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The comments on this thread are proof of the AI effect: People will continually push the goal posts back as progress occurs. “Meh, it’s just a fancy word predi

The comments on this thread are proof of the AI effect: People will continually push the goal posts back as progress occurs. “Meh, it’s just a fancy word predictor. It’s not actually useful.” “Boring, it’s just memorizing answers. And it scored in the lowest percentile anyways”. “Sure, it’s in the top percentile now but honestly are those tests that hard? Besides, it can’t do anything with images.” “Ok, it takes image input now but honestly, it’s not useful in any way.”

lolsal 4y ago
I’m one of these skeptics, but it’s not moving the goalposts. These goalposts are already there, in some sort of serial order that we expect them to be reached. It is good that when tech like this satisfied one of the easier/earlier goalposts, that skeptics refine our criticism based on evidence. You will see skepticism until it is ubiquitous; for example, Tesla tech - it’s iterative and there are still skeptics about its current implementation.
- hnfong 4y ago
  It’s one thing to be skeptical of the state of art and only believe something when you actually see it working (a useful antidote against vapor ware) It’s another to keep making wrong assertions and predictions about the pace of advancement because of a quasi-religious belief that humans with meat-brains are somehow fundamentally superior .
  - lolsal 4y ago
    Expecting what we collectively call “artificial intelligence” to mimic our own intelligence, which is continuously being refined, does not seem like a quasi-religious belief. Intelligence and consciousness are at the fringe of our understanding, so this skeptical approach seems like a reasonable and scientific way to approach categorizing computer programs that are intended to be called “artificial intelligence”. We refine our hypothesis of “this is artificial intelligence” once we gain more information. You’re free to disagree of course, or call these early programs “artificial intelligence”, but they don’t satisfy my crude hypothesis above to a lot of folks. This doesn’t mean they aren’t in some ways intelligent (pattern recognition could be a kind or degree of intelligence, it certainly seems required).
    - maxdoop 4y ago
      The part I push back on is the confidence with which people claim these LLMs “are definitely not intelligent / thinking”. We can’t even define clearly what human thinking is, yet so many folks claim “nope, LLMs are just pattern matching. Wake me up when it actually has a thought.” And there are two points to make on that: the first is again, we can’t even explain our own thoughts or rational thinking. And second, I’ve yet to see how it even matters . The output of GPT-4, for example, is pretty much on point with your average person on certain topics. Whether or not it’s “truly thinking” under the hood is irrelevant, imo, if it gives a really good illusion of it.
    - hnfong 4y ago
      > We refine our hypothesis of “this is artificial intelligence” once we gain more information. You're basically saying skepticism is the correct approach and it doesn't matter if we make confident yet wrong predictions about the (lack of) future potential of AI. I mean, sure, that works too. But I think that's basically admitting the goalposts are moving.
      - lolsal 4y ago
        You can call it that if you want, but it’s not the same as goalpost shifting for well-definable things like “universal healthcare” or “trans rights”. We don’t collectively agree on what artificial intelligence is, so it makes sense that it is constantly refined, and efforts that fall short are called out as such.
TaupeRanger 4y ago
There isn't and was never any movement of goalposts. They have been exactly the same for 70 years. We want creative systems (in the Deutschian sense) that can create new explanatory theories, which lead to actual new knowledge. When an AI is capable of creating new explanatory theories that are GOOD (not world salad), we will have human-like AGI. GPT is no closer to this goal than ELIZA (though it is much more useful).
- HPMOR 4y ago
  Bro what???!!?? GPT-4 is already being used as a personalized tutor on Kahn Academy. It’s personally helped me understand difficult Algorithms and CV applications in my undergrad classes. GPT-4 is about to revolutionize the world.
  - TaupeRanger 4y ago
    Seems like you're responding to a comment completely unrelated to mine...not sure what happened here. I never said otherwise.
  - NineStarPoint 4y ago
    It’s about to revolutionize the world, yes. What you described is what this sort if approach is good at: acting as a repository and reformatter for already existing human knowledge. But that doesn’t mean it’s an AGI, because as the person you’re responding to said, to be sure we have one of those requires making something that can create something beyond current human knowledge. (Or, at least, beyond just the logic that was contained in its training set)
