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Richard Stallman's thoughts on ChatGPT, AI and their impact on humanity

156 points by nixcraft 4y ago

Eumenes 4y ago
Stallman is always right
sinenomine 4y ago
That's why opensource AI is trailing behind proprietary implementations. Sad!
- ergonaught 4y ago
  Sure, it has nothing to do with the resources required, the costs involved, "profit motive" to euphemize crippling human greed and selfishness and lust for control and power. Sure. Sad!
  - sinenomine 4y ago
    The resources required are peanuts compared to funding of moderate silicon valley startups. There are estimates of GPT-4 training run priced around 10e6$ There is no culture of trusting engineers with this kind of money almost everywhere except a few orgs like openai, that's for sure. And if we ask "why is such culture in place" we get a long tail of answers, one of them in the link above.
nixcraft 4y ago
Mobile friendly URL: https://i.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallmans_thoughts_on_chatgpt_artificial/ https://i.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallm... (sorry about that).
- drivers99 4y ago
  I’m on a browser on mobile and this is what I change it to https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallmans_thoughts_on_chatgpt_artificial/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stal...
- quectophoton 4y ago
  Teddit URL: https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallmans_thoughts_on_chatgpt_artificial/ https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallman...
  - MayeulC 4y ago
    Or libreddit: https://libreddit.de/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallmans_thoughts_on_chatgpt_artificial/ https://libreddit.de/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallm... I have Firefox redirrect reddit links with the "privacy redirect" extension. Unfortunately, it isn't whitelisted for mobile, but it works well if you use a different list on nightly or Fennec.
    - baal80spam 4y ago
      > the "privacy redirect" extension I found LibRedirect to be far more customizable, plus I think Privacy Redirect is no longer maintained.
      - MayeulC 4y ago
        I'm going to try LibRedirect out, thank you for pointing this out! I had no idea Privacy Redirect was orphaned.
version_five 4y ago
One one hand, it would be more interesting to hear RMS' views in the implications, if any, on software freedom (personally I think there are many angles here). On the other hand, the comment attributed to him is correct, if simple and pretty obvious.
pjio 4y ago
> I can't foretell the future... I like how he states the scope of his answer just like ChatGPT would.
- kgeist 4y ago
  Also "it's important to realize".
WinstonSmith84 4y ago
> It plays games with words to make plausible-sounding English text, but any statements made in it are liable to be false Well, that could also be perfectly applied to any human. The difference being that humans may make purposefully or not false statement (i.e. by lying or by ignorance), whereas the AI will only make false statements by ignorance. Also... "It can't avoid that because it doesn't know what the words _mean_.". That's very subjective to understand what a word "means", is that again about lies and ignorance? And we need the AI to lie to declare it intelligent? Maybe, ChatGPT has ironically a modest answer to this claim, when asked what it's thinking about Richard Stallman's statement: ``` Richard Stallman raises some valid concerns about the limitations of AI language models like ChatGPT. It is true that these models, while highly advanced and capable of generating human-like text, still have limitations in terms of understanding and reasoning. ChatGPT, being a product of GPT-4 architecture, learns from vast amounts of text data and is designed to predict and generate plausible-sounding responses based on the input it receives. However, it lacks the capability to truly comprehend meaning or context in the same way a human can. It is important to recognize these limitations and not overestimate the abilities of AI language models. Users should be aware that the information provided by ChatGPT might not always be accurate or reliable, and it is essential to cross-verify any critical information obtained from such models with trusted sources. In summary, while Richard Stallman's statement highlights important concerns, it is worth noting that AI language models like ChatGPT can still provide valuable insights and assistance when used responsibly and with an understanding of their limitations. ```
- vxNsr 4y ago
  Did you just feed it the quote and ask it if it was true or did you have some fancy prompt for it?
  - WinstonSmith84 4y ago
    Fed the quote and asked it "Richard Stallman has written this, what are your thoughts"
- tlb 4y ago
  No, you can instruct ChatGPT to respond as a liar. If you wanted, you could build a clone that did this implicitly by having the instruction hidden.
usgroup 4y ago
What I would just love to see is the out come of the following: 1. Train Chat GPT on human stuff. 2. Make Chat GPT spit out libraries of knowledge by random walk. 3. Train Chat GPT on its own stuff. 4. Do this a few times. 5. Ask it some questions.
- kmac_ 4y ago
  There's no ChatGPT own stuff. It generates perfectly sound text based on trained data. Its capabilites ends when it has to deduce something new. Still, it is really impressive achievement as mostly there's no need for such capability and synthesis on the existing knowledge is more than enough.
  - obscurette 4y ago
    It doesn't really know where this training data comes from. It probably isn't a problem yet, but at some point in the future it will be for sure. It already happened with many smaller languages in the world – the languages live their own life in "automatic translation engines are trained by data generated by translation engines" loop.
  - usgroup 4y ago
    Of course there is, else it'd be a database. The poems, prose and histories of bears in space which it generates typically do not exist.
- precompute 4y ago
  You can't expect coherent output from a system that lacks a physical component. There's a very strong physical component to human intelligence that machines lack.
wslh 4y ago
Richard Stallman is neglecting the impact of ChatGPT. It doesn't matter if ChatGPT is a magician or not, it absorbes our minds.
wonderingyogi 4y ago
> It doesn't need intelligence to nullify human's labour.
leveraction 4y ago
This sounds just like something my brother-in-law said. I think they are both technically correct and both missing the point. Does a calculator truly understand math when it spits out a correct answer? Of course not. And it doesn't matter. I have been really impressed with chatgpt, and when it comes to shiny new tech I am usually in the poo poo camp. If tech does something useful then it is useful tech. The fact that it is not true intelligence doesn't matter at all. Besides, what's intelligence anyway? Aren't we still debating that ourselves'?
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >And it doesn't matter. It matters insofar as determining whether something is intelligent and/or sentient, which is critical to determining whether this "AI" should be conferred human rights or not.
  - usgroup 4y ago
    In some sense, I'm not sure intelligent/sentient is all that important when separated from what we think requires intelligence/sentience. I think we attribute less and less to sentience these days and its feels like its less part of the conversation as a result.
  - KyeRussell 4y ago
