10 ms·
> What are the implications for society when general thinking, reading, and writing becomes like Chess? I think going from LSAT to general thinking is still a
by afavour 4y ago
> What are the implications for society when general thinking, reading, and writing becomes like Chess?
I think going from LSAT to general thinking is still a very, very big leap. Passing exams is a really fascinating benchmark but by their nature these exams are limited in scope, have very clear assessment criteria and a lot of associated and easily categorized data (like example tests). General thought (particularly like, say, coming up with an original idea) is a whole different ball game.
I don't say any of this to denigrate GPT4, it looks amazing. But I'm reminded of the early days of self driving vehicles: with 10% mastered everyone assumed it was a race to 100% and we'd all be in self-driving cars by now. The reality has been a lot more complicated than that.
- pottspotts 4y agoWe are moving the goal posts on AGI very quickly, but it is catching up. I think we need to appreciate the nature of this milestone if we have any hope of controlling potential singularities.
- andsoitis 4y ago> We are moving the goal posts on AGI What, in your mind, should the goal posts be for AGI?
- rdedev 4y agoI guess till some model explicitly says that it's sentient without any input, we would keep pushing the goal posts.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y agoTherein lies the rub. Has anyone wired their models to have real-time data ingestion and the ability to output at will in a variety of mediums? Wake me when we’re there.
- paganel 4y agoBecause those were the real goal-posts all along, some of the best SF novels written all the way back in the ‘50s and ‘60s are testimony to that.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sebzim4500 4y agoI got LLaMA to say that it was sentient without mentioning sentience at all, I think this is a pretty bad metric.
- kvetching 4y agoSilicon chips will never be able to generate a bound qualia space as we have. Currently, you could prompt GPT to act as if it is sentient and has qualia, and it will do quite a good job at trying to convince you it's not a P-Zombie.
- krisoft 4y ago> Silicon chips will never be able to generate a bound qualia space as we have. How do you know that?
- kvetching 4y agoObviously we can't "know" this. My thinking is largely influenced by consciousness researcher and founder of Qualia Research Institute, Andrés Gómez Emilsson. Here's a couple recent videos with him about why digital computers can't be sentient. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzBjBo24g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzBjBo24g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT9tnzucnPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT9tnzucnPU
- CuriouslyC 4y agoHow do you know silicon chips don't have an internal experience already? Are you in that "consciousness is magically emergent" camp?
- kvetching 4y agoI'm sure they do. It's just not coherent, hence prefacing my comment with bound. It's just random mind dust. I am a believer of a form of panpsychism. And that the hard problem of consciousness is better formulated as the boundary problem, whereby you get a conscious / intelligent being from properly creating boundaries around the consciousness that already exists. Here's a good video detailing this line of thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xmprt 4y agoI think there are two different things that people are talking about when they say AGI - usefulness and actual general intelligence. I think we're already passed the point where these AIs are very useful and not just in a Siri or Google Assistant way and the goal posts for that have moved a little bit (mostly around practicality so the tools are in everyone's hands). But general intelligence is a much loftier goal and I think that we're eventually going to hit another road block regardless of how much progress we can make towards that end.
- madaxe_again 4y agoWhat is this general intelligence of which you speak? The things that we generally regard as people are essentially language models that run on meat hardware with a lizard-monkey operating system. Sapir-whorf/linguistic relativity more or less demonstrates that "we" are products of language - our rational thought generally operates in the language layer. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck - then you've got yourself a duck. To be honest, perhaps the language model works better without the evolutionary baggage. That isn't to discount the other things we can do with our neural nets - for instance, it is possible to think without language - see music, instantaneous mental arithmetic, intuition - but these are essentially independent specialised models that we run on the same hardware that our language model can interrogate. We train these models from birth. Whether intentional or not, AI research is very much going in the direction of replicating the human mind.
- triyambakam 4y agoAI has never been more than a derivative of human thought. I am confident it will never eclipse or overtake it. Your portrayal is too simplistic. There is a lot about humans that LLMs and the like can emulate, but the last N percent (pick a small number like 5) will never be solved. It just doesn't have the spark.
- madaxe_again 4y agoYou’re saying that we are magical? Some kind of non-physical process that is touched by… what? The divine? God? Get real.
- camjohnson26 4y agoThis is a popular take, but does it hold up to reality? From what I’ve seen most people have long expected AI to solve standardized tests, even more free form ones like the LSAT. LLMs’ new abilities are mostly just because of faster and cheaper training and huge amounts of data, but I don’t see anything it can solve that doesn’t use pattern matching. There are many things that pattern matching over large amounts of data can solve, like eventually we can probably get fully generated movies, music compositions, and novels, but the problem is that all of the content of those works will have to have been formalized into rules before it is produced, since computers can only work with formalized data. None of those productions will ever have an original thought, and I think that’s why GPT-3’s fiction feels so shallow. So it boils down to a philosophical question, can human thought be formalized and written in rules? If it can, no human ever has an original thought either, and it’s a moot point.
