6 ms·

It's getting harder to credit the perspective that GPT is just a wildly efficient Mad Libs generator. Or alternatively, another way to describe intelligence is

It's getting harder to credit the perspective that GPT is just a wildly efficient Mad Libs generator. Or alternatively, another way to describe intelligence is the ability of a template-filling algorithm to work effectively in a template-sparce environment. Maybe the Mad Lib, the process of mashing up templates, is in some sense an atom of thought.

pocketarc 4y ago
There was a meme, in the olden days, about how you don’t know who you’re talking to on the internet[0]. And I think it applies here. We don’t need to know who GPT is, whether it thinks or not. It doesn’t need to. It just needs to give you the response you want to hear. Whether it’s just getting really good at predictions based off of a gobsmacking amount of training data, or actually thinking, doesn’t matter, for the task it’s performing. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
- amrb 4y ago
  No one knows your a dog on the internet!
thequadehunter 4y ago
It's pretty funny seeing that ex-google "sentient" dude get slightly vindicated over time.
- Daishiman 4y ago
  Intelligence and sentience are two very different things that don't necessarily overlap.
  - thequadehunter 4y ago
    Why not? I feel like sentience requires the ability to reason.
    - Daishiman 4y ago
      Invertebrates are sentient and most likely capable of feeling and acting yet barely have intellect and may operate completely our of instinct.
- skybrian 4y ago
  Not really, though. It's a stranger situation. ChatGPT's language model doesn't remember chatting with you. It doesn't remember anything not in the training set. It's stateless. It only seems to remember you because the chat transcript gets fed back in again. No "game" is running, most of the time. There's no other "game state." There is a writer. It can continue stories with convincing fictional characters. But the fictional characters consist entirely of words. This is the same sort of existence as the fictional characters in a novel. The helpful AI assistant itself is a fictional character created by the writer. Each time you start a chat session, you create another clone. If you wanted to keep a story going, there are other writers. The writer you're using could be replaced. It should make upgrades easy as technology improves. Looks like we are going to end up chatting with increasingly intelligent fictional characters who don't actually exist. What sort of meme-creatures consist entirely of words?
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    No hay banda. https://youtu.be/7PlJP56WAhU https://youtu.be/7PlJP56WAhU No hay banda. There is no band. Il n'est pas de orchestra. This is all a tape recording. No hay banda and yet, we hear them. If we want to hear a clarinet. Listen... Un trombon à coulisse. Un trombon con sordina. Sient le son del trombon in sourdine. Sient le son! A muted trumpet. It's all recorded. No hay banda! It's all a tape. Il n'est pas de orchestra. It is an illusion. Listen! https://youtu.be/P1-_k3qjhw0 https://youtu.be/P1-_k3qjhw0
  - thequadehunter 4y ago
    His argument was that it might not be completely sentient, but could have some properties of sentience that we should be testing for. I'd say the ability to reason well given a unique irl situation is one of them. I understand that it's just predicting text and the model is only working when it receives input, but what if someone took the LLM and made some kind of cognitive loop in the background where the same LLM reads information, thinks to itself when you are gone, and stores these things in its chat content then tells you about the cool stuff it read about the next day. It may be just text, but now it's "thinking". At what point should we start to consider it as a creature with rights?
- TMWNN 4y ago
  That's what I've been thinking about, too. As a non-expert in the field I was hesitant at the time to disagree with the legions of experts who denounced said dude and his claims. I know enough to know, though, that there is a longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 many people would have in their homes, and carry around in their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on a variety of topics. To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and sentience—and what it takes for them to emerge—as the experts who denounced the ex-Google AI guy. The recent GPT breakthroughs have made me more so. You may find a recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0>
  - thequadehunter 4y ago
    This is what I'm talking about. Everybody in the comments is doing that thing where "it's not sentient bro, it's just an app that responds to input!" but that's so beside the point. Humans parrot points they heard on HN all the time too. The question is more about how can you be sure it's not sentient based on how it acts, and how can you be sure that someone can't make it sentient by giving it something like a cognition loop? If you had an LLM that had unlimited chat storage, and gave it multiple containers for things like memories, idle thoughts, daydreams, aspirations, etc, and you had a loop for each of those where it reads information and reasons through it to form those thoughts, then stores those thoughts in certain containers and brings it up in conversation...would you feel bad if you called it a name and it reacted with emotional text? It's still "just an llm" with a bunch of overhead.
    - TMWNN 4y ago
      > Humans parrot points they heard on HN all the time too. A recent Reddit post discussed something positive about Texas. The replies? Hundreds, maybe thousands, of comments by Redditors, all with no more content than some sneering variant of "Fix your electrical grid first", referring to the harsh winter storm of two years ago that knocked out power to much of the state. It was something to see. If we can dismiss GPT as "just autocomplete", I can dismiss all those Redditors in the same way.

