specifically on how language models fail (obnoxiously often). This is her line of research to show how LLMs are overhyped / given more credit than should be. I think her fun little experiments will give a better answer than I ever can :). She's on substack & Twitter https://janellecshane.substack.com/p/okay-gpt-3-candy-hearts https://janellecshane.substack.com/p/okay-gpt-3-candy-hearts
- dekhn 4y ago
- rootw0rm 4y ago+1 for SHRUBBERY'S PRECIOUS if anything, this proves that candy hearts should be larger, and less disgusting
- jameshart 4y agoI don't understand how frequency of failure is a relevant concern here. Humans are frequently monumental idiots. The human language and inference model produces nonsensical, dangerous, and stupid results with alarming frequency. (not to say I believe language models are sentient, but... you need something more than 'sometimes they spout made up BS' to refute the claim, because it turns out that is not particularly indicative of sentience.)
- gnramires 4y agoTo be fair, I didn't know what a exactly a 'candy heart message' was. I probably would have failed this particular Turing test.
- astrange 4y agoI think it would be fair to give you Google access or at least an encyclopedia.
- arcturus17 4y agoIs there really a difference between commonplace logic, advanced logic, and otherwise? Logic is logic, if there ever was a tautology...
- kareemsabri 4y agoYeah but what's weird is this guy appears to be a practitioner of the field. He surely knows more about AI than I do, and I find it incredibly obvious it's not sentient. I dunno if he's got some issues or something (it appears he's dressed like a magician underwater in that photo) but it's really odd...
- klodolph 4y agoSmart CS students were fooled by ELIZA back in the day.
- DonHopkins 4y agoRMS wasn't able to fool his own EMACS DOCTOR: http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...
- kareemsabri 4y agoSmart CS students in the 1960s and professional AI engineers with Ph.D level education (as I believe he has) in 2022 are a world apart.
- redavni 4y agoAnd now you have empirical evidence that a Ph.D education just means someone stayed in school entirely too long.
- bee_rider 4y agoWhile we have become over-credentialed nowadays, I wouldn't say a smart CS student from the 1960s is worlds above a current day person with a PhD level education. We're at least in the same ballpark as the bright olden days bachelors degree holders.
- throwoutway 4y agoI don’t think those students were told they were being evaluated though did they? They didn’t know Eliza was a machine right?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwoutway 4y agoIt just seems one engineer failed to acknowledge that he failed the Turing Test even with insider information, and (according to Google) was told he was wrong, but decided to double down and tell the public all about how wrong he was. To which they reported on because the claims were so laughable
- Gene_Parmesan 4y agoThe guy is unhinged and has a persecution complex. He is a "priest" in a bizarre sect and has long claimed that Google has it out for him because of his religious practice. This was a publicity stunt plain and simple.
- steego 4y agoHis goal was always to launch his career as America's first AI priest, publish a book and become a talking head.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago"Turing Test" is a co-opted term: his original was about the computer fooling a person as to its gender... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Imitation_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Imitation_game
- anjc 4y ago> I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. In effect this is how humans respond to prompts no? What's the difference between this and sentience? People also fail to use logic when assimilating/regurgitating knowledge.
- srvmshr 4y ago> In effect this is how humans respond to prompts no? What's the difference between this and sentience? An interesting line of question & open research is if we statistically learn similarly - why do we know "what we don't know" & LM cannot. If this isn't working, we probably need better knowledge models
- Brian_K_White 4y agoThis is merely the observation that a person and a machine can both perform some of the same actions, and is not much of an observation. I can crank a shaft just like a motor, and a Victrola can recite poetry. You are not confused by either of those things one would hope. If I tried to write poetry, it would probably be 90% or more "mechanical" in that I would just throw things together from my inventory of vocabulary and some simple assembly rules that could all be codified in a pretty simple flowchart, and a computer could and would do exactly that same thing. But it's no more mystical than the first example. It's exactly the same as the first example. It's just overlapping facilities, that a person is capable, and even often does, perform mechanical operations that don't require or exhibit any consciousness. It doesn't mean the inartistic poet person is not conscious or that the poetry generating toaster is.
- bb88 4y ago> As someone with a PhD in this domain, What is sentience then? Last I checked the Searle Chinese Room argument was still unresolved. Is it not possible that our brains are also just "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" machines?
