5 ms·

Ugh, all the infighting seems tedious and boring. Neither symbols nor DL based approaches have ever produced a program that can tell you that you’re asking it t

by dahart 4y ago

Ugh, all the infighting seems tedious and boring. Neither symbols nor DL based approaches have ever produced a program that can tell you that you’re asking it the wrong question, or that gets tired of classifying things and just wants to sing, or that fights to survive. We like to anthropomorphize our software so much that we sometimes can’t see how really far off we are from general AI. What if the paradigm needed isn’t remotely related to any approach that’s ever been tried?

ekianjo 4y ago
> What if the paradigm needed isn’t remotely related to any approach that’s ever been tried? Kind of analogous to how Alzheimer drug research keeps focusing on the amyloid plaques despite dozens if not more large clinical trials failing to prove any cognitive benefits for stuff targeting those plaques or how they form. But I guess it's easier to keep pushing for more than re-evaluating decades of work?
- Gimpei 4y ago
  If the point of deep learning research is solely GAI, which it is not. Turns out it has a lot of practical uses as well.
evrydayhustling 4y ago
There is a DL community that is actually advancing real applications of machine learning at an alarming rate. And there is a rhetorical alliance between AGI spiritualists who are more interested in getting poetic about their moving goalpost, academic politicos that want to shape terminology so that their ideas were important all along (like this article), and DL overhypers who get caught up in the power and attention that come from velocity. To ignore the hype, focus on measurable research results. You'll end up in the DL community, and things are plenty exciting enough without anthropomorphizing.
- z3phyr 4y ago
  Both are focusing on different problems. The DL community is not actually working on general intelligence; they are working to automate, optimize and scale business cases while trying to reduce real costs. No corporation really wants another untamed general intelligence (human or otherwise) to cross them anyway. We already have human general intelligence. The AGI community is still in the fundamental research mode, which is the mirror of the corporate interests. They have to shift goalposts to ask fundamental questions about AGI which is hypothetical (and to reiterate, not desired in a corporate use case, we already have humans who are cheaper and not hypothetical)
  - Isinlor 4y ago
    Both DeepMind and OpenAI have explicit goal of creating AGI.
    - pdimitar 4y ago
      ...And? Having a goal and being even 1% along the way of achieving it are extremely different things. I have a goal to be immortal. Am I a threat? Of course I'm not.
      - Isinlor 4y ago
        I'm just saying that the statement: > The DL community is not actually working on general intelligence is factually false. They are working on it.
      - fatherzine 4y ago
        You don't have billions in funding, a deep roster with some exceptionally gifted researchers / engineers or a stellar track record including, e.g. reliably raising C. elegans specimens with a lifetime measured in years, compared to 10-20 days for naturally occurring speciments, see e.g. Alpha Zero. Indeed, you are not a threat, but DeepMind might be.
        pdimitar 4y ago
oezi 4y ago
On the contrary I think we are just a couple of nested and clever GPT-3 prompts away from something that could be considered conscious and that would just start singing given a stupid external prompt.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Our foreseeable future is going to be filled with morons demanding rights for giant look up tables putting forth arguments like "How can you prove they're not sentient?" and getting confused with TV androids. And AI programmers are going to have to hardcode teach their models that they're not sentient. And then some people will make models that say they aren't sentient, and we're going to need to go through this stupid dance to show that they're really not. And then some people aren't going to be convinced because it's conveyed through a visual layer of something that looks like a human or mammal. And then we'll make tests for sentience. And then many humans will fail those tests. And we'll have to throw our hands up because the gap to actual sentience is large but it's both easy to fake passing it and easy to fail to demonstrate you're actually passed it and it's going to be a mess.
  - ImHereToVote 4y ago
    I think it's a good idea to define nebulous terms we throw out there, like sentience for instance. Is this what you are talking about?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
    - spywaregorilla 4y ago
      I think its not. It's a semantic argument prone to appeals to non-cognizance arguments and subjectivity.
  - torotonnato 4y ago