    All of the nerds complaining about GPT-4 not being perfect aren’t talking about it from the perspective of “conferring it human rights”. It’s all about implying that it not being [insert nebulous word like “Intelligent” or “creative”] somehow makes it useless or a gimmick.
    - sidlls 4y ago
      I haven't seen anyone call these LLMs "useless" or "gimmicks." What I have seen is pushback against calling them general AIs or even "intelligence" in general. LLMs are not "intelligent." They do not reason by any reasonable interpretation of the word, and it is certainly an unfounded leap to suggest they "reason" the same way humans do. Especially considering we don't really know how humans reason.
draw_down 4y ago
[dead]
golf_mike 4y ago
Great... and now prove this does not hold for yourself as well
- golf_mike 4y ago
  Thanks for the downvotes, but the point is not that Stallman should prove it but the point is that you should reflect on the fact that the point being made cannot be proven. Ever. Also not for you, yourself.
gjitcbcz 4y ago
No context was given but here was his actual statement—- > I can't foretell the future, but it is important to realize that ChatGPT is not artificial intelligence. It has no intelligence; it doesn't know anything and doesn't understand anything. It plays games with words to make plausible-sounding English text, but any statements made in it are liable to be false. It can't avoid that because it doesn't know what the words _mean_.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > It can't avoid that because it doesn't know what the words _mean_. That’s true of a fair number of humans, too.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    This is an uncharitable description of human understanding: your statement is simply not true in this context.
    - arbitrage 4y ago
      > your statement is simply not true in this context. Thanks for clearing up the misconception with your cogent and well-reasoned reply.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > true of a fair number of humans, too And your conclusion would be? If they show to have what it takes we will call them intelligent, otherwise unintelligent. Some seem to want to cling to a weak definition of intelligence, covering all sentient beings in compassion - but we are engineering /tools/, things that have to be effective, "have what it takes"... This puts the "intelligence" of the narcoleptic carp in a special corner with little relevance to the context.
- dev_tty01 4y ago
  His comments might have some weight if he actually provided evidence of his assertions. For instance he says "it doesn't know what the words _mean_." How do we indicate/prove that we know what a word means? We can give a definition. We can offer an example of how to use it in a sentence. We can explain and/or demonstrate how its meaning can vary depending upon context. Etc... ChatGPT can do all those things. So, is there something more fundamental going on in our own brains? If so, what is it? As far as false vs. true, humans also make many mistakes, confuse references, draw false conclusions drawn from unrelated evidence, and on and on. We also often get things right. ChatGPT is similar. He just makes conclusory statements so it is just an opinion. I'm not saying any true intelligence has been demonstrated yet, but the progress that has been made in just the last year or two has been enormous. Does anyone doubt the progress won't continue? Something very important is happening and I personally think it is more than just "playing games with words." Just my opinion...
xiphias2 4y ago
Richard was super sensitive about the power companies have over users with closed source software, and had a great impact on our culture (just look at the controversy over the name OpenAI), but it seems like he's deeply underestimating the much much bigger power AI is (and soon will be) having over us, even though there have been countless books and movies predicting it, and we feel it coming.
- Zurrrrr 4y ago
  All those books and movies deal with artificial consciousness, even though they call it ai. We are not even close to having anything like that.
  - unshavedyak 4y ago
    I view it like Google. Google (web Search) had a ton of impact on humanity on the availability and accessibility of knowledge. Even imagining we continue to improve AI accuracy but assuming we struggle with consciousness i think we'll at the very least be due for a similar impact to that of Web Search. Which is to say knowledge will be even easier to transfer. Linking complex ideas will be easier to transfer. Having LLMs construct arguments for you. These might have sources cited, might not, who knows. The little details like if they obscure information or cite resources will have quite the interesting impact too. Then of course there will be the entertainment impact. Potentially being able to guide AI on all sorts of things like creating media for games, story lines, etc - even with lots of human guidance for the creative parts, has a lot of potential for human impact. Not claiming good or bad, but .. something, heh.
  - grantcas 4y ago
    [dead]
lagrange77 4y ago
I think Stallman is right. It's really the term 'intelligence', that's the issue here. We should stop using using that term. I personally just use 'machine learning' or '(statistical/mathematical) model'. But then there's marketing, i know.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > We should stop using using that term There would be little issue with the term 'Artificial Intelligence', provided that it were clear it means "problem solver that could replace a human professional, in finding clever solutions". So, in normal logic, when you call a Statistical Language Model - or an Expert System, or Sorting, whatever - "Artificial Intelligence", it should be clear that you implied the above nuance.
- criddell 4y ago
  Somebody might have a problem with using machine for non-mechanical devices. I like statistical/mathematical model, but then that seems like what “real” intelligence probably is. So maybe the problem isn’t with the “I” part of “AI”, but with the “A”. If intelligence is a full spectrum thing and not a binary condition, then maybe LLMs have intelligence somewhere between mold and birds?
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > Somebody might have a problem 'Machine' comes from the root best represented by current 'might', so it is generic enough to cover a good amount of expressions of the area of "enabler" - if those «some» want to be reassured. > somewhere between mold and birds In our context, then you should employ it where you would have employed mold and birds in absence of a non-human facilitator.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  We should just call it what it is: an LLM. Other terms are far too broad and lump GPT-4 in the same bucket as a chess engine.
- mindslight 4y ago
wozer 4y ago
I think his answer is driven by a preference for the status quo and a reluctance to face difficult changes. ChatGPT, and especially GPT-4, seem to do much more than just play games with words. You can’t overlook the “emergent” phenomena that manifest themselves when using them.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  If we look at when this "emergence" takes place you'll see it's an illusion. Namely, predictions (text output) are good-looking when sampling from data which are similar to the prompts; and they're bad-looking when not. So, when do models go from being "not intelligent" to "intelligent", well no surprise: when their data includes everything ever written. Is this emergence? No, it's just sampling from *data with the relevant properties*. How does data acquire those properties? Well when people produce it. What "emerges" from AI is not from AI; its from the properties of the data its using. The data here is produced by intelligent agents, and it is light of their intelligence which shines thru' GPTs like a prism.