    - bick_nyers 4y ago
      What it kind of boils down to is: is it a tool, or an entity? One could argue that IDE's and Compilers each revolutionized the world.
      - easterncalculus 4y ago
esjeon 4y ago
This is a good example of “this is great, so I’m gonna settle here”-type of people. They just stick to what’s popular today, without understanding it will become a past anyway. GPT is limited by its own design. The network is crude on the architectural level - which is easy to copy - but is only scaled to an unusual level - which is the factor behind the recent development. The current situation is almost like running BFS on a cluster during a chess match. Certainly, the AI will be able to beat human, but that can hardly change anything in real life, because it’s just BFS. I find the real problem with AI is that there are people who freak out and extrapolate from select few examples. Meh, let GPT do that - because it can’t by design. We still have a lot of things to do until AIs become generally applicable.
oska 4y ago
I will continually push back at the concept of 'Artificial Intelligence'. It's a science fiction conceit, a fantasy, and I don't think it is ever possible to achieve (creation of an actual artificial intelligence). And people who do think tat are, imo, fantasists. That being said, in the field of machine learning there are significant things being achieved. I was wowed by DeepMind's AlphaZero and its achievements in 'teaching itself' and playing Go, at a level never seen before. I'm impressed by what Tesla is doing with self-driving. I'm less impressed by OpenAI's GPT-x because I don't think it's very useful technology (despite all the, imo, foolish talk of it doing away with all sorts of knowledge jobs and being able to 'tutor' ppl) but I do recognise that it also marks a step up in machine learning in the area of LLMs. None of this is 'Artificial Intelligence' however, and it is both silly and dangerous to conceptualise it as such.
- red75prime 4y ago
  > It's a science fiction conceit What is the human brain then? I'm afraid you are bound to push so far that humans are no longer qualify as intelligent.
- maxdoop 4y ago
  This begs several questions -- one of which being, "what is intelligence, then?"
- adamhp 4y ago
  You can kind of prove it is possible, can't you? I mean, we have ourselves, which we're sort of claiming is the ground truth comparison to "intelligence". You can then see that the average human actually have limited intelligence, when you look at say, savants or hyper-intelligent people. Then it must be that some physical structure of people's bodies enables this higher degree of intelligence, and removes the "limit" so-to-speak. The average brain has 86 billion neurons, which we know are mostly responsible for piecing together consciousness. We also have extensive studies on all the ways we are actually really bad at processing input (a by-product of our primate ancestral heritage). There are entire textbooks on all of the different biases we have built-in. And there are clear and obvious limits to our perception, as well (I'm thinking of the five senses here). Imagine you're neither constrained on the input side or the processing side of this equation. It becomes kind of a mathematical inevitability that we will be able to create artificial intelligence. When anything can be tokenized and act as an "input", and we can run that through something that can process it in the same way that our brains can, only scaled up 10-fold (or more)... If there is one thing we're good at, it is thinking that we are the center of the universe. I think that is blinding people to the possibility of AI. We can't fathom it, for lots of good and bad monkey reasons.
seydor 4y ago
Yeah, but can GPT4 be a hypocrite?
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Exactly. This is an early version of a technology that in short time span might wipe out the need of a vast amount of knowledge workers who are mostly still unaware of this or in denial about it. There are two mistakes people make with this: 1) assuming this is the definite and final answer as to what AI can do. Anything you think you know about what the limitations are of this technology is probably already a bit out of date. OpenAI have been sitting on this one for some time. They are probably already working on v5 and v6. And those are not going to take that long to arrive. This is exponential, not linear progress. 2) assuming that their own qualities are impossible to be matched by an AI and that this won't affect whatever it is they do. I don't think there's a lot that is fundamentally out of scope here just a lot that needs to be refined further. Our jobs are increasingly going to be working with, delegating to, and deferring to AIs.
soheil 4y ago
Here is what it thinks of the shifting goal posts https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soheil/fileshare/main/The%20Problem%20of%20Shifting%20the%20Goalposts%20in%20AI%20Development.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soheil/fileshare/main/The%...