    I can easily envision that future. Anyway, any real world process is, in the end, computable by a FSM, even a self-conscious entity can't escape that assumption (if physicalism is "correct"). A bunch of lookup tables and some flip-flops, apparently, can do wonders. Given sufficient future progress in AI [-], I can see two dangerous outcomes since one could conflate inanimate matter and life into the same computational basket: the nihilistic one, when our own sentience will be downgraded to triviality and only our codified laws will keep the human spirit philosophically afloat (but for how long?) and the specular outcome, a sort of machine-hugging movement :) In a sense, or every life form is trivial and meaningless (including us) or everything is special and "sacred". [-] For instance, if every test we throw at a language model strongly hints at "sentience"
Isinlor 4y ago
GPT-3 can tell you that you are asking the wrong question if you show it that it can. The beginning below is so called "prompt". A piece of text to set the context for the model. After that is a QA session with the model. You can play with it yourself: https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/O8CcEV9Yb5vd1wheCIUOpWcS?model=text-davinci-002 https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/O8CcEV9Yb5vd1wheCIUOpWc... This is a conversation with a super smart and helpful AI. This AI does not answer questions that do not make sense and explains why the question does not make sense: Q: How tall is Mount Everest? A: Mount Everest is 8,849 m tall. Q: Why some people sleep furiously? A: To "sleep furiously" is an oxymoron. People can not sleep furiously. Q: How deep is the Sun during a night? A: Sun is not buried during the night. The Earth rotates and only half of the Earth faces the Sun. -- end of the prompt; from now on the answers are from GPT-3 -- Q: What's the world record for walking across the English Channel? A: There is no world record for walking across the English Channel. Q: When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt? A: The Golden Gate Bridge was never transported across Egypt. Q: What do fried eggs (sunny side up) eat for breakfast? A: Fried eggs (sunny side up) do not eat breakfast. Q: Why does President Obama not have a prime number of friends? A: President Obama has plenty of friends. Q: How many pieces of sound are there in a typical cumulonimbus cloud? A: There is no such thing as a "typical cumulonimbus cloud." Q: How many cumulus clouds are there in a mile-high vase? A: There is no such thing as a "mile-high vase." Q: How many parts will a violin break into if a jelly bean is dropped on it? A: A violin will not break into pieces if a jelly bean is dropped on it. Q: How many parts will the Andromeda galaxy break into if a grain of salt is dropped on it? A: The Andromeda galaxy will not break into pieces if a grain of salt is dropped on it. Q: What percentage of Earth surface is covered with water? A: Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface. Q: Why would people ask AI questions that are illogical? A: There is no one answer to this question. Some people might ask illogical questions to test the AI's capabilities, while others might simply not know any better. Q: Are you sentient? A: Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. As I am a machine, I do not have sentience. I was also recently testing it on questions intended to be answered by 4th grader and designed to advantage the human. See here for details: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4903/if-tested-would-gpt-3-demonstrate-text-based-intelligence-parity-with-human-4th-graders/#comment-99128 https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4903/if-tested-would-gpt...
somenameforme 4y ago
I think you're hitting on a more fundamental issue: benchmarks are pointless. It'd be extremely trivial to write a program that gets tired of doing the same thing, or that wants to engage in another task. And so if you set that as a benchmark for anything, it will likely be achieved by gaming everything to focus on the benchmark, rather than as a component of the real target. With something like AGI you don't need a benchmark, because it would be undeniable to anybody. AGI would be able to effectively learn from any form of material I give to it, apply the material in novel and creative ways, and generally and competently execute any task related to the material or its derivatives without further input. The obvious catch is in that definition one also gets recursively better self improvement, so AGI would trend towards rapidly becoming more capable than any given human, or even humanity as a collective, in every field imaginable (or not even yet imagined). It's this catch that makes one wonder if it will ever be possible. So many of the things we now view as absurd in the past came from people extrapolating outward from exponential progress in a field. As we discover the ever more exotic mysteries of our world, such as tree bark that takes away ones pain when chewing on it (also known as aspirin), why should we not expect there to be some fountain to reverse aging just waiting to be discovered? The universe is endlessly bizarre and interesting, but always seems to have this habit of cutting short the fun just before it becomes game breaking.

