3 ms·
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 d
by 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 agoThis 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.