lolsal 4y ago

I’m one of these skeptics, but it’s not moving the goalposts. These goalposts are already there, in some sort of serial order that we expect them to be reached. It is good that when tech like this satisfied one of the easier/earlier goalposts, that skeptics refine our criticism based on evidence. You will see skepticism until it is ubiquitous; for example, Tesla tech - it’s iterative and there are still skeptics about its current implementation.

hnfong 4y ago
It’s one thing to be skeptical of the state of art and only believe something when you actually see it working (a useful antidote against vapor ware) It’s another to keep making wrong assertions and predictions about the pace of advancement because of a quasi-religious belief that humans with meat-brains are somehow fundamentally superior .
- lolsal 4y ago
  Expecting what we collectively call “artificial intelligence” to mimic our own intelligence, which is continuously being refined, does not seem like a quasi-religious belief. Intelligence and consciousness are at the fringe of our understanding, so this skeptical approach seems like a reasonable and scientific way to approach categorizing computer programs that are intended to be called “artificial intelligence”. We refine our hypothesis of “this is artificial intelligence” once we gain more information. You’re free to disagree of course, or call these early programs “artificial intelligence”, but they don’t satisfy my crude hypothesis above to a lot of folks. This doesn’t mean they aren’t in some ways intelligent (pattern recognition could be a kind or degree of intelligence, it certainly seems required).
  - maxdoop 4y ago
    The part I push back on is the confidence with which people claim these LLMs “are definitely not intelligent / thinking”. We can’t even define clearly what human thinking is, yet so many folks claim “nope, LLMs are just pattern matching. Wake me up when it actually has a thought.” And there are two points to make on that: the first is again, we can’t even explain our own thoughts or rational thinking. And second, I’ve yet to see how it even matters . The output of GPT-4, for example, is pretty much on point with your average person on certain topics. Whether or not it’s “truly thinking” under the hood is irrelevant, imo, if it gives a really good illusion of it.
  - hnfong 4y ago
    > We refine our hypothesis of “this is artificial intelligence” once we gain more information. You're basically saying skepticism is the correct approach and it doesn't matter if we make confident yet wrong predictions about the (lack of) future potential of AI. I mean, sure, that works too. But I think that's basically admitting the goalposts are moving.
    - lolsal 4y ago
      You can call it that if you want, but it’s not the same as goalpost shifting for well-definable things like “universal healthcare” or “trans rights”. We don’t collectively agree on what artificial intelligence is, so it makes sense that it is constantly refined, and efforts that fall short are called out as such.

TaupeRanger 4y ago

There isn't and was never any movement of goalposts. They have been exactly the same for 70 years. We want creative systems (in the Deutschian sense) that can create new explanatory theories, which lead to actual new knowledge. When an AI is capable of creating new explanatory theories that are GOOD (not world salad), we will have human-like AGI. GPT is no closer to this goal than ELIZA (though it is much more useful).

HPMOR 4y ago
Bro what???!!?? GPT-4 is already being used as a personalized tutor on Kahn Academy. It’s personally helped me understand difficult Algorithms and CV applications in my undergrad classes. GPT-4 is about to revolutionize the world.
- TaupeRanger 4y ago
  Seems like you're responding to a comment completely unrelated to mine...not sure what happened here. I never said otherwise.
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
  It’s about to revolutionize the world, yes. What you described is what this sort if approach is good at: acting as a repository and reformatter for already existing human knowledge. But that doesn’t mean it’s an AGI, because as the person you’re responding to said, to be sure we have one of those requires making something that can create something beyond current human knowledge. (Or, at least, beyond just the logic that was contained in its training set)
  - bick_nyers 4y ago
    What it kind of boils down to is: is it a tool, or an entity? One could argue that IDE's and Compilers each revolutionized the world.
    - easterncalculus 4y ago