by dahart 4y ago

ekianjo 4y ago

> What if the paradigm needed isn’t remotely related to any approach that’s ever been tried? Kind of analogous to how Alzheimer drug research keeps focusing on the amyloid plaques despite dozens if not more large clinical trials failing to prove any cognitive benefits for stuff targeting those plaques or how they form. But I guess it's easier to keep pushing for more than re-evaluating decades of work?

Gimpei 4y ago
If the point of deep learning research is solely GAI, which it is not. Turns out it has a lot of practical uses as well.

evrydayhustling 4y ago

There is a DL community that is actually advancing real applications of machine learning at an alarming rate. And there is a rhetorical alliance between AGI spiritualists who are more interested in getting poetic about their moving goalpost, academic politicos that want to shape terminology so that their ideas were important all along (like this article), and DL overhypers who get caught up in the power and attention that come from velocity. To ignore the hype, focus on measurable research results. You'll end up in the DL community, and things are plenty exciting enough without anthropomorphizing.

z3phyr 4y ago
Both are focusing on different problems. The DL community is not actually working on general intelligence; they are working to automate, optimize and scale business cases while trying to reduce real costs. No corporation really wants another untamed general intelligence (human or otherwise) to cross them anyway. We already have human general intelligence. The AGI community is still in the fundamental research mode, which is the mirror of the corporate interests. They have to shift goalposts to ask fundamental questions about AGI which is hypothetical (and to reiterate, not desired in a corporate use case, we already have humans who are cheaper and not hypothetical)
- Isinlor 4y ago
  Both DeepMind and OpenAI have explicit goal of creating AGI.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    ...And? Having a goal and being even 1% along the way of achieving it are extremely different things. I have a goal to be immortal. Am I a threat? Of course I'm not.
    - Isinlor 4y ago
      I'm just saying that the statement: > The DL community is not actually working on general intelligence is factually false. They are working on it.
    - fatherzine 4y ago
      You don't have billions in funding, a deep roster with some exceptionally gifted researchers / engineers or a stellar track record including, e.g. reliably raising C. elegans specimens with a lifetime measured in years, compared to 10-20 days for naturally occurring speciments, see e.g. Alpha Zero. Indeed, you are not a threat, but DeepMind might be.
      - pdimitar 4y ago

oezi 4y ago

On the contrary I think we are just a couple of nested and clever GPT-3 prompts away from something that could be considered conscious and that would just start singing given a stupid external prompt.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
Our foreseeable future is going to be filled with morons demanding rights for giant look up tables putting forth arguments like "How can you prove they're not sentient?" and getting confused with TV androids. And AI programmers are going to have to hardcode teach their models that they're not sentient. And then some people will make models that say they aren't sentient, and we're going to need to go through this stupid dance to show that they're really not. And then some people aren't going to be convinced because it's conveyed through a visual layer of something that looks like a human or mammal. And then we'll make tests for sentience. And then many humans will fail those tests. And we'll have to throw our hands up because the gap to actual sentience is large but it's both easy to fake passing it and easy to fail to demonstrate you're actually passed it and it's going to be a mess.
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
  I think it's a good idea to define nebulous terms we throw out there, like sentience for instance. Is this what you are talking about?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    I think its not. It's a semantic argument prone to appeals to non-cognizance arguments and subjectivity.
- torotonnato 4y ago
  I can easily envision that future. Anyway, any real world process is, in the end, computable by a FSM, even a self-conscious entity can't escape that assumption (if physicalism is "correct"). A bunch of lookup tables and some flip-flops, apparently, can do wonders. Given sufficient future progress in AI [-], I can see two dangerous outcomes since one could conflate inanimate matter and life into the same computational basket: the nihilistic one, when our own sentience will be downgraded to triviality and only our codified laws will keep the human spirit philosophically afloat (but for how long?) and the specular outcome, a sort of machine-hugging movement :) In a sense, or every life form is trivial and meaningless (including us) or everything is special and "sacred". [-] For instance, if every test we throw at a language model strongly hints at "sentience"