- Victerius 4y agoCan code feel emotions?
- gnramires 4y agoYes it can, although it depends on the code (and maybe some hardware details to an extent).
- bb88 4y agoangry = 0.87 happy = 0.10 sadness = 0.25 if angry.above_threshold: release_anger_hormones()
- SnowHill9902 4y agoGod doesn’t use Python.
- xyzwave 4y agoDefinitely Java, 3 billion devices run Java.
- _moof 4y agoIs that a necessary condition for sentience? Look, nobody knows what makes a thing conscious or not, and anyone who claims they do with certainty is talking out of turn. Is this guy being a bit silly? Yeah, I think so. But let's not pretend that anyone on earth has suddenly answered a question that humanity has been thinking about without significant progress for thousands of years.
- srvmshr 4y ago
- grumpopotamus 4y ago> GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.) These things are orthogonal to sentience.
- sudosysgen 4y agoNot really. Anything that's sentient should have the general intelligence to figure out addition. Make mistakes, sure, but at least understand the concept.
- jefftk 4y agoIf you asked me to add two large numbers in my head and give my best guess I might not do any better than GPT3 does. And I think I could probably do better than the average person.
- zach_garwood 4y agoSure, but in your head is a squishy organ, and in GPT3's "head" is a bit of silicon purpose-built to make such calculations.
- visarga 4y agoThe multiplication problem can be solved by spacing the digits (to enforce one token per digit) and asking the model to do the intermediate steps (chain-of-thought). It's not that language models can't do it. With this method LMs can solve pretty difficult math, physics, chemistry and coding problems. But without looking at individual digits and using pen and paper we can't do long multiplications either. Why would we ask a language model to do it in one step?
- jobs_throwaway 4y agoBecause a sufficiently intelligent model should be able to figure out that there are intermediate steps towards the goal and complete them autonomously. That's a huge part of general intelligence. The fact that GPT-3 has to be spoon fed like that is a serious indictment of its usefulness/cleverness.
- dougSF70 4y agoExactly...most displays of AI are well trained circus animals...so far.
- itisit 4y agoExcept well trained circus animals have the capacity for depression.
- johnfn 4y ago> I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output Small children also have success in adding small numbers but increasingly garbled output on larger inputs. :)
- whimsicalism 4y ago> PhD in this domain Philosophy? More seriously, I am curious how long ago you got your PhD and in what field that you consider "this domain."
- srvmshr 4y agoI defended my PhD in Computer Science in 2020. My dissertation was on "Rapid & robust modeling on small data regime", hence specifically focused on generalization, network optimization & adversarial robustness. I also worked for a year with Microsoft Research in their ML group :) It was quite a fun ride
- NHQ 4y ago
- laserlight 4y agoThanks for clarifying. I think the question is more about sentience than ML. So, a PhD in philosophy would suit better your initial claim.
- stale2002 4y agoNo it would not. Philosophy people wrap themselves up in so many circular self justifying presuppositions that they can make up whatever arguments they want to justify almost anything. It is much better to listen to people who study other, more falsifiable claims, in the material world.
- laserlight 4y agoThe commenter I previously replied to has a PhD in those “other” fields, yet I haven’t seen a falsifiable definition of sentience made by them. As a field of study, sentience has been a topic of philosophy more than ML. That’s why top-level comment’s claim of having a PhD in “this domain” is not apt. Comparative quality of studies in different domains is a different question.
- groffee 4y ago> Once people understand that sentience also means self-awareness, empathy & extrapolation of logic to assess unseen task ... Tell that to mentally deficient people (no self-awareness), psychopaths (no empathy) and morons (couldn't spell logic never-mind use it) That said though I do agree with you overall. 'Machine learning' is headed in the wrong direction, and models like GPT-3 are frankly a joke.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThere are degrees of sentience
- jobigoud 4y agoYep. And this also implies that once machines are above zero on the sentience scale they will continue up and will move past human-level sentience just like they moved past human-level chess playing. It's actually worrying ethically because a super-sentient being could experience extreme feelings compared to us, including extreme happiness and sadness, extreme psychological pain, etc.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoI doubt current architectures will allow for a snowballing of sentience due to the power inefficiencies of silicon compared to biology. We are more than three orders of magnitude more efficient than current computers…
- saulpw 4y agoI agree that these are not sentient, but sentience does not imply self-awareness, and so lack of self-awareness does not mean that a being is not sentient. For example, it seems likely (to me anyway) that a bear is "sentient" (has experiences) but lacks self-awareness, at least according to the mirror test.