pocketarc 4y ago

There was a meme, in the olden days, about how you don’t know who you’re talking to on the internet[0]. And I think it applies here. We don’t need to know who GPT is, whether it thinks or not. It doesn’t need to. It just needs to give you the response you want to hear. Whether it’s just getting really good at predictions based off of a gobsmacking amount of training data, or actually thinking, doesn’t matter, for the task it’s performing. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

amrb 4y ago
No one knows your a dog on the internet!

thequadehunter 4y ago

It's pretty funny seeing that ex-google "sentient" dude get slightly vindicated over time.

Daishiman 4y ago
Intelligence and sentience are two very different things that don't necessarily overlap.
- thequadehunter 4y ago
  Why not? I feel like sentience requires the ability to reason.
  - Daishiman 4y ago
    Invertebrates are sentient and most likely capable of feeling and acting yet barely have intellect and may operate completely our of instinct.
skybrian 4y ago
Not really, though. It's a stranger situation. ChatGPT's language model doesn't remember chatting with you. It doesn't remember anything not in the training set. It's stateless. It only seems to remember you because the chat transcript gets fed back in again. No "game" is running, most of the time. There's no other "game state." There is a writer. It can continue stories with convincing fictional characters. But the fictional characters consist entirely of words. This is the same sort of existence as the fictional characters in a novel. The helpful AI assistant itself is a fictional character created by the writer. Each time you start a chat session, you create another clone. If you wanted to keep a story going, there are other writers. The writer you're using could be replaced. It should make upgrades easy as technology improves. Looks like we are going to end up chatting with increasingly intelligent fictional characters who don't actually exist. What sort of meme-creatures consist entirely of words?
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  No hay banda. https://youtu.be/7PlJP56WAhU https://youtu.be/7PlJP56WAhU No hay banda. There is no band. Il n'est pas de orchestra. This is all a tape recording. No hay banda and yet, we hear them. If we want to hear a clarinet. Listen... Un trombon à coulisse. Un trombon con sordina. Sient le son del trombon in sourdine. Sient le son! A muted trumpet. It's all recorded. No hay banda! It's all a tape. Il n'est pas de orchestra. It is an illusion. Listen! https://youtu.be/P1-_k3qjhw0 https://youtu.be/P1-_k3qjhw0
- thequadehunter 4y ago
  His argument was that it might not be completely sentient, but could have some properties of sentience that we should be testing for. I'd say the ability to reason well given a unique irl situation is one of them. I understand that it's just predicting text and the model is only working when it receives input, but what if someone took the LLM and made some kind of cognitive loop in the background where the same LLM reads information, thinks to itself when you are gone, and stores these things in its chat content then tells you about the cool stuff it read about the next day. It may be just text, but now it's "thinking". At what point should we start to consider it as a creature with rights?
TMWNN 4y ago
That's what I've been thinking about, too. As a non-expert in the field I was hesitant at the time to disagree with the legions of experts who denounced said dude and his claims. I know enough to know, though, that there is a longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 many people would have in their homes, and carry around in their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on a variety of topics. To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and sentience—and what it takes for them to emerge—as the experts who denounced the ex-Google AI guy. The recent GPT breakthroughs have made me more so. You may find a recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0>
- thequadehunter 4y ago
  This is what I'm talking about. Everybody in the comments is doing that thing where "it's not sentient bro, it's just an app that responds to input!" but that's so beside the point. Humans parrot points they heard on HN all the time too. The question is more about how can you be sure it's not sentient based on how it acts, and how can you be sure that someone can't make it sentient by giving it something like a cognition loop? If you had an LLM that had unlimited chat storage, and gave it multiple containers for things like memories, idle thoughts, daydreams, aspirations, etc, and you had a loop for each of those where it reads information and reasons through it to form those thoughts, then stores those thoughts in certain containers and brings it up in conversation...would you feel bad if you called it a name and it reacted with emotional text? It's still "just an llm" with a bunch of overhead.
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    > Humans parrot points they heard on HN all the time too. A recent Reddit post discussed something positive about Texas. The replies? Hundreds, maybe thousands, of comments by Redditors, all with no more content than some sneering variant of "Fix your electrical grid first", referring to the harsh winter storm of two years ago that knocked out power to much of the state. It was something to see. If we can dismiss GPT as "just autocomplete", I can dismiss all those Redditors in the same way.