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This 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 o

This 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 ago
Sounds like Chinese Room argument. Maybe human intelligence is just a pattern matching?
- tspike 4y ago
  What 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Making 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.
  - slingnow 4y ago
    Can you explain how this is a whole different ballgame? It seems to me that making art that people like is a combination of pattern matching, luck, the zeitgeist, and other factors. However it doesn't seem like there's some kind of unknowable gap between "making similar art" and "making innovations in art that people like". I'm of the opinion that all art is in some sense derivative in that the human mind integrates everything it has seen and produces something based on those inputs.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Luck and the zeitgeist are pretty important. Without those, you have a lot of noise and are basically throwing things at the wall until it sticks. A urinal, and some supermarket soup cans, represent pretty pivotal art movements. It’s not clear what makes those two things more art than others, and even to people at the time it wasn’t super clear.
  - mlsu 4y ago
    I mean, the data has to come from somewhere. Look at something like [Luncheon on the Grass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_D%C3%A9jeuner_sur_l%27herbe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_D%C3%A9jeuner_sur_l%27herbe) This painting was revolutionary. When it was first exhibited in Paris, people were shocked. It was rejected from the Salon (the most prominent art exhibition at the time). Yet, 10 years later, every painting in the Salon resembled it. And you can draw a line from this painting, to Monet, from which you can draw a line to Picasso, from which you can draw a line to Pollock.... Obviously, none of these are totally new innovations, they all came from somewhere. Pattern making. The only difference between this and these language models is that Manet and artists like him use their rich sensory experience obtained outside of painting to make new paintings. But it's all fundamentally pattern matching in the end. As long as you can obtain the patterns, there's no difference between a human and a machine in this regard.
javajosh 4y ago
We are about to test the tests, so to speak, and discover whether an agent that aces a test is capable of doing "real work". Meaning information work you would normally pay a human to do. Paperwork stuff, managing accounts, but also programming and social media marketing. Anything mediated by a computer. If so it means the union of all human expertise is a few gigabytes. Having seen both a) what we can do in a kilobyte of code, and b) a broad range of human behavior, this doesn't seem impossible. The more interesting question is: what are humans going to do with this remarkable object, a svelte pocket brain, not quite alive, a capable coder in ALL languages, a shared human artifact that can ace all tests? "May you live in interesting times," indeed.
kordlessagain 4y ago
> can human thought be formalized and written in rules No, and I think it's because human thought is based on continuous inferencing of experience, which gives rise to the current emotional state and feeling of it. For a machine to do this, it will need a body and the ability to put attention on things it is inferencing at will.
- luxcem 4y ago
  The embodied cognition is still a theory, can consciousness appears in a simulated brain without a physical body? Maybe. What seems to be a limiting factor for now it's that current models don't experience existence, they don't have memory and don't "think" outside of the prompt. They are just instances of code launched and destroyed as soon as their task is done. Right now it's possible to simulate memory with additional context (eg system prompt) but it doesn’t represent existence experienced by the model. If we want to go deeper the models need to actually learn from their interaction, update their internal networks and have some capabilities of self reflection (ie "talking to themselves"). I'm sure that's highly researched topic but it would demands extraordinary computational power and would cause lot of issues by letting such an AI in the wild.
  - kordlessagain 4y ago
    Embeddings via ada-002 give us a way to update the model in real time. Using Weaviate, or another dense vector engine, it is possible to write "memories" to the engine and then search those with concepts at a subsequent inferencing step. The "document models" that the engine stores can be considered a "hot model".
    - bobvanluijt 4y ago
      Yeah - it will become available as a multi2vec Weaviate module as well in due time.
jimbokun 4y ago
> but I don’t see anything it can solve that doesn’t use pattern matching. Do you have evidence that human brains are not just super sophisticated pattern matching engines? Humans read novels, listen to compositions, watch movies, and make new ones similar in some ways and different in other ways. What is fundamentally different about the process used for LLMs? Not the current generation necessarily, but what's likely to emerge as they continue to improve.
- gowld 4y ago
  Do pattern matching engines get out of bed in the morning and make breakfast?
  - tspike 4y ago
    If they have a body, and needs that they recognize they need to fill, sure.
- camjohnson26 4y ago
  If you’re looking for proof you’re begging the question, asking for a formal proof of something that by definition can’t be proven, which only makes sense if your philosophical basis is that reality is a formal system. Other people have other philosophical bases, and while they may not be formally probable, they can be supported with other evidence that is equally strong, pointing to the non determinism of quantum physics or the infinitely recursive question of “what caused the first cause”. The strongest evidence I have is that people are notoriously difficult to predict, individually.
  - gnaritas99 4y ago
    [dead]
- joshuahedlund 4y ago
  Humans can ask questions and seek out information. LLMs can only respond to questions.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> 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. Clearly the key takeaway from GPT is that given enough unstructured data, LLM can produce impressive results. From my point of view, the flaw in most discussion surrounding AI is not that people underestimate computers but overestimate how special humans are. At the end of day, every thoughts are a bunch of chemical potentials changing in a small blob of flesh.
sirsinsalot 4y ago
We might consider certain humans to have had innovative or original thoughts. It is probably true that at a given point many many people had the same or very similar ideas. Those who execute or are in the right place and time to declare themselves the originator are the ones we think innovated. It isn't true. Or rarely is true. History is written by the victor (and their simps)

loandbehold 4y ago

Sounds like Chinese Room argument. Maybe human intelligence is just a pattern matching?