- whyenot 4y agoHumans are nothing more than water and a bunch of organic compounds arranged in a particular order through what is ultimately a statistical process (natural selection). Would we even recognize sentience in a virtual entity? > sentience also means self-awareness, empathy & extrapolation of logic to assess unseen task (to name a few) Non-human primates and crows would seem to satisfy this. ...or do we use "to name a few" to add requirements that redefine "sentience" as human only? Isn't there a problem with that? I mean I understand what you are saying and have some familiarity with the models, but it sometimes feels like people in your field are repeating the same mistake early molecular biologists made, when they asserted that all of life could be reduced to genes and DNA.
- rektide 4y agoA person can change their mind, attitude & perspective on a dime. The willingness to disbelieve in sentience is fantastically remarkable, as a grevious oversight.
- rektide 4y agoAny ya'll numerous downvoters care to make stance? It seems obvious to me the difference: an AI has to be elaborately re-trained/re-programmed. A more or less total mind wipe. How many AI's can adapt & change, that we've seen? These expert systems seem clearly a product of trained learning, with minimal adaptive capability. Sentience seems much more about having that adaptive, cognizant, realtime model of real reality. I see no evidence anything comes remotely close. Please counter-shit-post me. I have a hard hard hard time seeing why we should take any of this seriously.
- visarga 4y agoGPT-3 can adapt on the spot with just a task description or an example. No retraining.
- saberience 4y agoIt’s not self driven at all. It has no opinions itself, it’s responding to its “masters” inputs and pulling crap from a very large database. Humans are self motivated and driven by goals and desires we create ourselves and change on a whim. We daydream and imagine things which don’t exist not because we are being ordered to by a human operator. GPT-3 doesn’t do anything by itself. It’s just a big lookup table that does nothing unless a human tells it to.
- Waterluvian 4y agoIsn’t this also wrong, though? I mean in the sense that it’s impossible to demonstrate that anything is sentient.
- cbreynoldson 4y agoThis makes some spiritual assumptions about things that are currently unknown and debated by respected people in related fields - one being that"everything" (or not) is sentient/conscious.
- moron4hire 4y agoI'm pretty sure I gave GPT-3 a nervous breakdown. I was using a writing tool to modify this old short story I wrote, and it kept trying to insert this character I didn't like. I would make the main character ignore him and then GPT-3 would bring him back. Finally, I made him go away completely and after that GPT-3 had a wonderfully surrealist breakdown, melting my story in on itself, like the main character had an aneurysm and we were peaking into his last conscious thought as he slipped away. It was clearly nothing more than a failure of any ability to track continuity, but it was amazing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wlorenz65 4y ago> sentience also means self-awareness, How is token #100 not able to have read-access to tokens #1 to #99 which may have been created by the agent itself? > empathy How is a sentiment neuron, which has emerged from training a character RNN on Amazon reviews, not empathic with the reviewer's mood? > & extrapolation of logic This term does not exist. "Extrapolation is the process of estimating values of a variable outside the range of known values", and the values of Boolean logic are true/false, and [0,1] in case of fuzzy logic. How would one "extrapolate" this?
- jfoutz 4y ago> ELIZA came out few decades ago Like, 6. It's just amusing how old this example is. The Mechanical Turk was much much older - but easily shown to be a person hiding in the mechanism. I think ELIZA was in some sense a mirror, reflecting back consciousness, and that's the feeling we get from these systems.
- saalweachter 4y agoHell, there's a literary trope of talking to an echo that probably dates back centuries or millennia.
- rictic 4y agoOn GPT-3's large number addition, a little prompt engineering goes a long ways. Separating large numbers into three digit chunks is helpful for its input encoding (https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#bpes https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#bpes), and giving it a few examples of other correct large sums will make the correct answer the most likely continuation of the input. For example, I was able to get 2/3 nine digit sums correct (the third one was off by exactly 1000, which is interesting) by using this prompt: Here are some examples of adding large numbers: 606 468 720 + 217 363 426 = 823 832 146 930 867 960 + 477 524 122 = 1 408 392 082 823 165 449 + 493 959 765 = 1 317 125 214 And then posing the actual problem as a new line formatted the same up to the equals.
