9 ms·

What if we discover that the real problem is not that ChatGPT is just a fancy auto-complete, but that we are all just a fancy auto-complete (or at least indisti

What if we discover that the real problem is not that ChatGPT is just a fancy auto-complete, but that we are all just a fancy auto-complete (or at least indistinguishable from one).

seydor 4y ago
I think we re already there
mckirk 4y ago
I've thought about this as well. If something seems 'sentient' from the outside for all intents and purposes, there's nothing that would really differentiate it from actual sentience, as far as we can tell. As an example, if a model is really good at 'pretending' to experience some emotion, I'm not sure where the difference would be anymore to actually experiencing it. If you locked a human in a box and only gave it a terminal to communicate with the outside world, and contrasted that with a LLM (sophisticated enough to not make silly mistakes anymore), the only immediately obvious reason you would ascribe sentience to the human but not the LLM is because it is easier for you to empathize with the human.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- venv 4y ago
  Well, not because of emphasizing, but because of there being a viable mechanism in the human case (reasoning being, one can only know that oneself has qualia, but since those likely arise in the brain, and other humans have similar brains, most likely they have similar qualia). For more reading see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness It is important to note, that neural networks and brains are very different.
  - mckirk 4y ago
    That is what I'd call empathizing though. You can 'put yourself in the other person's shoes', because of the expectation that your experiences are somewhat similar (thanks to similarly capable brains). But we have no idea what qualia actually _are_, seen from the outside, we only know what it feels like to experience them. That, I think, makes it difficult to argue that a 'simulation of having qualia' is fundamentally any different to having them.
    - maxwell 4y ago
      Same with a computer. It can't "actually" see what it "is," but you can attach a webcam and microphone and show it itself, and look around the world. Thus we "are" what we experience, not what we perceive ourselves to "be": what we think of as "the universe" is actually the inside of our actual mind, while what we think of as our physical body is more like a "My Computer" icon with some limited device management. Note that this existential confusion seems tied to a concept of "being," and mostly goes away when thinking instead in E-Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
- continuational 4y ago
  I think there's still the "consciousness" question to be figured out. Everyone else could be purely responding to stimulus for all you know, with nothing but automation going on inside, but for yourself, you know that you experience the world in a subjective manner. Why and how do we experience the world, and does this occur for any sufficiently advanced intelligence?
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Exactly this. I can joke all I want that I'm living in the Matrix and the rest of y'all are here merely for my own entertainment (and control, if you want to be dark). But in my head, I know that sentience is more than just the words coming out of my mouth or yours.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      Is it more than your inner monologue? Maybe you don't need to hear the words, but are you consciously forming thoughts, or are the thoughts just popping up and are suddenly 'there'?
      - TecoAndJix 4y ago
        I sometimes like to imagine that consciousness is like a slider that rides the line of my existence. The whole line (past, present, and future) has always (and will always) exist. The “now” is just individual awareness of the current frame. Total nonsense I’m sure, but it helps me fight existential dread !
        luckylion 4y ago
        The image of a slider also works on the other dimension: at any point in time, you're somewhere between auto-pilot and highly focused awareness. AI, or maybe seemingly intelligent artificial entities, could deliver lots of great opportunities to observe the boundaries of consciousness, intelligence and individuality and maybe spark new interesting thoughts.
  - 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  >sophisticated enough to not make silly mistakes anymore So a dumb human is not sentient? /s Joke aside. I think that we will need to stop treating "human sentience" as something so unique. It's special because we are familiar with it. But we should understand by now that minds can take many forms. And when should we apply ethics to it? At some point well before the mind starts acting with severe belligerence when we refuse to play fair games with it.
  - mckirk 4y ago
    > So a dumb human is not sentient? /s That was just my way of preempting any 'lol of course ChatGPT isn't sentient, look at the crap it produces' comments, of which there thankfully were none. > But we should understand by now that minds can take many forms. Should we understand this already? I'm not aware of anything else so far that's substantially different to our own brain, but would still be considered a 'mind'. > And when should we apply ethics to it? At some point well before the mind starts acting with severe belligerence when we refuse to play fair games with it. That I agree with wholeheartedly. Even just people's attempts of 'trolling' Bing Chat already leave a sour taste in my mouth.
    - worldsayshi 4y ago