- loandbehold 4y agoSounds like Chinese Room argument. Maybe human intelligence is just a pattern matching?
- tspike 4y agoWhat would be an alternative explanation for our capabilities? It was once controversial (and still is in some circles) to say that humans are animals simply because it took away some of our sense of being "special."
- burlesona 4y agoI agree with your take, but will emphasize that the recent wave of AI progress has me questioning how much of human intelligence just reduces to pattern matching. There's certainly a lot of things, like painting, that most people wouldn't have called "pattern matching" a few years ago and now seem to clearly fall into that category.
- bobthepanda 4y agoMaking existing art, or art similar to existing art, might be pattern matching. Making totally new innovations in art, particularly ones that people end up liking, is a whole different ball game.
- nradov 4y agoNo one has moved the goal posts. Let's see a computer pass a rigorous Turing test conducted by an interdisciplinary panel of expert evaluators. That has long been considered the gold standard for identifying the arrival of true AGI. GPT-4 is a tremendous technical achievement, but still far from that level. The notion of some sort of technological "singularity" is just silly. It is essentially an article of faith, a secular religion among certain pseudo-intellectual members of the chattering class. There is no hard scientific backing for it.
- CuriouslyC 4y agoIf we had a large dataset of experts interrogating AI/people and noting answers that raised suspicion, we'd have AI passing the Turing test more often than actual people very quickly.
- frumper 4y agoA Turing test doesn't require that the AI know the answers to the experts, only that it responds in a way that is equivalent of a person. It would be perfectly acceptable to answer I don't have a clue. You're asking for super intelligence.
- Jevon23 4y agoThe goalposts have not moved. The goalposts have never been moved. An AGI is an AI that can do everything a human can do, period. If you were starting a startup for example, you wouldn’t need to hire any humans - you would just spin up enough AGI instances and they would design your product, write your code, deploy it, handle your financials, respond to any and all customer interactions, proactively navigate regulations and litigation, and everything else that needs to be done in the management of a business. That is the goalpost for AGI. It’s an artificial human - a human replacement.
- adriand 4y agoThe goalposts absolutely have moved: consider the Turing Test as a prime example. If machines cannot pass that test now (and right now it would take a skilled interviewer with substantial domain knowledge to cause a failure), they seem likely to be able to in the very near future.
- gowld 4y agoThe Turing Test was proposed as one example of a test for "indistinguishable from a human", not the singular goalpost for indistinguishability.
- bluefirebrand 4y agoRecognizing that the Turing Test is not a sufficient bar for judging if a computer is true AGI is not moving the goalposts, it's just realizing that passing the test and the location of the goalposts weren't actually the same in the first place.
- wongarsu 4y agoThe Turing test has been questioned for decades, with many suggesting that Turing meant it more as a joke. And that's ignoring that arguably chat bots have been passing the Turing test (against non-expert judges) since ELIZA in the 60s [1] 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
- soperj 4y ago
- intended 4y agoWe seem to be taking stands on either side of > “there are/are not, additional properties to human level symbol manipulation, beyond what GPT encapsulates.” GPT does appear to do an awful lot, before we find the limits, of pattern extrapolation.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y agoThe goalposts never moved, but you're right that we're catching up quickly. We always thought that if AI can do X then it can do Y and Z. It keeps turning out that you can actually get really good at doing X without being able to do Y and Z, so it looks like we're moving the goalposts, when we're really just realizing that X wasn't as informative as we expected. The issue is that we can't concretely define Y and Z, so we keep pointing at the wrong X. But all indication is that we're getting closer.
- jstx1 4y agoThe goalposts don't matter. If we all agreed today that we have AGI, nothing would be different tomorrow.
- loandbehold 4y agoPeak denialism? Answering LSAT questions requires general intelligence. They present real life scenarios that test-taker has to understand. It requires "common sense" knowledge about the world and reasoning ability. It's not something you can memorize answers to or solve by following prescribed patterns or templates. And GPT-4 wasn't trained specifically to solve LSAT questions.
- jack_riminton 4y agoBingo. These are very 'human' tasks. As others have said elsewhere, the issue remains accuracy. I wish every response comes with an accurate estimation of how true the answer is, because at the moment it gives wrong answers as confidently as right ones.