  - antibasilisk 4y ago
    >and they're bad-looking when not. They are sometimes bad looking, and they are always better than randomness, which does indicate understanding even if the conclusions are faulty. >What "emerges" from AI is not from AI; its from the properties of the data its using This is squabbling over semantics. If the properties of the data are used to the effect of displaying intelligence, then the fact is that what you are looking at is intelligence. If I define a word I have never seen before using deductive logic according to the passage I find it in, I've still acquired an understanding of the word, even though I've not referred to anything external.
    - mjburgess 4y ago
      > If I define a word I have never seen before using deductive logic according to the passage I find it in uhuh. And have you studied anything in the area of the intelligence of really-existing systems? (ie., animals) For sure, bugs bunny appears witty; and chatgpt, intelligent. But you know: only because their writers are.
deleted 4y ago
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NotYourLawyer 4y ago
Link should be to old.reddit.com
crop_rotation 4y ago
This seems to miss the forest for the trees. Whether LLMs will have an impact similar to the industrial revolution will not depend on whether they pass some arbitrary threshold where everyone is convinced that it is an AGI and understands what words mean. It will depend on the utility they provide. And the utility is there right now. GPT4 is so immensely useful for so many things. At even a reasonable pace of improvement, it is hard to see why LLMs would not be able to do more and more things. Morever and slightly off topic, most humans also don't care what words mean or what numbers mean in a philosophical sense. If you talk of "The Axiom of Choice" in a big company software meeting, people will ask if it is the new ice cream flavour in the cafeteria. That doesn't prevent people from getting value out of both words and numbers.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  The problem is that most tasks require general intelligence at some point. So the question is more: given that in the vast majority of cases, weak-AI cannot go from "0 to 100%" how much should we care? The whole "the sky is falling" schtick i think requires weak-AI systems to be getting very near 100%s reliably across industries. Anything even 90% and we're talking more about assisting and empowering users than replacing them.
- Beaver117 4y ago
  Maybe a weird question, by why does everyone assume that we will continue to have improvements and GPT-5,6,7,8 will surely "get there"? Isn't it possible that we've almost reached the limit of this technology and it won't improve much for a very long time? Like self driving cars.
  - crop_rotation 4y ago
    Self driving cars have a very different problem. Regardless of the improvements and sufficiency they reach, their errors can be fatal. One news headline about a self driving car crash will ensure that the technology doesn't get any approvals. ChatGPT for all it's flaws can't jump out of the computer and harm the user. It can harm users in others ways, but those are less known or understood by the general public, and thus it is much easier to take to general availability. I agree on the limit part that it might be possible the technology has reached a limit, however, it is still better to think about what happens if it hasn't and the rate of improvement continues.
guilhas 4y ago
This is just a snippet of text out of context posted somewhere It states something pretty uncontroversial, repeated several times through HN And does not contain an opinion about ChatGPT utility or impact on humanity But we already know his opinion opaque software is bad. And the widespread interest in llama and alpaca shows a lot of people agree, want to run it locally, learn how it works, reproduce it
deleted 4y ago
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diego_moita 4y ago
Man, this is so wrong in so many ways... > it is important to realize that ChatGPT is not artificial intelligence. The first is to assume that there is a technical, precise, objective and clear definition of "Artificial Intelligence". There isn't. He should know that. > it doesn't know anything and doesn't understand anything. And what does "know" or "understand" means in the context of a machine that doesn't even have self-consciousness? Besides, are you implying that human beings know stuff? The overwhelming majority of people knows very, very little. Most of the people I know are too lazy to think or doing the hard work of studying. I'd suggest Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" before putting any faith in people's "knowledge". > It plays games with words to make plausible-sounding English text, but any statements made in it are liable to be false. I think we can we apply the same judgment to Stallman's argument itself, since his concepts are so badly defined. And thank you for an open democratic society where every statement is liable to be false, regardless if it comes from a machine, Richard Stalman or Putin and Jiping. I'll take Turing's test approach: if it looks intelligent to me then it is certainly more intelligent than me. Also, I'll take Dijkstra approach: "the question on whether computers can think is as irrelevant as whether submarines can swim". Edit: to all Stallman's fanboys downvoting this: got any good argument?
- jahnu 4y ago
  Great points and if anyone would like a deep dive into these questions I can highly recommend the latest Mindscape episode https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/20/230-raphael-milliere-on-how-artificial-intelligence-thinks/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/20/230-...
- Zurrrrr 4y ago
  If you consider stallman is using the colloquial definition of artificial intelligence (which, as pop culture uses it, is basically artificial consciousness), his answer makes a lot more sense.
  - diego_moita 4y ago
    "Definition" is a rigorous concept and technique in philosophy and logic. It comes straight from Aristotle and is a foundation for the whole western culture. I won't consider any colloquial definition of something so precious.
eulers_secret 4y ago
In his recent talk for the FSF at Boston Stallman suggested that published weights are open source. I guess because they’re modifiable and auditable. It’s an interesting argument. So far, I’ve managed to modify llama myself so I guess so??
- arnaudsm 4y ago
  Weights can be retrained but cannot be explained. Recent papers even demonstrated backdoors : https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07840 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07840 Therefore a real open source model needs a public dataset and training code.
jasfi 4y ago
I would argue that ChatGPT has reached a certain level of understanding about what it's saying. That's because you can ask it questions about what it says, and it can continue to reason along the line of what it's previously said. It does sometimes make mistakes in this, but this is improving. It's just that people want understanding to look a certain way, that seems more familiar to us.
- jmfldn 4y ago