      >I'm not aware of anything else so far that's substantially different to our own brain, but would still be considered a 'mind'. I'm firstly thinking of minds of all other living things. Mammals to insects. If an ant has a mind, which I think it does, why not chatgpt? Heck, I might even go as far as saying that the super simple algorithm i wrote for a mob in a game has a mind. But maybe most would scoff at that notion. And conscious minds to me are just minds that happen to have a bunch of features that means we feel we need to properly respect them.
- tryauuum 4y ago
  For a person experiencing emotions there certainly is a difference, experience of red face and water flowing from the eyes...
BlueTemplar 4y ago
Indeed... you know that situation when you're with a friend, and you know that they are about to "auto-complete" using an annoying meme, and you ask them to not to before they even started speaking ?
- airstrike 4y ago
  Obligatory not-xkcd: https://condenaststore.com/featured/that-reminds-me-jason-adam-katzenstein.html https://condenaststore.com/featured/that-reminds-me-jason-ad...
maxwell 4y ago
Then where does theory of mind fit in?
parentheses 4y ago
If AI emulates humans, don’t humans too :thinkingface:?
BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
I was going to say that's such dumb and absurd idea that it might as well have come from ChatGPT, but I suppose that's a point in your favor.
- nilsbunger 4y ago
  Touche! I can't lose :) EDIT: I guess calling the idea stupid is technically against the HN guidelines, unless I'm actually a ChatGPT? In any case I upvoted you, I thought your comment is funny and insightful.
  - mckirk 4y ago
    You have been a good user.
    - LastMuel 4y ago
      SMILIE
jeroenhd 4y ago
That's been an open philosophical question for a very long time. The closer we come to understanding the human brain and the easier we can replicate behaviour, the more we will start questioning determinism. Personally, I believe that conscience is little more than emergent behaviour from brain cells and there's nothing wrong with that. This implies that with sufficient compute power, we could create conscience in the lab, but you need a lot of compute power to get a human equivalent. After all, neural networks are extremely simplified models of actual neurons, and without epigenetics and a hormonal interaction system they don't even come close to how a real brain works. Some people find the concept incredibly frightening, others attribute consciousness to a spiritual influence which simply influences our brains. As religion can almost inherently never be scientifically proven or disproven, we'll never really know if all we are is a biological ChatGPT program inside of a sack of meat.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  > Personally, I believe that conscience is little more than emergent behaviour from brain cells and there's nothing wrong with that. Similarly I think it is a consequence of our ability to think about things/concepts as well as the ability to recognize our own existence and thoughts based on the environment's reactions. The only next step is to think about our existence and our thoughts instead of wondering what the neighbour's cat might be thinking about.
- adamhp 4y ago
  Have you ever seen a video of a schizophrenic just rambling on? It almost starts to sound coherent but every few sentence will feel like it takes a 90 degree turn to an entirely new topic or concept. Completely disorganized thought. What is fascinating is that we're so used to equating language to meaning. These bots aren't producing "meaning". They're producing enough language that sounds right that we interpret it as meaning. This is obviously very philosophical in itself, but I'm reminded of the maxim "the map is not the territory", or "the word is not the thing".
  - O__________O 4y ago
    Simply fall asleep and dream — since dreams literally flow wildly around and frequently have impossible outcomes that defy reasoning, facts, physics, etc.
plutonorm 4y ago
This is a deep philosophical question that has no definite answer. Truth is we don't know what is consciousness. We are only left with the Turing test. That can be our only guide - otherwise you are basing your judgement off a belief. The best response, treat it like it's conscious. Personally I do actually think it is conscious, consciousness is a scale, and it's now near human level. Enjoy this time because pretty soon it's going to be much much smarter than you. But that is my belief, I cannot know.
guybedo 4y ago
we aren't much more than fancy auto-complete + memory + activity thread/process. ChatGpt is a statistical machine, but so are our brains. I guess we think of ourselves as conscious because we have a memory and that helps us build our own identity. And we have a main processing thread so we can iniate thoughts and actions, we don't need to wait on a user's input to respond to... So, if ChatGpt had a memory and a processing thread, it could build itself an identity and randomly initiate thoughts and/or actions. The results would be interesting i think, and not that far from what we call consciousness.
simple-thoughts 4y ago
Humans exist in a cybernetic loop with the environment that chatgpt doesn’t really have. It has a buffer of 4096 tokens, so it can appear to have an interaction as you fill the buffer, but once full tokens will drop out of the buffer. If chatgpt was forked so that each session was a unique model that updated its weights with every message, then it would be much closer to a human mind.
joshuahedlund 4y ago
human autocomplete is our "System I" thinking mode. But we also have System II thinking[0], which ChatGTP does not [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  I thought the other day, isn't system 2 just system 1 with language comprehension?