- 1attice 4y agoSo the thing is, giving wrong answers with confidence is literally what we train students to do when they are unsure. I can remember my GRE coach telling me that it was better to confidently choose an answer I only had 50% confidence in, rather than punt on the entire question. AIs hallucinate because, statistically, it is 'rewarding' for them to do so. (In RLHF)
- jjeaff 4y agoFor the human brain, the LSAT requires reasoning. But not for an LLM. Do we even know exactly what data this is trained on? I have only seen vague references to what data they are using. If it is trained on large chunks of the internet, then it certainly is trained on LSAT practice questions. And because LSAT questions follow a common pattern, it is well suited to a LLM. There isn't any reasoning or general intelligence at all. Just really good statistics applied to large amounts of data.
- bespokedevelopr 4y ago> Passing exams is a really fascinating benchmark but by their nature these exams are limited in scope, have very clear assessment criteria and a lot of associated and easily categorized data I know I’m not the first to say this, but this is also a generalization of many jobs performed right now. Follow the template, click the boxes, enter the text/data in the standard format, submit before 4pm. Come in tomorrow and do it again.
- camjohnson26 4y agoHumans are at their best correcting and finding errors in the integration between automated systems. Yes we probably won’t have accountants manually typing data from a page into a computer in the future, but we’ll always have people reviewing and checking the automation. If that automation doesn’t require oversight, everyone wins, since now that process, typing data from a ledger, is free to anyone who wants to use it. The exception of course is if a monopoly or oligopoly controls the process, so it’s up to the government to break them up and keep the underlying tech accessible. The biggest risk is how much computing power it takes to run these models, so it’s very important to support the open alternatives that are trying to lower the barrier to entry.
- zamnos 4y agoThe big huge difference is that cars have this unfortunate thing where if they crash, people get really hurt or killed, especially pedestrians. And split second response time matters, so it's hard for a human operator to just jump in. If ChatGPT-4 hallucinates an answer, it won't kill me. If a human needs to proofread the email it wrote before sending, it'll wait for seconds or minutes.
- afavour 4y ago> If ChatGPT-4 hallucinates an answer, it won't kill me Sure but look in this thread, there are already plenty of people citing the use of GPT in legal or medical fields. The danger is absolutely real if we march unthinkingly towards an AI-driven future.
- greatpatton 4y agoWho is using ChatGPT in a medical field (serious question), knowing that it only displays very shallow level of knowledge on specific topic?
- slingnow 4y ago> If ChatGPT-4 hallucinates an answer, it won't kill me Not yet it won't. It doesn't take much imagination to foresee where this kind of AI is used to inform legal or medical decisions.
- SoftTalker 4y agoReal human doctors kill people by making mistakes. Medical error is a non-trivial cause of deaths. An AI doctor only needs to be better than the average human doctor, isn't that what we always hear about self-driving cars? And medicine is nothing but pattern matching. Symptoms -> diagnosis -> treatment.
- mustacheemperor 4y agoEven just in the exam passing category, GPT4 showed no improvement over GPT3.5 on AP Language & Composition or AP English Literature, and scored quite poorly. Now, granted, plenty of humans don't score above a 2 on those exams either. But I think it's indicative that there's still plenty of progress left to make before this technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- nopinsight 4y agoGeneral thinking requires an AGI, which GPT-4 is not. But it can already have a major impact. Unlike self-driving cars which we require 99.999+% safety to be deployed widely, people already use the imperfect GPT-3 and ChatGPT for many productive tasks. Driving as well as an attentive human in real time, in all conditions, probably requires AGI as well. GPT-4 is not an AGI and GPT-5 might not be it yet. But the barriers toward it are getting thinner and thinner. Are we really ready for AGI in a plausibly-within-our-lifetime future? Sam Altman wrote that AGI is a top potential explanation for the Fermi Paradox. If that were remotely true, we should be doing 10x-100x work on AI Alignment research.
- the_gipsy 4y agoDefine: "general thinking".
- nanidin 4y agoWhat might be interesting is to feed in the transcripts & filings from actual court cases and ask the LLM to write the judgement, then compare notes vs the actual judge.
- dang 4y agoWe detached this perfectly fine subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154722 in an attempt to spare our poor server, which has smoke coming out of its ears today :( - sorry. We're still working on this and one day it will be better.
- lynguist 4y agoYour last paragraph weakens the argument that you’re making. Driving assistance and the progress made there and large language models and the progress made there are absolutely incomparable. The general public’s hype in driving assistance is fueled mostly by the hype surrounding one car maker and its figurehead and it’s a hype that’s been fueled for a few years and become accepted in the public, reflected in the stock price of that car maker. Large language models have not yet perpetrated the public’s memory yet, and, what’s actually the point is that inside of language you can find our human culture. And inside a large language model you have essentially the English language with its embeddings. It is real, it is big, it is powerful, it is respectable research. There’s nothing in driving assistance that can be compared to LLMs. They don’t have an embedding of the entire physical surface of planet earth or understanding of driving physics. They’re nothing.