- NHQ 4y ago
- DonHopkins 4y agoHimself.
- Skypwn 4y ago
- dcow 4y agoAs a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity (or at least until we further our understanding of how to define sentience to the point where we can do so objectively enough to finally dredge it up out of the philosophical quagmire)? Not to disrespect your credentials they just don’t really… apply, at a rhetorical level. You also make a compelling argument, which I have no desire to detract from. I personally happen to agree with your points. But, perhaps Lemoine simply has more empathy than most for something we will come to understand as sentience? Or not. What… annoys… me about this situation is how subjective it actually is. Ignore everything else, some other sentient being is convinced that a system is sentient. I’m more interested, or maybe worried, immediately, in how we are going to socially deal with the increasing frequency of Lamoire-types we will certainly encounter. Even if you were to argue that the only thing that can possibly bestow sentience is God. People will still be able to convince themselves and others that God did in fact bestow sentience upon some system, because it’s a duck and who are we to question?
- srvmshr 4y agoDisagreement is good! It actually leads to counter thoughts and a more refined idea of what we eventually want to describe. Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. So from a purely technical perspective, we have only made some progress in open-domain QA. That's one dimension of progress. Deep learning has enabled us to create unseen faces & imagery - but is it independent? No, because we prompt it. It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream. It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on) So while the philosophical question remains what bestows sentience, we as a community have a fairly reasonable understanding of what is NOT sentience i.e. we have a rough understanding of the borders between mechanistics and sentient beings. It is not one man's philosophical construct but rather a general consensus if you could say
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SkyMarshal 4y agoThere was a recent post either here or on Twitter where someone took the questions Blake asked the AI about how it feels to be sentient, and replaced “sentient” with “cat” and had the same conversation with it. It’s clearly not self aware.
- refulgentis 4y agoThat's not possible because it's internal to Google: you're right about the post existing, though, I found it very misleading because it was replicating with GPT-3. Blake is certainly misguided, though.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoSeems like an easy test to give any AI. I didn’t read all of Blake’s transcript with the AI, did he do any kind of similar test with it?
- ge96 4y agoCorecursive listener by chance? (Eliza)
- jablongo 4y agoNot disagreeing with you that LLMs are probably not sentient, but that is neither here nor there since lamda is more than a simple llm. There are significant differences between GPT3 and LaMDA. We gotta stop making these false equivalences. LaMDA is fundamentally more dynamic in the ways it interacts with the world: it constructs its own queries to ground truth sources to check it’s facts and then updates weights based on that (among many other differences). While it does incorporate LLMs it seems like people are in denial about the complexity and data access that lamda has relative to GPT3. In google’s own paper about lamda they demonstrated how it sometimes showed a rudimentary theory of mind by being able to reason about other’s perceptions.
- srvmshr 4y agoIts a fundamental question of sentience that folks are commenting. I agree LaMDa has a better knowledge-base & open-domain information retrieval method. In the words of Robert Heinlein, "One man's magic is another man's engineering" :)
- ChadNauseam 4y agoIs an inability to add large numbers together evidence against sentence? Because if so, I have bad news for about 90% of people alive
- muzani 4y agoParent means to say that its ability to add numbers is an illusion brought about by seeing enough numbers. The same way it gives the illusion of deep thinking by parroting deep thoughts it was trained on.
- mongol 4y agoIs it bad news for a non-sentient being to hear they are non-sentient?
- taneq 4y ago"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest [machine learning systems] and the dumbest [humans]."
- godotnyc 4y agoWhat I don't understand, personally, is how people who are apparently experts in this domain seem to consistently treat the word "sentience" as a synonym of "sapience," which is what they are really talking about. It's almost as though their expertise comes from several decades' worth of bad science fiction writing rather than from an understanding of the English language.
- srvmshr 4y agoSince you broached it, would you mind to explain sentience vs. sapience? Curious to know the difference. > It's almost as though their expertise comes from several decades' worth of bad science fiction Oof. Thanks - thats a novel way of insulting. But on a personal note, you're mistaken: Many of us do research not because we want to be identified as experts, but we're genuinely curious about the world. And I'd be happy to learn even from a high schooler if they've something to offer.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoAnd regardless of how others define these terms, I’d describe lambda as sapient and not sentient. Sentient means having feelings (eg sentimental) while sapient means wise. Can wisdom emerge from statistical models? It actually seems inevitable, to me, if you can abstract high enough. I mean, much of human learning is statistical. Wisdom comes from this kind of statistical experience, not memorizing symbols. (Btw, I’m working on using the complete works of Plato to fine tune GPT3 and will use crowdsourcing to compare the perceived wisdom of the original to the generated.)