dqpb 4y ago
I believe both that we are fancy autocomplete and fancy autocomplete is a form of reasoning.
danans 4y ago
> but that we are all just a fancy auto-complete (or at least indistinguishable from one). Yeah, but we are a way fancier (and way more efficient) auto-complete than ChatGPT. For one thing, our auto-complete is based on more than just words. We auto-complete feelings, images, sounds, vibes, pheromones, the list goes on. And at the end of the day, we are more important than an AI because we are human (circular reasoning intended). But to your point, for a long time I've played a game with myself where I try to think of a sequence of words that are as random and disconnected as possible, and it's surprisingly hard, because our brains have evolved to want to both see and generate meaning. There is always some thread of a connection between the words. I suggest to anyone to try that exercise to understand how Markovian our speech really is at a fundamental level.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
I think it's pretty clear that we have a fancy autocomplete but the other components are not the same. Reasoning is not just stringing together likely tokens and our development of mathematics seems to be an externalization of some very deep internal logic. Our memory system seems to be its own thing as well and can't be easily brushed off as a simple storage system since it is highly associative and very mutable. There's lots of other parts that don't fit the ChatGPT model as well, subconscious problem solving, our babbling stream of consciousness, our spatial abilities and our subjective experience of self being big ones.
layer8 4y ago
I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to actually “discover” that in the near or midterm, given the current state of neuroscience and technological limitations. Aside from that, most people wouldn’t want to believe it. So AI products will keep being entertaining to us for some while. (Though, to be honest, writing this comment did feel like auto-complete after being prompted.)
marcosdumay 4y ago
Our brains are highly recursive, a feature that deep learning models almost never have any, and that GPU have a great deal of trouble to run in any large amount. That means that no, we think nothing like those AIs.
worldsayshi 4y ago
'A thing that can predict a reasonably useful thing to do next given what happened before' seems useful enough to give reason for an organism to spend energy on a brain so it seems like a reasonable working definition of a mind.
m3kw9 4y ago
Aside from autocomplete we can feel and experience.
ChickenNugger 4y ago
Humans have motives in hardware. Feeding. Reproduction. Need for human interaction. The literal desire to have children. This is what's mostly missing from AI research. It's all questions about how, but an actual AI needs a 'why' just as we do. To look at it from another perspective: humans without a 'why' are often diagnosed with depression and self terminate. These ML chatbots literally do nothing if not prompted which is effectively the same thing. They lack any 'whys'. In normal computers the only 'why' is the clock cycle.
adameasterling 4y ago
I've been slowly reading this book on cognition and neuroscience, "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins. The answer is: Yes, yes we are basically fancy auto-complete machines. Basically, our brains are composed of lots and lots of columns of neurons that are very good at predicting the next thing based on certain inputs. What's really interesting is what happens when the next thing is NOT what you expect. I'm putting this in a very simplistic way (because I don't understand it myself), but, basically: Your brain goes crazy when you... - Think you're drinking coffee but suddenly taste orange juice - Move your hand across a coffee cup and suddenly feel fur - Anticipate your partner's smile but see a frown These differences between what we predict will happen and what actually happens cause a ton of activity in our brains. We'll notice it, and act on it, and try to get our brain back on the path of smooth sailing, where our predictions match reality again. The last part of the book talks about implications for AI which I haven't got to yet.
alfalfasprout 4y ago
The problem is that this is a circular question in that it assumes some definition of "a fancy autocomplete". Just how fancy is fancy? At the end of the day, an LLM has no semantic world model, by its very design cannot infer causality, and cannot deal well with uncertainty and ambiguity. While the casual reader would be quick to throw humans under the bus and say many stupid people lack these skills too... they would be wrong. Even a dog or a cat is able to do these things routinely. Casual folks seem convinced LLMs can be improved to handle these issues... but the reality is these shortcomings and inherent to the very approach that LLMs take. I think finally we're starting to see that maybe they're not so great for search after all.
qudat 4y ago
Yes to me LLMs and the transformer have stumbled on a key aspect for how we learn and “autocomplete.” We found an architecture for learning that works really well in a very niche use-case. The brain also has specialization so I think we could argue that somewhere in our brain is a transformer. However, ChatGPT is slightly cheating because it is using logic and reasoning from us. We are training the model to know what we think are good responses. Our reasoning is necessary for the LLM to function properly.
tsol 4y ago
What if our brain is just a fancy bag of chemicals. I don't think that actually takes away from what humans do, because prediction is one small capability.