  I think you are right in a sense. Whether ChatGPT 'understands' might be moot if it produces responses to that effect. Understanding to me implies perceiving the intended meaning, which to me implies sentience. Does it matter though if it doesn't have this property? As the aphorism goes (paraphrasing) "asking whether machines think is like asking whether submarines swim", ie. it's kind of beside the point. If you get the result you want, in this case understanding-like responses, then that's enough right?
dgb23 4y ago
I propose a new term for this thing: AK - Artificial Knowledge. The purpose of this tool is to compress, match and combine text based, _informal_ information.
tinyhouse 4y ago
I actually think it shows incredible reasoning ability already. It can change its answers based on new content you provide. For example, you can show it a Java program and ask how it will behave, then show it release notes of a new Java version it has never seen before and ask it how the functionality may change, and it will get it right. Most programmers won't because our ability to attend to information is far inferior unless we really try hard. Focus is not something most humans excel at. Our brains are more capable but are less utilized most of the time.
st_goliath 4y ago
Surprisingly not mentioned in the post: The whole Free Software movement aside, RMS has actually spent a chunk of his academic career at the MIT AI lab, researching artificial intelligence and co-authored some papers during his time there. Granted, many of their research topics at the time are now no longer considered AI topics, part of what ultimately lead to the AI winter at the time. Particularly because of that connection, however, I think it could indeed be interesting to hear some more from his perspective on developments in recent years.
- arnaudsm 4y ago
  Indeed, the symbolic vs connectionist battle is still going. GPT plugins like Wolfram alpha seem like a step in the right direction. For reliability I would prefer the symbolic system to be in charge of the transformer. Like the left and right brain.
orbital-decay 4y ago
> It has no intelligence; it doesn't know anything and doesn't understand anything. I don't like the word "intelligence". It's too arbitrary and depends on the language. In my native language, there are two synonyms which imply different thresholds for something to be considered intelligent. I'm sure in other languages it's also pretty arbitrary. Instead, let's compare those models with complex biological systems we typically consider to be at least somewhat intelligent. - biological systems use spiking networks and are incredibly power efficient. This is more or less irrelevant for capabilities. - biological systems have a lot of surrounding neural and biochemical hardware - hardwired motorics, senses processing, internal regulators. Complex I/O is missing from these models, but is being added as we're talking. The large downside of current models is that it cannot understand what drives humans as it has different hardware, it's trained on their output, and has to "reverse engineer" the motivation. Which might or might not be possible, but it makes them different. - biological systems are autonomous agents in their world. They exist on an uninterrupted timeline, with input and output streams constantly present. Those models don't exist on a timeline, they are activated by the user each time. - biological systems have some form of memory; they compress incoming data into higher order concepts on the fly, and store them. This is a HUGE DEAL. The model has no equivalent of memory or neuroplasticity, it's a function that doesn't keep any state. LLMs have the context which can be turned into a sliding window with an external feedback loop (chatbots do that), however it's not equivalent to biological memory at all, as it just stores tokens verbatim, instead of trying to compress the incoming data. - biological systems exhibit highly complex emergent behavior. This also happens in LLMs and even simpler models. - biological systems are social. Birds compose songs from tokens, and spread them through the population. Dogs, monkeys, and humans teach their kids. The mental capacity of a human isn't that great; every time you think you're smart, remember that you stand on the shoulders of giants. The model does have much more capacity than a human. My own conclusion: sparks of "intelligence"? Undeniably, the emergent behavior alone is enough. They do understand things, in the conventional terms. However, they are also profoundly different than human intelligence, and still lack key elements like the memory.
_yb2s 4y ago
It’s shocking to see so many famous intellectuals like Stallman and Chomsky get this so wrong. It seems like they have preconceptions so strongly held that no amount of hard evidence could convince them otherwise. GPT-4 deeply understands what it is talking about. I was able to pose it difficult classical physics problems that would be hard for a physics undergrad to solve and it could give correct answers consistently. These are things I made up that are nothing like existing examples. When asked to explain it’s work, or modify it for unusual scenarios, it could do so. I could also get it to invent new terms and concepts to describe the work, and then use those correctly. It even could reason out appropriate simplifying approximations when demands exceeded its calculating abilities. If gpt-4 isn’t really understanding what it is saying, or not intelligent than neither are any humans.
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  Because it's assembling data from an enormous dataset with correct answers. It's a language model, it is physically impossible for it to 'think' or 'feel'.
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    Those answers aren't in the training set, nor is anything like it. It's assembling a correct and general model of physics from examples in the training set, and applying that understanding to be able to solve any arbitrary problem. Nobody knows what "think" or "feel" really mean, and I think this surprising phenomena is a clue to understanding that- it isn't what it seems. Most of our theories about what the human mind, language, and thinking are imply this should be impossible, yet it's clearly not.
braingenious 4y ago
I wonder if Stallman has actually used GPT-4. His opinion seems like a conclusion that a person could arrive at by just reading the specifications.
muyuu 4y ago
I think people tend to underestimate the concept of understanding, and also the concept of conveying thing by just saying them. Most people don't get most things most of the time.
tim333 4y ago
Stallman's statement (as it's deleted on Reddit): >I can't foretell the future, but it is important to realize that ChatGPT is not artificial intelligence. It has no intelligence; it doesn't know anything and doesn't understand anything. It plays games with words to make plausible-sounding English text, but any statements made in it are liable to be false. It can't avoid that because it doesn't know what the words _mean_. I asked ChatGTP plus what it thought: >do you understand what words mean? and it replied: >Yes, as an AI language model, I have been trained on vast amounts of data to understand the meanings of words and their usage in various contexts. I use this knowledge to generate responses to questions and statements that are as accurate and informative as possible. However, it is important to note that language is a complex and nuanced system, and there may be cases where my understanding of a word or its context may not be entirely accurate or complete. Which I guess is not so different from humans although we have other inputs from the physical world I guess.

