4 ms·

OK how about this: It 'knows' language, as in it has learnt about relationships between words (and thats really underselling it, in reality it has learnt very

OK how about this: It 'knows' language, as in it has learnt about relationships between words (and thats really underselling it, in reality it has learnt very very subtle relationships between a great many words, and it can process words about 2000 at a time (token count etc)) BUT as you say it has no outside reference, its just a bundle of weights (those weights forming models of a sort) BUT we provide the outside context by interacting with it. We ask it a question, it is able to provide an answer. In any case it wont be long before someone hooks one of these up to cameras and robot arms and teaches it to make a cup of tea or whatever. A 'relationship to reality' is coming in the next few years if you think thats a critical ingredient.

swatcoder 4y ago
The future AI you describe has language at the center of its understanding. For example, you would expect that the cameras and arm-feedback-sensors would produce text (or text-associated weights/tokens) that describe what the AI "sees" and the robotic arms would be receive some kind of language-derived directives from the LLM. It will be very interesting to see what that system is capable of. I think a lot of people here don't identify language as an essential part of "thinking" and "being", and instead view language as a superficial layer whose role is primarily about social communication and secondarily about abstract reasoning. This is why some of us see these LLM examples as not really speaking to intelligence per se. It's hard for some of us to conceive of intelligence as being represented purely in language. So your proposed system would be a extremely interesting exploration of that! I look forward to it.
- didntreadarticl 4y ago
  So your proposed system would be a extremely interesting exploration of that! I look forward to it. Right, so lets virtualise it. Actually training AIs using real cameras and real robot arms will be really slow and expensive. So we provide a system that renders a photorealistic graphical room with teapot and robot arm, and a virtual camera inside the room is 'seeing' parts of the room and a vision model then processes what it can 'see' to try and feed info to the LLM. Likewise the LLM can make the robot arm move but its all just simulated. Does the LLM now have a relationship with reality?
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    Let me know when you find out. The interesting and open question to me is what the limitations are of a language model at the center of that experience. How much of a a relationship with reality can be captured by language at all, and specifically with the specific sort of statistical models of language that we're exploring now? For some of us, the intuitive answer is not all that much and for others it seems to be at least as much as any human. Whether conducted virtually or physically, coming up with an answer sounds like an empirical study, and one that we're some years away from having results for.
    - didntreadarticl 4y ago
      Ideally in that scenario you'd have a model that unified vision, language and an understanding of 'doing things' and manipulating objects. so it wouldnt just be an LLM, it would be a language-vision-doingthings model. There's no reason why we cant build one.
      - didntreadarticl 4y ago
        Come to think of it, thats kindof what Tesla are building
- shinycode 4y ago
  At the end the real question is what morality the AI is being taught ? It’s own ? A religious inspired one ? It can’t be non if a machine decides not to help or worse, do actions that hurt or kill someone. Would they abide to laws ? Be destroyed if anything happens ? Would people could influence machine with dialogue and make them do something ? What’s the purpose and imposed limits of such machines ?
strbean 4y ago
Yeah, that argument seems especially hollow. Take someone and put their brain in a jar, with some Brain Computer Interface that enables call-and-response text chat. Are they suddenly not conscious, because they no longer have some transcendent connection with reality?
- pdonis 4y ago
  > Take someone and put their brain in a jar, with some Brain Computer Interface that enables call-and-response text chat. This is a much, much, much less complex and rich semantic relationship with the outside world than the brain had before. So you would expect it to drastically change the brain's state and hence its consciousness. I don't think you have fully considered the implications: the brain would have no sight, no hearing, no smell, no taste, no touch, no kinesthetic sense of its body, no sense of hunger, thirst, no sense of heartbeat, breathing, etc., etc, etc., I could go on and on. And that's just the sensory side; the motor side is a whole other can of worms that you haven't even mentioned. > Are they suddenly not conscious, because they no longer have some transcendent connection with reality? I don't think anyone can make authoritative statements about what this kind of scenario would be like. But to answer the question exactly as you ask it, the answer is "mu" because the claim was not that consciousness requires any kind of "transcendent connection with reality", it was the much more mundane claim that the kind of knowledge we humans have is based on an extremely complex and rich physical connection with the rest of the world.
pdonis 4y ago
> it wont be long before someone hooks one of these up to cameras and robot arms and teaches it to make a cup of tea or whatever. And that will at least be a start at giving these things some very simple semantic relationships with the outside world. But right now they have none.
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  You haven't heard of GATO then?

