3 ms·

Is it? There are many mentions of confetti cannons on the web, along with explanations of how they work (saying something like confetti shoots out of the canno

Is it? There are many mentions of confetti cannons on the web, along with explanations of how they work (saying something like confetti shoots out of the cannon). Chat-GPT just picked a random thing (confetti) and completed the pattern "X out of Y" with the thing confetti comes out of. It's easy. The cereal is out of the box. The helium is out of the balloon. The snow is out of the globe. And it's exactly the one thing LLMs are trained to do: reproduce patterns of words. They are (perhaps) already better than humans at that one specific skill (another win for AI research) but I don't think it's a sign of general intelligence.

slyall 4y ago
"The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not real intelligence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- leereeves 4y ago
  Better that than the opposite effect, to assume that because a system solves a single problem very well, it is intelligent. Is Stockfish intelligent? Is a system with A* pathfinding intelligent? I would define intelligence as the ability to solve a wide variety of novel problems. A system built to be excellent at a single task may be better than humans at that task but still lack "intelligence". We still don't know what that even is exactly, but historically people consistently underestimate how difficult it is. Not even knowing how to approach it, researchers work on solving single specialized problems instead and make little progress on whatever "intelligence" is. (If you'd prefer a different definition of intelligence under which Stockfish and GPT are intelligent, then what would you call the ability to solve a wide variety of novel problems? Feel free to substitute that word for "intelligence" above if you'd like to understand what I'm saying.)
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    > Is Stockfish intelligent? > Is a system with A pathfinding intelligent?* I'm not sure if we should get stuck on definitions of intelligence. The fact is that these tools are useful, as are the currently existing AI's. The latter can also pass for humans, in many ways, while the algorithms you mentioned can only pass for humans in very narrow domains. Both can exceed human performance in some ways. Eventually, AI's may be indistinguishable from human or convince humans that they should be treated differently from "mere" programs and algorithms, and at that point we will have entered a new era, call it what you will.
    - leereeves 4y ago
      We'll have to "get stuck on" definitions of intelligence if we want to talk precisely about what LLMs are capable of.
      - pmoriarty 4y ago
        Not necessarily, as we can just evaluate them on their performance as we give them ever greater challenges. To do this we do not need to consider whether they're intelligent at all.
techdragon 4y ago
To continue with some human brain powered pedantry for fun I’d argue that “the snow is out of the globe” is not a valid idiom to suit the “X out of Y” pattern. We have multiple example pairings of X and Y but the common components are that putting X back in Y would be impossible or extremely difficult, and also that X is in some way meant to no longer be contained inside Y as part of either a desired outcome, it’s normal function or the natural expected and thus inevitable result. Cats want to escape, helium leaks, confetti is expelled to have the desired effect, and toothpaste is squeezed out to use it… For the snow to come out of a snow globe you have to smash it which is not normal usage, not normally meant to happen, and shouldn’t happen by itself. Making the idiom “The snow is out of the globe” not a proper member of this “family” of idioms. (Also I’m not sure if there’s an agreed upon collective noun for idioms)
roenxi 4y ago
The issue I see here is you are doing a worse job at this than ChatGTP. Creating idioms is hard, that is why we left most of them to Shakespeare. - I regularly return cereal to its box. - "helium" and "balloon" have a more awkward rhythm than "confetti" and "cannon". It also loses the connotations of sudden, explosive and exciting change. - Snow & globe I'm not even sure what that means in practice. It has poor prospects as an idiom. Is the snow even known for leaving globes?
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  > "helium" and "balloon" have a more awkward rhythm than "confetti" and "cannon". It also loses the connotations of sudden, explosive and exciting change. Not only that, but "the confetti has left the cannon" is an alliteration, which makes the phrase even more poetic.
  - leereeves 4y ago
    I actually agree, it's a very good phrase. But I do think it's cherry picking the most impressive example. I repeated the dialog (and some variations), each time asking for a completely new idiom, and ChatGPT responded with several phrases that aren't new at all: "The toothpaste is out of the tube" "The lid has been lifted" "The secret has been spilled" "The arrow has left the bow"
    - selcuka 4y ago
      > But I do think it's cherry picking the most impressive example. Yes, but don't we cherry pick from what humans have said, too? I'm sure there have been many dumb and obvious proverbs that didn't survive. > ChatGPT responded with several phrases that aren't new at all Are you using the GPT-4 version of ChatGPT? That's what GP used.
  - DoctorOetker 4y ago
    it also attests to the ramifications, the magnificent difficulty of cleaning confetti, you will keep occasionally finding confetti around the house for months or years
Timon3 4y ago
In a way, this comment perfectly encapsulates why the argument "machines will never replicate human behavior" is so ridiculous. Instead of engaging with the discussion and topic, you chose a position, and then tried to justify it without really thinking about why one example works and the other one doesn't. In doing so you're literally showing that for certain topics, machines are already more capable than some humans.
- leereeves 4y ago
  I didn't say "machines will never replicate human behavior" so I don't think you're engaging with what I said.
  - Timon3 4y ago
    Sure, you didn't say that. You merely said: > And it's exactly the one thing LLMs are trained to do: reproduce patterns of words. They are (perhaps) already better than humans at that one specific skill (another win for AI research) but I don't think it's a sign of general intelligence. while completely missing why the machine did a better job.
slowmovintarget 4y ago
Like you, I thought these pieces of software and data were little more than statistics-based text generators. But it turns out that this is a Category Mistake. There was an argument made by Raphaël Millière in a recent Mindscape Podcast [1] with Sean Carroll that finally landed for me. He used the example that human beings are driven to eat and reproduce, so by that argument all humans are just eating and reproducing machines. "Ah! But we developed other capabilities along the way to allow us to be good at that!" And that's the point. GPT-4, for example, is very very good at producing pleasing and useful output for a given input. It uses a simulated neural net to do that. Why would one assume that on the way toward becoming excellent at that task that a neural net wouldn't also acquire other abilities that we associate with reasoning or cognition? When we test GPT-4 for these things (like Theory of Mind) we actually find them. "Ah hah!" you say, "Humans are set up to learn from the get go, and machines must be trained from scratch." However if you consider the entirety of our genetic legacy together with our childhoods, those are our equivalent "training" from scratch. I don't think it can be easily dismissed that we're seeing something significant here. It's not human-level intelligence yet. Part of the reason for that is that human brains are vastly more complex than any LLM at the moment (100s of trillions of "parameters" in LLM-speak, along with other advantages). But we're seeing the emergence of something important. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUJOcVPdDvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUJOcVPdDvg
- leereeves 4y ago
  That emergence is precisely what I'm looking for evidence of. Human beings evolved to eat and reproduce and yet here we are, building computers and inventing complex mathematical models of language and debating whether they're intelligent. We're so far from the environment we evolved to solve that we've clearly demonstrated the ability to adapt. ChatGPT doing well at a language task isn't demonstrating that same ability to adapt because that's the task it was designed and trained to do. ChatGPT doing something completely different would be the impressive example. In short: I don't categorically reject the possibility that LLMs might become capable of more than being "statistics-based text generators", I simply require evidence.
  - slowmovintarget 4y ago