What if we discover that the real problem is not that ChatGPT is just a fancy auto-complete, but that we are all just a fancy auto-complete (or at least indistinguishable from one).

seydor 4y ago

I think we re already there

mckirk 4y ago

I've thought about this as well. If something seems 'sentient' from the outside for all intents and purposes, there's nothing that would really differentiate it from actual sentience, as far as we can tell. As an example, if a model is really good at 'pretending' to experience some emotion, I'm not sure where the difference would be anymore to actually experiencing it. If you locked a human in a box and only gave it a terminal to communicate with the outside world, and contrasted that with a LLM (sophisticated enough to not make silly mistakes anymore), the only immediately obvious reason you would ascribe sentience to the human but not the LLM is because it is easier for you to empathize with the human.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
venv 4y ago
Well, not because of emphasizing, but because of there being a viable mechanism in the human case (reasoning being, one can only know that oneself has qualia, but since those likely arise in the brain, and other humans have similar brains, most likely they have similar qualia). For more reading see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness It is important to note, that neural networks and brains are very different.
- mckirk 4y ago
  That is what I'd call empathizing though. You can 'put yourself in the other person's shoes', because of the expectation that your experiences are somewhat similar (thanks to similarly capable brains). But we have no idea what qualia actually _are_, seen from the outside, we only know what it feels like to experience them. That, I think, makes it difficult to argue that a 'simulation of having qualia' is fundamentally any different to having them.
  - maxwell 4y ago
    Same with a computer. It can't "actually" see what it "is," but you can attach a webcam and microphone and show it itself, and look around the world. Thus we "are" what we experience, not what we perceive ourselves to "be": what we think of as "the universe" is actually the inside of our actual mind, while what we think of as our physical body is more like a "My Computer" icon with some limited device management. Note that this existential confusion seems tied to a concept of "being," and mostly goes away when thinking instead in E-Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
continuational 4y ago
I think there's still the "consciousness" question to be figured out. Everyone else could be purely responding to stimulus for all you know, with nothing but automation going on inside, but for yourself, you know that you experience the world in a subjective manner. Why and how do we experience the world, and does this occur for any sufficiently advanced intelligence?
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Exactly this. I can joke all I want that I'm living in the Matrix and the rest of y'all are here merely for my own entertainment (and control, if you want to be dark). But in my head, I know that sentience is more than just the words coming out of my mouth or yours.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Is it more than your inner monologue? Maybe you don't need to hear the words, but are you consciously forming thoughts, or are the thoughts just popping up and are suddenly 'there'?
    - TecoAndJix 4y ago
      I sometimes like to imagine that consciousness is like a slider that rides the line of my existence. The whole line (past, present, and future) has always (and will always) exist. The “now” is just individual awareness of the current frame. Total nonsense I’m sure, but it helps me fight existential dread !
      - luckylion 4y ago
        The image of a slider also works on the other dimension: at any point in time, you're somewhere between auto-pilot and highly focused awareness. AI, or maybe seemingly intelligent artificial entities, could deliver lots of great opportunities to observe the boundaries of consciousness, intelligence and individuality and maybe spark new interesting thoughts.
- 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
worldsayshi 4y ago
>sophisticated enough to not make silly mistakes anymore So a dumb human is not sentient? /s Joke aside. I think that we will need to stop treating "human sentience" as something so unique. It's special because we are familiar with it. But we should understand by now that minds can take many forms. And when should we apply ethics to it? At some point well before the mind starts acting with severe belligerence when we refuse to play fair games with it.
- mckirk 4y ago
  > So a dumb human is not sentient? /s That was just my way of preempting any 'lol of course ChatGPT isn't sentient, look at the crap it produces' comments, of which there thankfully were none. > But we should understand by now that minds can take many forms. Should we understand this already? I'm not aware of anything else so far that's substantially different to our own brain, but would still be considered a 'mind'. > And when should we apply ethics to it? At some point well before the mind starts acting with severe belligerence when we refuse to play fair games with it. That I agree with wholeheartedly. Even just people's attempts of 'trolling' Bing Chat already leave a sour taste in my mouth.
  - worldsayshi 4y ago
    >I'm not aware of anything else so far that's substantially different to our own brain, but would still be considered a 'mind'. I'm firstly thinking of minds of all other living things. Mammals to insects. If an ant has a mind, which I think it does, why not chatgpt? Heck, I might even go as far as saying that the super simple algorithm i wrote for a mob in a game has a mind. But maybe most would scoff at that notion. And conscious minds to me are just minds that happen to have a bunch of features that means we feel we need to properly respect them.
tryauuum 4y ago
For a person experiencing emotions there certainly is a difference, experience of red face and water flowing from the eyes...