swatcoder 4y ago

The future AI you describe has language at the center of its understanding. For example, you would expect that the cameras and arm-feedback-sensors would produce text (or text-associated weights/tokens) that describe what the AI "sees" and the robotic arms would be receive some kind of language-derived directives from the LLM. It will be very interesting to see what that system is capable of. I think a lot of people here don't identify language as an essential part of "thinking" and "being", and instead view language as a superficial layer whose role is primarily about social communication and secondarily about abstract reasoning. This is why some of us see these LLM examples as not really speaking to intelligence per se. It's hard for some of us to conceive of intelligence as being represented purely in language. So your proposed system would be a extremely interesting exploration of that! I look forward to it.

didntreadarticl 4y ago
So your proposed system would be a extremely interesting exploration of that! I look forward to it. Right, so lets virtualise it. Actually training AIs using real cameras and real robot arms will be really slow and expensive. So we provide a system that renders a photorealistic graphical room with teapot and robot arm, and a virtual camera inside the room is 'seeing' parts of the room and a vision model then processes what it can 'see' to try and feed info to the LLM. Likewise the LLM can make the robot arm move but its all just simulated. Does the LLM now have a relationship with reality?
- swatcoder 4y ago
  Let me know when you find out. The interesting and open question to me is what the limitations are of a language model at the center of that experience. How much of a a relationship with reality can be captured by language at all, and specifically with the specific sort of statistical models of language that we're exploring now? For some of us, the intuitive answer is not all that much and for others it seems to be at least as much as any human. Whether conducted virtually or physically, coming up with an answer sounds like an empirical study, and one that we're some years away from having results for.
  - didntreadarticl 4y ago
    Ideally in that scenario you'd have a model that unified vision, language and an understanding of 'doing things' and manipulating objects. so it wouldnt just be an LLM, it would be a language-vision-doingthings model. There's no reason why we cant build one.
    - didntreadarticl 4y ago
      Come to think of it, thats kindof what Tesla are building
shinycode 4y ago
At the end the real question is what morality the AI is being taught ? It’s own ? A religious inspired one ? It can’t be non if a machine decides not to help or worse, do actions that hurt or kill someone. Would they abide to laws ? Be destroyed if anything happens ? Would people could influence machine with dialogue and make them do something ? What’s the purpose and imposed limits of such machines ?

strbean 4y ago

Yeah, that argument seems especially hollow. Take someone and put their brain in a jar, with some Brain Computer Interface that enables call-and-response text chat. Are they suddenly not conscious, because they no longer have some transcendent connection with reality?

pdonis 4y ago
> Take someone and put their brain in a jar, with some Brain Computer Interface that enables call-and-response text chat. This is a much, much, much less complex and rich semantic relationship with the outside world than the brain had before. So you would expect it to drastically change the brain's state and hence its consciousness. I don't think you have fully considered the implications: the brain would have no sight, no hearing, no smell, no taste, no touch, no kinesthetic sense of its body, no sense of hunger, thirst, no sense of heartbeat, breathing, etc., etc, etc., I could go on and on. And that's just the sensory side; the motor side is a whole other can of worms that you haven't even mentioned. > Are they suddenly not conscious, because they no longer have some transcendent connection with reality? I don't think anyone can make authoritative statements about what this kind of scenario would be like. But to answer the question exactly as you ask it, the answer is "mu" because the claim was not that consciousness requires any kind of "transcendent connection with reality", it was the much more mundane claim that the kind of knowledge we humans have is based on an extremely complex and rich physical connection with the rest of the world.

pdonis 4y ago

> it wont be long before someone hooks one of these up to cameras and robot arms and teaches it to make a cup of tea or whatever. And that will at least be a start at giving these things some very simple semantic relationships with the outside world. But right now they have none.

LesZedCB 4y ago
You haven't heard of GATO then?