esjeon 4y ago

This is a good example of “this is great, so I’m gonna settle here”-type of people. They just stick to what’s popular today, without understanding it will become a past anyway. GPT is limited by its own design. The network is crude on the architectural level - which is easy to copy - but is only scaled to an unusual level - which is the factor behind the recent development. The current situation is almost like running BFS on a cluster during a chess match. Certainly, the AI will be able to beat human, but that can hardly change anything in real life, because it’s just BFS. I find the real problem with AI is that there are people who freak out and extrapolate from select few examples. Meh, let GPT do that - because it can’t by design. We still have a lot of things to do until AIs become generally applicable.

oska 4y ago

I will continually push back at the concept of 'Artificial Intelligence'. It's a science fiction conceit, a fantasy, and I don't think it is ever possible to achieve (creation of an actual artificial intelligence). And people who do think tat are, imo, fantasists. That being said, in the field of machine learning there are significant things being achieved. I was wowed by DeepMind's AlphaZero and its achievements in 'teaching itself' and playing Go, at a level never seen before. I'm impressed by what Tesla is doing with self-driving. I'm less impressed by OpenAI's GPT-x because I don't think it's very useful technology (despite all the, imo, foolish talk of it doing away with all sorts of knowledge jobs and being able to 'tutor' ppl) but I do recognise that it also marks a step up in machine learning in the area of LLMs. None of this is 'Artificial Intelligence' however, and it is both silly and dangerous to conceptualise it as such.

red75prime 4y ago
> It's a science fiction conceit What is the human brain then? I'm afraid you are bound to push so far that humans are no longer qualify as intelligent.
maxdoop 4y ago
This begs several questions -- one of which being, "what is intelligence, then?"
adamhp 4y ago
You can kind of prove it is possible, can't you? I mean, we have ourselves, which we're sort of claiming is the ground truth comparison to "intelligence". You can then see that the average human actually have limited intelligence, when you look at say, savants or hyper-intelligent people. Then it must be that some physical structure of people's bodies enables this higher degree of intelligence, and removes the "limit" so-to-speak. The average brain has 86 billion neurons, which we know are mostly responsible for piecing together consciousness. We also have extensive studies on all the ways we are actually really bad at processing input (a by-product of our primate ancestral heritage). There are entire textbooks on all of the different biases we have built-in. And there are clear and obvious limits to our perception, as well (I'm thinking of the five senses here). Imagine you're neither constrained on the input side or the processing side of this equation. It becomes kind of a mathematical inevitability that we will be able to create artificial intelligence. When anything can be tokenized and act as an "input", and we can run that through something that can process it in the same way that our brains can, only scaled up 10-fold (or more)... If there is one thing we're good at, it is thinking that we are the center of the universe. I think that is blinding people to the possibility of AI. We can't fathom it, for lots of good and bad monkey reasons.

seydor 4y ago

Yeah, but can GPT4 be a hypocrite?

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Exactly. This is an early version of a technology that in short time span might wipe out the need of a vast amount of knowledge workers who are mostly still unaware of this or in denial about it. There are two mistakes people make with this: 1) assuming this is the definite and final answer as to what AI can do. Anything you think you know about what the limitations are of this technology is probably already a bit out of date. OpenAI have been sitting on this one for some time. They are probably already working on v5 and v6. And those are not going to take that long to arrive. This is exponential, not linear progress. 2) assuming that their own qualities are impossible to be matched by an AI and that this won't affect whatever it is they do. I don't think there's a lot that is fundamentally out of scope here just a lot that needs to be refined further. Our jobs are increasingly going to be working with, delegating to, and deferring to AIs.

soheil 4y ago

Here is what it thinks of the shifting goal posts https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soheil/fileshare/main/The%20Problem%20of%20Shifting%20the%20Goalposts%20in%20AI%20Development.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soheil/fileshare/main/The%...