slyall 4y ago

"The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not real intelligence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

leereeves 4y ago
Better that than the opposite effect, to assume that because a system solves a single problem very well, it is intelligent. Is Stockfish intelligent? Is a system with A* pathfinding intelligent? I would define intelligence as the ability to solve a wide variety of novel problems. A system built to be excellent at a single task may be better than humans at that task but still lack "intelligence". We still don't know what that even is exactly, but historically people consistently underestimate how difficult it is. Not even knowing how to approach it, researchers work on solving single specialized problems instead and make little progress on whatever "intelligence" is. (If you'd prefer a different definition of intelligence under which Stockfish and GPT are intelligent, then what would you call the ability to solve a wide variety of novel problems? Feel free to substitute that word for "intelligence" above if you'd like to understand what I'm saying.)
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  > Is Stockfish intelligent? > Is a system with A pathfinding intelligent?* I'm not sure if we should get stuck on definitions of intelligence. The fact is that these tools are useful, as are the currently existing AI's. The latter can also pass for humans, in many ways, while the algorithms you mentioned can only pass for humans in very narrow domains. Both can exceed human performance in some ways. Eventually, AI's may be indistinguishable from human or convince humans that they should be treated differently from "mere" programs and algorithms, and at that point we will have entered a new era, call it what you will.
  - leereeves 4y ago
    We'll have to "get stuck on" definitions of intelligence if we want to talk precisely about what LLMs are capable of.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      Not necessarily, as we can just evaluate them on their performance as we give them ever greater challenges. To do this we do not need to consider whether they're intelligent at all.