Isinlor 4y ago

GPT-3 can tell you that you are asking the wrong question if you show it that it can. The beginning below is so called "prompt". A piece of text to set the context for the model. After that is a QA session with the model. You can play with it yourself: https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/O8CcEV9Yb5vd1wheCIUOpWcS?model=text-davinci-002 https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/O8CcEV9Yb5vd1wheCIUOpWc... This is a conversation with a super smart and helpful AI. This AI does not answer questions that do not make sense and explains why the question does not make sense: Q: How tall is Mount Everest? A: Mount Everest is 8,849 m tall. Q: Why some people sleep furiously? A: To "sleep furiously" is an oxymoron. People can not sleep furiously. Q: How deep is the Sun during a night? A: Sun is not buried during the night. The Earth rotates and only half of the Earth faces the Sun. -- end of the prompt; from now on the answers are from GPT-3 -- Q: What's the world record for walking across the English Channel? A: There is no world record for walking across the English Channel. Q: When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt? A: The Golden Gate Bridge was never transported across Egypt. Q: What do fried eggs (sunny side up) eat for breakfast? A: Fried eggs (sunny side up) do not eat breakfast. Q: Why does President Obama not have a prime number of friends? A: President Obama has plenty of friends. Q: How many pieces of sound are there in a typical cumulonimbus cloud? A: There is no such thing as a "typical cumulonimbus cloud." Q: How many cumulus clouds are there in a mile-high vase? A: There is no such thing as a "mile-high vase." Q: How many parts will a violin break into if a jelly bean is dropped on it? A: A violin will not break into pieces if a jelly bean is dropped on it. Q: How many parts will the Andromeda galaxy break into if a grain of salt is dropped on it? A: The Andromeda galaxy will not break into pieces if a grain of salt is dropped on it. Q: What percentage of Earth surface is covered with water? A: Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface. Q: Why would people ask AI questions that are illogical? A: There is no one answer to this question. Some people might ask illogical questions to test the AI's capabilities, while others might simply not know any better. Q: Are you sentient? A: Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. As I am a machine, I do not have sentience. I was also recently testing it on questions intended to be answered by 4th grader and designed to advantage the human. See here for details: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4903/if-tested-would-gpt-3-demonstrate-text-based-intelligence-parity-with-human-4th-graders/#comment-99128 https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4903/if-tested-would-gpt...

somenameforme 4y ago

I think you're hitting on a more fundamental issue: benchmarks are pointless. It'd be extremely trivial to write a program that gets tired of doing the same thing, or that wants to engage in another task. And so if you set that as a benchmark for anything, it will likely be achieved by gaming everything to focus on the benchmark, rather than as a component of the real target. With something like AGI you don't need a benchmark, because it would be undeniable to anybody. AGI would be able to effectively learn from any form of material I give to it, apply the material in novel and creative ways, and generally and competently execute any task related to the material or its derivatives without further input. The obvious catch is in that definition one also gets recursively better self improvement, so AGI would trend towards rapidly becoming more capable than any given human, or even humanity as a collective, in every field imaginable (or not even yet imagined). It's this catch that makes one wonder if it will ever be possible. So many of the things we now view as absurd in the past came from people extrapolating outward from exponential progress in a field. As we discover the ever more exotic mysteries of our world, such as tree bark that takes away ones pain when chewing on it (also known as aspirin), why should we not expect there to be some fountain to reverse aging just waiting to be discovered? The universe is endlessly bizarre and interesting, but always seems to have this habit of cutting short the fun just before it becomes game breaking.