156 points by nixcraft 4y ago

Eumenes 4y ago

Stallman is always right

sinenomine 4y ago

That's why opensource AI is trailing behind proprietary implementations. Sad!

ergonaught 4y ago
Sure, it has nothing to do with the resources required, the costs involved, "profit motive" to euphemize crippling human greed and selfishness and lust for control and power. Sure. Sad!
- sinenomine 4y ago
  The resources required are peanuts compared to funding of moderate silicon valley startups. There are estimates of GPT-4 training run priced around 10e6$ There is no culture of trusting engineers with this kind of money almost everywhere except a few orgs like openai, that's for sure. And if we ask "why is such culture in place" we get a long tail of answers, one of them in the link above.

nixcraft 4y ago

Mobile friendly URL: https://i.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallmans_thoughts_on_chatgpt_artificial/ https://i.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallm... (sorry about that).

drivers99 4y ago
I’m on a browser on mobile and this is what I change it to https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallmans_thoughts_on_chatgpt_artificial/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stal...
quectophoton 4y ago
Teddit URL: https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallmans_thoughts_on_chatgpt_artificial/ https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallman...
- MayeulC 4y ago
  Or libreddit: https://libreddit.de/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallmans_thoughts_on_chatgpt_artificial/ https://libreddit.de/r/linux/comments/122gmm9/richard_stallm... I have Firefox redirrect reddit links with the "privacy redirect" extension. Unfortunately, it isn't whitelisted for mobile, but it works well if you use a different list on nightly or Fennec.
  - baal80spam 4y ago
    > the "privacy redirect" extension I found LibRedirect to be far more customizable, plus I think Privacy Redirect is no longer maintained.
    - MayeulC 4y ago
      I'm going to try LibRedirect out, thank you for pointing this out! I had no idea Privacy Redirect was orphaned.

version_five 4y ago

One one hand, it would be more interesting to hear RMS' views in the implications, if any, on software freedom (personally I think there are many angles here). On the other hand, the comment attributed to him is correct, if simple and pretty obvious.

pjio 4y ago

> I can't foretell the future... I like how he states the scope of his answer just like ChatGPT would.

kgeist 4y ago
Also "it's important to realize".

WinstonSmith84 4y ago

> It plays games with words to make plausible-sounding English text, but any statements made in it are liable to be false Well, that could also be perfectly applied to any human. The difference being that humans may make purposefully or not false statement (i.e. by lying or by ignorance), whereas the AI will only make false statements by ignorance. Also... "It can't avoid that because it doesn't know what the words _mean_.". That's very subjective to understand what a word "means", is that again about lies and ignorance? And we need the AI to lie to declare it intelligent? Maybe, ChatGPT has ironically a modest answer to this claim, when asked what it's thinking about Richard Stallman's statement: ``` Richard Stallman raises some valid concerns about the limitations of AI language models like ChatGPT. It is true that these models, while highly advanced and capable of generating human-like text, still have limitations in terms of understanding and reasoning. ChatGPT, being a product of GPT-4 architecture, learns from vast amounts of text data and is designed to predict and generate plausible-sounding responses based on the input it receives. However, it lacks the capability to truly comprehend meaning or context in the same way a human can. It is important to recognize these limitations and not overestimate the abilities of AI language models. Users should be aware that the information provided by ChatGPT might not always be accurate or reliable, and it is essential to cross-verify any critical information obtained from such models with trusted sources. In summary, while Richard Stallman's statement highlights important concerns, it is worth noting that AI language models like ChatGPT can still provide valuable insights and assistance when used responsibly and with an understanding of their limitations. ```

vxNsr 4y ago
Did you just feed it the quote and ask it if it was true or did you have some fancy prompt for it?
- WinstonSmith84 4y ago
  Fed the quote and asked it "Richard Stallman has written this, what are your thoughts"
tlb 4y ago
No, you can instruct ChatGPT to respond as a liar. If you wanted, you could build a clone that did this implicitly by having the instruction hidden.

usgroup 4y ago

What I would just love to see is the out come of the following: 1. Train Chat GPT on human stuff. 2. Make Chat GPT spit out libraries of knowledge by random walk. 3. Train Chat GPT on its own stuff. 4. Do this a few times. 5. Ask it some questions.

kmac_ 4y ago
There's no ChatGPT own stuff. It generates perfectly sound text based on trained data. Its capabilites ends when it has to deduce something new. Still, it is really impressive achievement as mostly there's no need for such capability and synthesis on the existing knowledge is more than enough.
- obscurette 4y ago
  It doesn't really know where this training data comes from. It probably isn't a problem yet, but at some point in the future it will be for sure. It already happened with many smaller languages in the world – the languages live their own life in "automatic translation engines are trained by data generated by translation engines" loop.
- usgroup 4y ago
  Of course there is, else it'd be a database. The poems, prose and histories of bears in space which it generates typically do not exist.
precompute 4y ago
You can't expect coherent output from a system that lacks a physical component. There's a very strong physical component to human intelligence that machines lack.

wslh 4y ago

Richard Stallman is neglecting the impact of ChatGPT. It doesn't matter if ChatGPT is a magician or not, it absorbes our minds.

wonderingyogi 4y ago

> It doesn't need intelligence to nullify human's labour.

leveraction 4y ago

This sounds just like something my brother-in-law said. I think they are both technically correct and both missing the point. Does a calculator truly understand math when it spits out a correct answer? Of course not. And it doesn't matter. I have been really impressed with chatgpt, and when it comes to shiny new tech I am usually in the poo poo camp. If tech does something useful then it is useful tech. The fact that it is not true intelligence doesn't matter at all. Besides, what's intelligence anyway? Aren't we still debating that ourselves'?