tspike 4y ago
What 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 ago

I 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 ago
Making 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.
- slingnow 4y ago
  Can you explain how this is a whole different ballgame? It seems to me that making art that people like is a combination of pattern matching, luck, the zeitgeist, and other factors. However it doesn't seem like there's some kind of unknowable gap between "making similar art" and "making innovations in art that people like". I'm of the opinion that all art is in some sense derivative in that the human mind integrates everything it has seen and produces something based on those inputs.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Luck and the zeitgeist are pretty important. Without those, you have a lot of noise and are basically throwing things at the wall until it sticks. A urinal, and some supermarket soup cans, represent pretty pivotal art movements. It’s not clear what makes those two things more art than others, and even to people at the time it wasn’t super clear.
- mlsu 4y ago
  I mean, the data has to come from somewhere. Look at something like [Luncheon on the Grass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_D%C3%A9jeuner_sur_l%27herbe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_D%C3%A9jeuner_sur_l%27herbe) This painting was revolutionary. When it was first exhibited in Paris, people were shocked. It was rejected from the Salon (the most prominent art exhibition at the time). Yet, 10 years later, every painting in the Salon resembled it. And you can draw a line from this painting, to Monet, from which you can draw a line to Picasso, from which you can draw a line to Pollock.... Obviously, none of these are totally new innovations, they all came from somewhere. Pattern making. The only difference between this and these language models is that Manet and artists like him use their rich sensory experience obtained outside of painting to make new paintings. But it's all fundamentally pattern matching in the end. As long as you can obtain the patterns, there's no difference between a human and a machine in this regard.

javajosh 4y ago

We are about to test the tests, so to speak, and discover whether an agent that aces a test is capable of doing "real work". Meaning information work you would normally pay a human to do. Paperwork stuff, managing accounts, but also programming and social media marketing. Anything mediated by a computer. If so it means the union of all human expertise is a few gigabytes. Having seen both a) what we can do in a kilobyte of code, and b) a broad range of human behavior, this doesn't seem impossible. The more interesting question is: what are humans going to do with this remarkable object, a svelte pocket brain, not quite alive, a capable coder in ALL languages, a shared human artifact that can ace all tests? "May you live in interesting times," indeed.

kordlessagain 4y ago

> can human thought be formalized and written in rules No, and I think it's because human thought is based on continuous inferencing of experience, which gives rise to the current emotional state and feeling of it. For a machine to do this, it will need a body and the ability to put attention on things it is inferencing at will.

luxcem 4y ago
The embodied cognition is still a theory, can consciousness appears in a simulated brain without a physical body? Maybe. What seems to be a limiting factor for now it's that current models don't experience existence, they don't have memory and don't "think" outside of the prompt. They are just instances of code launched and destroyed as soon as their task is done. Right now it's possible to simulate memory with additional context (eg system prompt) but it doesn’t represent existence experienced by the model. If we want to go deeper the models need to actually learn from their interaction, update their internal networks and have some capabilities of self reflection (ie "talking to themselves"). I'm sure that's highly researched topic but it would demands extraordinary computational power and would cause lot of issues by letting such an AI in the wild.
- kordlessagain 4y ago
  Embeddings via ada-002 give us a way to update the model in real time. Using Weaviate, or another dense vector engine, it is possible to write "memories" to the engine and then search those with concepts at a subsequent inferencing step. The "document models" that the engine stores can be considered a "hot model".
  - bobvanluijt 4y ago
    Yeah - it will become available as a multi2vec Weaviate module as well in due time.

jimbokun 4y ago

> but I don’t see anything it can solve that doesn’t use pattern matching. Do you have evidence that human brains are not just super sophisticated pattern matching engines? Humans read novels, listen to compositions, watch movies, and make new ones similar in some ways and different in other ways. What is fundamentally different about the process used for LLMs? Not the current generation necessarily, but what's likely to emerge as they continue to improve.

gowld 4y ago
Do pattern matching engines get out of bed in the morning and make breakfast?
- tspike 4y ago
  If they have a body, and needs that they recognize they need to fill, sure.
camjohnson26 4y ago
If you’re looking for proof you’re begging the question, asking for a formal proof of something that by definition can’t be proven, which only makes sense if your philosophical basis is that reality is a formal system. Other people have other philosophical bases, and while they may not be formally probable, they can be supported with other evidence that is equally strong, pointing to the non determinism of quantum physics or the infinitely recursive question of “what caused the first cause”. The strongest evidence I have is that people are notoriously difficult to predict, individually.
- gnaritas99 4y ago
  [dead]
joshuahedlund 4y ago
Humans can ask questions and seek out information. LLMs can only respond to questions.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

> 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. Clearly the key takeaway from GPT is that given enough unstructured data, LLM can produce impressive results. From my point of view, the flaw in most discussion surrounding AI is not that people underestimate computers but overestimate how special humans are. At the end of day, every thoughts are a bunch of chemical potentials changing in a small blob of flesh.

sirsinsalot 4y ago

We might consider certain humans to have had innovative or original thoughts. It is probably true that at a given point many many people had the same or very similar ideas. Those who execute or are in the right place and time to declare themselves the originator are the ones we think innovated. It isn't true. Or rarely is true. History is written by the victor (and their simps)