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> but doesn't actually understand how anything works I'm struggling to comprehend how an AI could ever truly achieve this.

hnbad 4y ago
Nobody knows. As I understand it so far the primary approach has been to just throw more data at it and tweak it until the output is good enough. The forest being missed here for the trees is that specialized AI is probably a much better solution to most problems unless your problem is literally replacing humans.
tootie 4y ago
This is one of the great conundrums of AI research. The human brain is a physical construct of neurons flooded with electrochemical fluids. Thinking and remembering are physical processes that must absolutely be replicable in a manufactured device and, by extraction, simulated in software. It's just really, really hard and we have no idea how to do it after decades of research. Instead, we get tools like ChatGPT, Alexa, Deep Blue and even Google search that completely sidestep the challenges of replicating human thought and instead use sophisticated heuristics and vast amounts of training data to synthesize human thought based on everything we've ever written down. It's all very complex and clever attempts to mimic the outputs of human thought without any actual thinking. And frankly, they've gotten way farther with this approach than I would have thought possible. Google and Alexa can very reliable solve math problems by recognizing the input type as a special case to hand off to a specific set of subroutines for calculating. But true human-like intelligence is still very, very far off.
jibalt 4y ago
The same way we do--by having semantic language models and conceptual models of the world. LLMs are just syntax manipulators; they have statistical models of how different pieces of text relate to each other, but no models of how they relate to the things the words (or digits) represent.

hnbad 4y ago

Nobody knows. As I understand it so far the primary approach has been to just throw more data at it and tweak it until the output is good enough. The forest being missed here for the trees is that specialized AI is probably a much better solution to most problems unless your problem is literally replacing humans.

tootie 4y ago

This is one of the great conundrums of AI research. The human brain is a physical construct of neurons flooded with electrochemical fluids. Thinking and remembering are physical processes that must absolutely be replicable in a manufactured device and, by extraction, simulated in software. It's just really, really hard and we have no idea how to do it after decades of research. Instead, we get tools like ChatGPT, Alexa, Deep Blue and even Google search that completely sidestep the challenges of replicating human thought and instead use sophisticated heuristics and vast amounts of training data to synthesize human thought based on everything we've ever written down. It's all very complex and clever attempts to mimic the outputs of human thought without any actual thinking. And frankly, they've gotten way farther with this approach than I would have thought possible. Google and Alexa can very reliable solve math problems by recognizing the input type as a special case to hand off to a specific set of subroutines for calculating. But true human-like intelligence is still very, very far off.

jibalt 4y ago

The same way we do--by having semantic language models and conceptual models of the world. LLMs are just syntax manipulators; they have statistical models of how different pieces of text relate to each other, but no models of how they relate to the things the words (or digits) represent.