Dalewyn 4y ago
>And it doesn't matter. It matters insofar as determining whether something is intelligent and/or sentient, which is critical to determining whether this "AI" should be conferred human rights or not.
- usgroup 4y ago
  In some sense, I'm not sure intelligent/sentient is all that important when separated from what we think requires intelligence/sentience. I think we attribute less and less to sentience these days and its feels like its less part of the conversation as a result.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  All of the nerds complaining about GPT-4 not being perfect aren’t talking about it from the perspective of “conferring it human rights”. It’s all about implying that it not being [insert nebulous word like “Intelligent” or “creative”] somehow makes it useless or a gimmick.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    I haven't seen anyone call these LLMs "useless" or "gimmicks." What I have seen is pushback against calling them general AIs or even "intelligence" in general. LLMs are not "intelligent." They do not reason by any reasonable interpretation of the word, and it is certainly an unfounded leap to suggest they "reason" the same way humans do. Especially considering we don't really know how humans reason.

draw_down 4y ago

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golf_mike 4y ago

Great... and now prove this does not hold for yourself as well

golf_mike 4y ago
Thanks for the downvotes, but the point is not that Stallman should prove it but the point is that you should reflect on the fact that the point being made cannot be proven. Ever. Also not for you, yourself.

gjitcbcz 4y ago

No context was given but here was his actual statement—- > I can't foretell the future, but it is important to realize that ChatGPT is not artificial intelligence. It has no intelligence; it doesn't know anything and doesn't understand anything. It plays games with words to make plausible-sounding English text, but any statements made in it are liable to be false. It can't avoid that because it doesn't know what the words _mean_.

commandlinefan 4y ago
> It can't avoid that because it doesn't know what the words _mean_. That’s true of a fair number of humans, too.
- sidlls 4y ago
  This is an uncharitable description of human understanding: your statement is simply not true in this context.
  - arbitrage 4y ago
    > your statement is simply not true in this context. Thanks for clearing up the misconception with your cogent and well-reasoned reply.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > true of a fair number of humans, too And your conclusion would be? If they show to have what it takes we will call them intelligent, otherwise unintelligent. Some seem to want to cling to a weak definition of intelligence, covering all sentient beings in compassion - but we are engineering /tools/, things that have to be effective, "have what it takes"... This puts the "intelligence" of the narcoleptic carp in a special corner with little relevance to the context.
dev_tty01 4y ago
His comments might have some weight if he actually provided evidence of his assertions. For instance he says "it doesn't know what the words _mean_." How do we indicate/prove that we know what a word means? We can give a definition. We can offer an example of how to use it in a sentence. We can explain and/or demonstrate how its meaning can vary depending upon context. Etc... ChatGPT can do all those things. So, is there something more fundamental going on in our own brains? If so, what is it? As far as false vs. true, humans also make many mistakes, confuse references, draw false conclusions drawn from unrelated evidence, and on and on. We also often get things right. ChatGPT is similar. He just makes conclusory statements so it is just an opinion. I'm not saying any true intelligence has been demonstrated yet, but the progress that has been made in just the last year or two has been enormous. Does anyone doubt the progress won't continue? Something very important is happening and I personally think it is more than just "playing games with words." Just my opinion...

xiphias2 4y ago

Richard was super sensitive about the power companies have over users with closed source software, and had a great impact on our culture (just look at the controversy over the name OpenAI), but it seems like he's deeply underestimating the much much bigger power AI is (and soon will be) having over us, even though there have been countless books and movies predicting it, and we feel it coming.

Zurrrrr 4y ago
All those books and movies deal with artificial consciousness, even though they call it ai. We are not even close to having anything like that.
- unshavedyak 4y ago
  I view it like Google. Google (web Search) had a ton of impact on humanity on the availability and accessibility of knowledge. Even imagining we continue to improve AI accuracy but assuming we struggle with consciousness i think we'll at the very least be due for a similar impact to that of Web Search. Which is to say knowledge will be even easier to transfer. Linking complex ideas will be easier to transfer. Having LLMs construct arguments for you. These might have sources cited, might not, who knows. The little details like if they obscure information or cite resources will have quite the interesting impact too. Then of course there will be the entertainment impact. Potentially being able to guide AI on all sorts of things like creating media for games, story lines, etc - even with lots of human guidance for the creative parts, has a lot of potential for human impact. Not claiming good or bad, but .. something, heh.
- grantcas 4y ago
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lagrange77 4y ago

I think Stallman is right. It's really the term 'intelligence', that's the issue here. We should stop using using that term. I personally just use 'machine learning' or '(statistical/mathematical) model'. But then there's marketing, i know.

mdp2021 4y ago
> We should stop using using that term There would be little issue with the term 'Artificial Intelligence', provided that it were clear it means "problem solver that could replace a human professional, in finding clever solutions". So, in normal logic, when you call a Statistical Language Model - or an Expert System, or Sorting, whatever - "Artificial Intelligence", it should be clear that you implied the above nuance.
criddell 4y ago
Somebody might have a problem with using machine for non-mechanical devices. I like statistical/mathematical model, but then that seems like what “real” intelligence probably is. So maybe the problem isn’t with the “I” part of “AI”, but with the “A”. If intelligence is a full spectrum thing and not a binary condition, then maybe LLMs have intelligence somewhere between mold and birds?
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > Somebody might have a problem 'Machine' comes from the root best represented by current 'might', so it is generic enough to cover a good amount of expressions of the area of "enabler" - if those «some» want to be reassured. > somewhere between mold and birds In our context, then you should employ it where you would have employed mold and birds in absence of a non-human facilitator.
phailhaus 4y ago
We should just call it what it is: an LLM. Other terms are far too broad and lump GPT-4 in the same bucket as a chess engine.
mindslight 4y ago

wozer 4y ago

I think his answer is driven by a preference for the status quo and a reluctance to face difficult changes. ChatGPT, and especially GPT-4, seem to do much more than just play games with words. You can’t overlook the “emergent” phenomena that manifest themselves when using them.