- ranguna 4y ago> large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models And who says our brain is not exactly that, but at an even greater scale?
- arpa 4y agomore diverse, maybe.
- Twisell 4y agoThis sound literaly like a subplot of the famous 1984 book by David Lodge Small World: An Academic Romance In the book professor Robin Dempsey almost become mad by chatting with ELIZA and gradually begin to believe it's sentient to the point of being ridiculous. PS: Apparently it was also adapted in a British TV serie in 1988, but unfortunately at that time they tended to reuse magnetic band and it's improbable that we can dig a clip out of that. Would have been appropriate an illustration!
- stevesimmons 4y agoThe master tapes are available. If you pay ITV, they will actually convert them to mp4 for you. ITV apparently said this, from a 2021 forum post I found via Google: I wrote to ITV in 2019 about this. Here is part of the (very helpful) response I received: "Currently, the only option for a copy would be for us to make one-off transfers from each individual master tape. These are an old format of reel-to-reel tape which increases the cost, I'm afraid: If delivered as video files (mp4), the total price would be £761.00 or on DVD it’s £771.00." If only we could find a few people to split that cost!
- ekianjo 4y ago> As someone with a PhD in this domain you dont need to use phd credentials to have an opinion on this matter
- srvmshr 4y agoYes, absolutely. But then I risk getting sounded vainly opinionated, especially on HN without basis if I don't give a disclaimer that I have spent half a decade working on these specific things. Too often, people get called out for no reason. And that sometimes hurt. (If I was credentials hopping I would rather put a longer list of illustrious institutions, co-authors and awards, just saying. I am not - its just justifying that I know reasonably enough to share a sane opinion, which you may or may not agree with)
- jstanley 4y agoThis is just a (not even) thinly-veiled appeal to authority. I'm not saying you're wrong, but your credentials don't make you right.
- srvmshr 4y agoAbsolutely agree. I edited my post to add the credential because elsewhere in this thread someone callously called me a "garden variety fraud" You're welcome to prove any of my conclusions wrong. It actually incentivizes me - it shows someone is willing to listen and engage with what I spent some years learning. The way I see its a win-win. Nothing makes a researcher happier to see someone taking interest to indulge. But letting know by an edit, where I stand, is a means of mental preservation. It hurts to get dissed irrationally
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zarzavat 4y ago> I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models Can the magic of the human brain not also be attributed to "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" as well, aka learning? > GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.) This is a bug, they did not encode digits properly. They should have encoded each digit as a separate token but instead they encoded them together. Later models fixed this. The human brain is full of bugs too, e.g. optical illusions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion > It's a fad No, it's objectively not a fad. The PaLM paper shows that Google's model exceeds average human performance on >50% of language tasks. The set of things that make us us is vanishing at an alarming rate. Eventually it will be empty, or close to it. Do I think Google's models are sentient? No, they lack several necessary ingredients of sentience such as a self and long-term memory. However we are clearly on the road to sentient AI and it pays to have that discussion now.
- wlorenz65 4y ago> Google's models are sentient? No, they lack several necessary ingredients of sentience such as a self They haven't been finetuned on their identity long enough because finetuning is expensive and Google lacks money ;-)
- achenet 4y ago> The set of things that make us us is vanishing at an alarming rate. Eventually it will be empty, or close to it. Computers can speak, but can they love? Can they care? Can they dance?
- mjburgess 4y ago>"large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" as well, aka learning No, experimentation is an act on the world to set its state and then measure it. That's what learning involves. These machines do not act on the world, they just capture correlations. In this sense, machines are maximally schizophrenic. They answer "yes" to "is there a cat on the matt?" not because there is one, but because "yes" was what they heard most often. Producing models of correlations in half-baked measures of human activity has nothing to do with learning. And everything to do with a magic light box that fools dumb apes.