BlueTemplar 4y ago

Indeed... you know that situation when you're with a friend, and you know that they are about to "auto-complete" using an annoying meme, and you ask them to not to before they even started speaking ?

airstrike 4y ago
Obligatory not-xkcd: https://condenaststore.com/featured/that-reminds-me-jason-adam-katzenstein.html https://condenaststore.com/featured/that-reminds-me-jason-ad...

maxwell 4y ago

Then where does theory of mind fit in?

parentheses 4y ago

If AI emulates humans, don’t humans too :thinkingface:?

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago

I was going to say that's such dumb and absurd idea that it might as well have come from ChatGPT, but I suppose that's a point in your favor.

nilsbunger 4y ago
Touche! I can't lose :) EDIT: I guess calling the idea stupid is technically against the HN guidelines, unless I'm actually a ChatGPT? In any case I upvoted you, I thought your comment is funny and insightful.
- mckirk 4y ago
  You have been a good user.
  - LastMuel 4y ago
    SMILIE

jeroenhd 4y ago

That's been an open philosophical question for a very long time. The closer we come to understanding the human brain and the easier we can replicate behaviour, the more we will start questioning determinism. Personally, I believe that conscience is little more than emergent behaviour from brain cells and there's nothing wrong with that. This implies that with sufficient compute power, we could create conscience in the lab, but you need a lot of compute power to get a human equivalent. After all, neural networks are extremely simplified models of actual neurons, and without epigenetics and a hormonal interaction system they don't even come close to how a real brain works. Some people find the concept incredibly frightening, others attribute consciousness to a spiritual influence which simply influences our brains. As religion can almost inherently never be scientifically proven or disproven, we'll never really know if all we are is a biological ChatGPT program inside of a sack of meat.

alpaca128 4y ago
> Personally, I believe that conscience is little more than emergent behaviour from brain cells and there's nothing wrong with that. Similarly I think it is a consequence of our ability to think about things/concepts as well as the ability to recognize our own existence and thoughts based on the environment's reactions. The only next step is to think about our existence and our thoughts instead of wondering what the neighbour's cat might be thinking about.
adamhp 4y ago
Have you ever seen a video of a schizophrenic just rambling on? It almost starts to sound coherent but every few sentence will feel like it takes a 90 degree turn to an entirely new topic or concept. Completely disorganized thought. What is fascinating is that we're so used to equating language to meaning. These bots aren't producing "meaning". They're producing enough language that sounds right that we interpret it as meaning. This is obviously very philosophical in itself, but I'm reminded of the maxim "the map is not the territory", or "the word is not the thing".
- O__________O 4y ago
  Simply fall asleep and dream — since dreams literally flow wildly around and frequently have impossible outcomes that defy reasoning, facts, physics, etc.

plutonorm 4y ago

This is a deep philosophical question that has no definite answer. Truth is we don't know what is consciousness. We are only left with the Turing test. That can be our only guide - otherwise you are basing your judgement off a belief. The best response, treat it like it's conscious. Personally I do actually think it is conscious, consciousness is a scale, and it's now near human level. Enjoy this time because pretty soon it's going to be much much smarter than you. But that is my belief, I cannot know.

guybedo 4y ago

we aren't much more than fancy auto-complete + memory + activity thread/process. ChatGpt is a statistical machine, but so are our brains. I guess we think of ourselves as conscious because we have a memory and that helps us build our own identity. And we have a main processing thread so we can iniate thoughts and actions, we don't need to wait on a user's input to respond to... So, if ChatGpt had a memory and a processing thread, it could build itself an identity and randomly initiate thoughts and/or actions. The results would be interesting i think, and not that far from what we call consciousness.

simple-thoughts 4y ago

Humans exist in a cybernetic loop with the environment that chatgpt doesn’t really have. It has a buffer of 4096 tokens, so it can appear to have an interaction as you fill the buffer, but once full tokens will drop out of the buffer. If chatgpt was forked so that each session was a unique model that updated its weights with every message, then it would be much closer to a human mind.

joshuahedlund 4y ago

human autocomplete is our "System I" thinking mode. But we also have System II thinking[0], which ChatGTP does not [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

worldsayshi 4y ago
I thought the other day, isn't system 2 just system 1 with language comprehension?