mjburgess 4y ago
If we look at when this "emergence" takes place you'll see it's an illusion. Namely, predictions (text output) are good-looking when sampling from data which are similar to the prompts; and they're bad-looking when not. So, when do models go from being "not intelligent" to "intelligent", well no surprise: when their data includes everything ever written. Is this emergence? No, it's just sampling from *data with the relevant properties*. How does data acquire those properties? Well when people produce it. What "emerges" from AI is not from AI; its from the properties of the data its using. The data here is produced by intelligent agents, and it is light of their intelligence which shines thru' GPTs like a prism.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  >and they're bad-looking when not. They are sometimes bad looking, and they are always better than randomness, which does indicate understanding even if the conclusions are faulty. >What "emerges" from AI is not from AI; its from the properties of the data its using This is squabbling over semantics. If the properties of the data are used to the effect of displaying intelligence, then the fact is that what you are looking at is intelligence. If I define a word I have never seen before using deductive logic according to the passage I find it in, I've still acquired an understanding of the word, even though I've not referred to anything external.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    > If I define a word I have never seen before using deductive logic according to the passage I find it in uhuh. And have you studied anything in the area of the intelligence of really-existing systems? (ie., animals) For sure, bugs bunny appears witty; and chatgpt, intelligent. But you know: only because their writers are.

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NotYourLawyer 4y ago

Link should be to old.reddit.com

crop_rotation 4y ago

This seems to miss the forest for the trees. Whether LLMs will have an impact similar to the industrial revolution will not depend on whether they pass some arbitrary threshold where everyone is convinced that it is an AGI and understands what words mean. It will depend on the utility they provide. And the utility is there right now. GPT4 is so immensely useful for so many things. At even a reasonable pace of improvement, it is hard to see why LLMs would not be able to do more and more things. Morever and slightly off topic, most humans also don't care what words mean or what numbers mean in a philosophical sense. If you talk of "The Axiom of Choice" in a big company software meeting, people will ask if it is the new ice cream flavour in the cafeteria. That doesn't prevent people from getting value out of both words and numbers.

mjburgess 4y ago
The problem is that most tasks require general intelligence at some point. So the question is more: given that in the vast majority of cases, weak-AI cannot go from "0 to 100%" how much should we care? The whole "the sky is falling" schtick i think requires weak-AI systems to be getting very near 100%s reliably across industries. Anything even 90% and we're talking more about assisting and empowering users than replacing them.
Beaver117 4y ago
Maybe a weird question, by why does everyone assume that we will continue to have improvements and GPT-5,6,7,8 will surely "get there"? Isn't it possible that we've almost reached the limit of this technology and it won't improve much for a very long time? Like self driving cars.
- crop_rotation 4y ago
  Self driving cars have a very different problem. Regardless of the improvements and sufficiency they reach, their errors can be fatal. One news headline about a self driving car crash will ensure that the technology doesn't get any approvals. ChatGPT for all it's flaws can't jump out of the computer and harm the user. It can harm users in others ways, but those are less known or understood by the general public, and thus it is much easier to take to general availability. I agree on the limit part that it might be possible the technology has reached a limit, however, it is still better to think about what happens if it hasn't and the rate of improvement continues.

guilhas 4y ago

This is just a snippet of text out of context posted somewhere It states something pretty uncontroversial, repeated several times through HN And does not contain an opinion about ChatGPT utility or impact on humanity But we already know his opinion opaque software is bad. And the widespread interest in llama and alpaca shows a lot of people agree, want to run it locally, learn how it works, reproduce it

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diego_moita 4y ago

Man, this is so wrong in so many ways... > it is important to realize that ChatGPT is not artificial intelligence. The first is to assume that there is a technical, precise, objective and clear definition of "Artificial Intelligence". There isn't. He should know that. > it doesn't know anything and doesn't understand anything. And what does "know" or "understand" means in the context of a machine that doesn't even have self-consciousness? Besides, are you implying that human beings know stuff? The overwhelming majority of people knows very, very little. Most of the people I know are too lazy to think or doing the hard work of studying. I'd suggest Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" before putting any faith in people's "knowledge". > It plays games with words to make plausible-sounding English text, but any statements made in it are liable to be false. I think we can we apply the same judgment to Stallman's argument itself, since his concepts are so badly defined. And thank you for an open democratic society where every statement is liable to be false, regardless if it comes from a machine, Richard Stalman or Putin and Jiping. I'll take Turing's test approach: if it looks intelligent to me then it is certainly more intelligent than me. Also, I'll take Dijkstra approach: "the question on whether computers can think is as irrelevant as whether submarines can swim". Edit: to all Stallman's fanboys downvoting this: got any good argument?

jahnu 4y ago
Great points and if anyone would like a deep dive into these questions I can highly recommend the latest Mindscape episode https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/20/230-raphael-milliere-on-how-artificial-intelligence-thinks/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/20/230-...
Zurrrrr 4y ago
If you consider stallman is using the colloquial definition of artificial intelligence (which, as pop culture uses it, is basically artificial consciousness), his answer makes a lot more sense.
- diego_moita 4y ago
  "Definition" is a rigorous concept and technique in philosophy and logic. It comes straight from Aristotle and is a foundation for the whole western culture. I won't consider any colloquial definition of something so precious.

eulers_secret 4y ago

In his recent talk for the FSF at Boston Stallman suggested that published weights are open source. I guess because they’re modifiable and auditable. It’s an interesting argument. So far, I’ve managed to modify llama myself so I guess so??

arnaudsm 4y ago
Weights can be retrained but cannot be explained. Recent papers even demonstrated backdoors : https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07840 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07840 Therefore a real open source model needs a public dataset and training code.

jasfi 4y ago

I would argue that ChatGPT has reached a certain level of understanding about what it's saying. That's because you can ask it questions about what it says, and it can continue to reason along the line of what it's previously said. It does sometimes make mistakes in this, but this is improving. It's just that people want understanding to look a certain way, that seems more familiar to us.