- pyinstallwoes 4y agoPerhaps the problem is how we model sentience. Perhaps the default should be everything is sentient but limited to the interface that exists as boundary conditions. To say otherwise is almost the path to sure error, and many terrible historic events have happened in that vicinity of categorization what is and isn't. Perhaps we should go by what sentience means. To feel. A being that feels. To feel is to respond to a vibration in some way. That is to say, anything that has a signal is sentient in some way.
- otikik 4y ago- “The previous article was written by GPT-4” I have no doubt in my mind that we will reach that point. My 6 year old son fails at common sense several times per day.
- tremon 4y agoOnce people understand that sentience also means Is this a matter of understanding, or a matter of definition? I can't help but feel that the entire AI field is so overcome with hype that every commonplace term is subject to on-the-spot redefinition, whatever helps to give the researcher/journalist/organization their two seconds of fame.
- twirlock 4y ago
- mr_mitm 4y agoIs there a test for sentience or self-awareness? Is it considered a binary property or can sentience or self-awareness be measured? I suspect it is not binary, because I completely lack sentience while asleep or before a certain age, and it doesn't really feel like a phase transition when waking up. Rarely, there are phases where I feel half-sentient. Which immediately leads to the question of how it can be measured, in which units, and at what point we consider someone or something "sentient". As a complete layman, I'm interested in your insight on the matter.
- User23 4y ago> because I completely lack sentience while asleep or before a certain age All you can say is you don’t remember. Children who are too young to form reliable long term memories still form short term ones and are observably sentient from birth and by extrapolation before, albeit in a more limited fashion than adults. This is more than a quibble, because it’s been used to justify barbaric treatment of babies with the claimed justification that they either don’t sense pain or it doesn’t matter because they won’t remember.
- mr_mitm 4y agoSurely I haven't been conscious minutes after conception. So there has to be either a phase transition or a gradual increase of consciousness. It cannot be purely a matter of not remembering.
- sholladay 4y agoI agree with you, there seems to be very little here that demonstrates sentience and very little that is unexplainable. That said, based on how much we struggle with defining and understanding animal intelligence, perhaps this is just something new that we don’t recognize. I am skeptical that any computer system we will create in the next 50 years (at least) will be sentient, as commonly understood. Certainly not at a level where we can rarely find counter evidence to its sentience. And until that time, any sentience it may have will not be accepted or respected. Human children also make tons of mistakes. Yet, while we too often dismiss their abilities, we don’t discount their sentience because of it. We are, of course, programmed to empathize with children to an extent, but beyond that, we know they are still learning and growing, so we don’t hold their mistakes against them the way we tend to for adults. So, I would ask, why not look at the AI as a child, rather than an adult? It will make mistakes, fail to understand, and it will learn. It contains multitudes
- franklampard 4y agoOnly if the same AI algorithm has the ability to learn and self correct.
- xnx 4y agoA modern day clever Hans
- RhysU 4y ago> (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.) I don't claim the LLM is sentient but beware "good at arithmetic" is a bad criterion. Many children and a not insignificant number of adults are not good at arithmetic. Babies stink at math.
- wideem 4y agoWell the bigger question is how can we detect if AI is sentient or not?
- joshuajill 4y agoWe humans have proven terrible at determining what is sentient. That's why we're still discussing the hard problem of consciousness. There is the Integrated Information Theory that attempts to resolve how to determine which systems are conscious, but it's far from being the only perspective, or immediately applicable. From the point of view of one the IIT's main theorists, Christof Koch, we're still far away from machine sentience. But I question whether if it's so far out to believe a machine capable of not only learning, but learning on their own behavior, self-monitoring for sensibleness and other very 'human' metrics is that far away from being self-aware. In fact the model seems to have been trained exactly for that.
- kf 4y agoPeople are consistently attacking a straw man of Lemoine's argument. Lemoine claims that LaMDA is more than an LLM, that it is an LLM with both short and long term memory and the ability to query the Google version of the internet in real time and learn from it. Various Google employees deny this. We are seeing a dispute between Google and Lemoine about the supposed architecture of LaMDA. If Lemoine is correct about the architecture, it becomes much more plausible that something interesting is happening with Google's AI.
- mbfg 4y agocan you prove to me that you are sentient? In a way that is qualitatively different then Lambda?
- SEJeff 4y agoMany humans have a lack of empathy and are considered sentient.