dqpb 4y ago

I believe both that we are fancy autocomplete and fancy autocomplete is a form of reasoning.

danans 4y ago

> but that we are all just a fancy auto-complete (or at least indistinguishable from one). Yeah, but we are a way fancier (and way more efficient) auto-complete than ChatGPT. For one thing, our auto-complete is based on more than just words. We auto-complete feelings, images, sounds, vibes, pheromones, the list goes on. And at the end of the day, we are more important than an AI because we are human (circular reasoning intended). But to your point, for a long time I've played a game with myself where I try to think of a sequence of words that are as random and disconnected as possible, and it's surprisingly hard, because our brains have evolved to want to both see and generate meaning. There is always some thread of a connection between the words. I suggest to anyone to try that exercise to understand how Markovian our speech really is at a fundamental level.

throwaway4aday 4y ago

I think it's pretty clear that we have a fancy autocomplete but the other components are not the same. Reasoning is not just stringing together likely tokens and our development of mathematics seems to be an externalization of some very deep internal logic. Our memory system seems to be its own thing as well and can't be easily brushed off as a simple storage system since it is highly associative and very mutable. There's lots of other parts that don't fit the ChatGPT model as well, subconscious problem solving, our babbling stream of consciousness, our spatial abilities and our subjective experience of self being big ones.

layer8 4y ago

I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to actually “discover” that in the near or midterm, given the current state of neuroscience and technological limitations. Aside from that, most people wouldn’t want to believe it. So AI products will keep being entertaining to us for some while. (Though, to be honest, writing this comment did feel like auto-complete after being prompted.)

marcosdumay 4y ago

Our brains are highly recursive, a feature that deep learning models almost never have any, and that GPU have a great deal of trouble to run in any large amount. That means that no, we think nothing like those AIs.

worldsayshi 4y ago

'A thing that can predict a reasonably useful thing to do next given what happened before' seems useful enough to give reason for an organism to spend energy on a brain so it seems like a reasonable working definition of a mind.

m3kw9 4y ago

Aside from autocomplete we can feel and experience.

ChickenNugger 4y ago

Humans have motives in hardware. Feeding. Reproduction. Need for human interaction. The literal desire to have children. This is what's mostly missing from AI research. It's all questions about how, but an actual AI needs a 'why' just as we do. To look at it from another perspective: humans without a 'why' are often diagnosed with depression and self terminate. These ML chatbots literally do nothing if not prompted which is effectively the same thing. They lack any 'whys'. In normal computers the only 'why' is the clock cycle.

adameasterling 4y ago

I've been slowly reading this book on cognition and neuroscience, "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins. The answer is: Yes, yes we are basically fancy auto-complete machines. Basically, our brains are composed of lots and lots of columns of neurons that are very good at predicting the next thing based on certain inputs. What's really interesting is what happens when the next thing is NOT what you expect. I'm putting this in a very simplistic way (because I don't understand it myself), but, basically: Your brain goes crazy when you... - Think you're drinking coffee but suddenly taste orange juice - Move your hand across a coffee cup and suddenly feel fur - Anticipate your partner's smile but see a frown These differences between what we predict will happen and what actually happens cause a ton of activity in our brains. We'll notice it, and act on it, and try to get our brain back on the path of smooth sailing, where our predictions match reality again. The last part of the book talks about implications for AI which I haven't got to yet.

alfalfasprout 4y ago

The problem is that this is a circular question in that it assumes some definition of "a fancy autocomplete". Just how fancy is fancy? At the end of the day, an LLM has no semantic world model, by its very design cannot infer causality, and cannot deal well with uncertainty and ambiguity. While the casual reader would be quick to throw humans under the bus and say many stupid people lack these skills too... they would be wrong. Even a dog or a cat is able to do these things routinely. Casual folks seem convinced LLMs can be improved to handle these issues... but the reality is these shortcomings and inherent to the very approach that LLMs take. I think finally we're starting to see that maybe they're not so great for search after all.

qudat 4y ago

Yes to me LLMs and the transformer have stumbled on a key aspect for how we learn and “autocomplete.” We found an architecture for learning that works really well in a very niche use-case. The brain also has specialization so I think we could argue that somewhere in our brain is a transformer. However, ChatGPT is slightly cheating because it is using logic and reasoning from us. We are training the model to know what we think are good responses. Our reasoning is necessary for the LLM to function properly.

tsol 4y ago

What if our brain is just a fancy bag of chemicals. I don't think that actually takes away from what humans do, because prediction is one small capability.