jmfldn 4y ago
I think you are right in a sense. Whether ChatGPT 'understands' might be moot if it produces responses to that effect. Understanding to me implies perceiving the intended meaning, which to me implies sentience. Does it matter though if it doesn't have this property? As the aphorism goes (paraphrasing) "asking whether machines think is like asking whether submarines swim", ie. it's kind of beside the point. If you get the result you want, in this case understanding-like responses, then that's enough right?

dgb23 4y ago

I propose a new term for this thing: AK - Artificial Knowledge. The purpose of this tool is to compress, match and combine text based, _informal_ information.

tinyhouse 4y ago

I actually think it shows incredible reasoning ability already. It can change its answers based on new content you provide. For example, you can show it a Java program and ask how it will behave, then show it release notes of a new Java version it has never seen before and ask it how the functionality may change, and it will get it right. Most programmers won't because our ability to attend to information is far inferior unless we really try hard. Focus is not something most humans excel at. Our brains are more capable but are less utilized most of the time.

st_goliath 4y ago

Surprisingly not mentioned in the post: The whole Free Software movement aside, RMS has actually spent a chunk of his academic career at the MIT AI lab, researching artificial intelligence and co-authored some papers during his time there. Granted, many of their research topics at the time are now no longer considered AI topics, part of what ultimately lead to the AI winter at the time. Particularly because of that connection, however, I think it could indeed be interesting to hear some more from his perspective on developments in recent years.

arnaudsm 4y ago
Indeed, the symbolic vs connectionist battle is still going. GPT plugins like Wolfram alpha seem like a step in the right direction. For reliability I would prefer the symbolic system to be in charge of the transformer. Like the left and right brain.

orbital-decay 4y ago

> It has no intelligence; it doesn't know anything and doesn't understand anything. I don't like the word "intelligence". It's too arbitrary and depends on the language. In my native language, there are two synonyms which imply different thresholds for something to be considered intelligent. I'm sure in other languages it's also pretty arbitrary. Instead, let's compare those models with complex biological systems we typically consider to be at least somewhat intelligent. - biological systems use spiking networks and are incredibly power efficient. This is more or less irrelevant for capabilities. - biological systems have a lot of surrounding neural and biochemical hardware - hardwired motorics, senses processing, internal regulators. Complex I/O is missing from these models, but is being added as we're talking. The large downside of current models is that it cannot understand what drives humans as it has different hardware, it's trained on their output, and has to "reverse engineer" the motivation. Which might or might not be possible, but it makes them different. - biological systems are autonomous agents in their world. They exist on an uninterrupted timeline, with input and output streams constantly present. Those models don't exist on a timeline, they are activated by the user each time. - biological systems have some form of memory; they compress incoming data into higher order concepts on the fly, and store them. This is a HUGE DEAL. The model has no equivalent of memory or neuroplasticity, it's a function that doesn't keep any state. LLMs have the context which can be turned into a sliding window with an external feedback loop (chatbots do that), however it's not equivalent to biological memory at all, as it just stores tokens verbatim, instead of trying to compress the incoming data. - biological systems exhibit highly complex emergent behavior. This also happens in LLMs and even simpler models. - biological systems are social. Birds compose songs from tokens, and spread them through the population. Dogs, monkeys, and humans teach their kids. The mental capacity of a human isn't that great; every time you think you're smart, remember that you stand on the shoulders of giants. The model does have much more capacity than a human. My own conclusion: sparks of "intelligence"? Undeniably, the emergent behavior alone is enough. They do understand things, in the conventional terms. However, they are also profoundly different than human intelligence, and still lack key elements like the memory.

_yb2s 4y ago

It’s shocking to see so many famous intellectuals like Stallman and Chomsky get this so wrong. It seems like they have preconceptions so strongly held that no amount of hard evidence could convince them otherwise. GPT-4 deeply understands what it is talking about. I was able to pose it difficult classical physics problems that would be hard for a physics undergrad to solve and it could give correct answers consistently. These are things I made up that are nothing like existing examples. When asked to explain it’s work, or modify it for unusual scenarios, it could do so. I could also get it to invent new terms and concepts to describe the work, and then use those correctly. It even could reason out appropriate simplifying approximations when demands exceeded its calculating abilities. If gpt-4 isn’t really understanding what it is saying, or not intelligent than neither are any humans.

DoItToMe81 4y ago
Because it's assembling data from an enormous dataset with correct answers. It's a language model, it is physically impossible for it to 'think' or 'feel'.
- _yb2s 4y ago
  Those answers aren't in the training set, nor is anything like it. It's assembling a correct and general model of physics from examples in the training set, and applying that understanding to be able to solve any arbitrary problem. Nobody knows what "think" or "feel" really mean, and I think this surprising phenomena is a clue to understanding that- it isn't what it seems. Most of our theories about what the human mind, language, and thinking are imply this should be impossible, yet it's clearly not.

braingenious 4y ago

I wonder if Stallman has actually used GPT-4. His opinion seems like a conclusion that a person could arrive at by just reading the specifications.

muyuu 4y ago

I think people tend to underestimate the concept of understanding, and also the concept of conveying thing by just saying them. Most people don't get most things most of the time.

tim333 4y ago

Stallman's statement (as it's deleted on Reddit): >I can't foretell the future, but it is important to realize that ChatGPT is not artificial intelligence. It has no intelligence; it doesn't know anything and doesn't understand anything. It plays games with words to make plausible-sounding English text, but any statements made in it are liable to be false. It can't avoid that because it doesn't know what the words _mean_. I asked ChatGTP plus what it thought: >do you understand what words mean? and it replied: >Yes, as an AI language model, I have been trained on vast amounts of data to understand the meanings of words and their usage in various contexts. I use this knowledge to generate responses to questions and statements that are as accurate and informative as possible. However, it is important to note that language is a complex and nuanced system, and there may be cases where my understanding of a word or its context may not be entirely accurate or complete. Which I guess is not so different from humans although we have other inputs from the physical world I guess.