techdragon 4y ago

To continue with some human brain powered pedantry for fun I’d argue that “the snow is out of the globe” is not a valid idiom to suit the “X out of Y” pattern. We have multiple example pairings of X and Y but the common components are that putting X back in Y would be impossible or extremely difficult, and also that X is in some way meant to no longer be contained inside Y as part of either a desired outcome, it’s normal function or the natural expected and thus inevitable result. Cats want to escape, helium leaks, confetti is expelled to have the desired effect, and toothpaste is squeezed out to use it… For the snow to come out of a snow globe you have to smash it which is not normal usage, not normally meant to happen, and shouldn’t happen by itself. Making the idiom “The snow is out of the globe” not a proper member of this “family” of idioms. (Also I’m not sure if there’s an agreed upon collective noun for idioms)

roenxi 4y ago

The issue I see here is you are doing a worse job at this than ChatGTP. Creating idioms is hard, that is why we left most of them to Shakespeare. - I regularly return cereal to its box. - "helium" and "balloon" have a more awkward rhythm than "confetti" and "cannon". It also loses the connotations of sudden, explosive and exciting change. - Snow & globe I'm not even sure what that means in practice. It has poor prospects as an idiom. Is the snow even known for leaving globes?

pmoriarty 4y ago
> "helium" and "balloon" have a more awkward rhythm than "confetti" and "cannon". It also loses the connotations of sudden, explosive and exciting change. Not only that, but "the confetti has left the cannon" is an alliteration, which makes the phrase even more poetic.
- leereeves 4y ago
  I actually agree, it's a very good phrase. But I do think it's cherry picking the most impressive example. I repeated the dialog (and some variations), each time asking for a completely new idiom, and ChatGPT responded with several phrases that aren't new at all: "The toothpaste is out of the tube" "The lid has been lifted" "The secret has been spilled" "The arrow has left the bow"
  - selcuka 4y ago
    > But I do think it's cherry picking the most impressive example. Yes, but don't we cherry pick from what humans have said, too? I'm sure there have been many dumb and obvious proverbs that didn't survive. > ChatGPT responded with several phrases that aren't new at all Are you using the GPT-4 version of ChatGPT? That's what GP used.
- DoctorOetker 4y ago
  it also attests to the ramifications, the magnificent difficulty of cleaning confetti, you will keep occasionally finding confetti around the house for months or years

Timon3 4y ago

In a way, this comment perfectly encapsulates why the argument "machines will never replicate human behavior" is so ridiculous. Instead of engaging with the discussion and topic, you chose a position, and then tried to justify it without really thinking about why one example works and the other one doesn't. In doing so you're literally showing that for certain topics, machines are already more capable than some humans.

leereeves 4y ago
I didn't say "machines will never replicate human behavior" so I don't think you're engaging with what I said.
- Timon3 4y ago
  Sure, you didn't say that. You merely said: > And it's exactly the one thing LLMs are trained to do: reproduce patterns of words. They are (perhaps) already better than humans at that one specific skill (another win for AI research) but I don't think it's a sign of general intelligence. while completely missing why the machine did a better job.

slowmovintarget 4y ago

Like you, I thought these pieces of software and data were little more than statistics-based text generators. But it turns out that this is a Category Mistake. There was an argument made by Raphaël Millière in a recent Mindscape Podcast [1] with Sean Carroll that finally landed for me. He used the example that human beings are driven to eat and reproduce, so by that argument all humans are just eating and reproducing machines. "Ah! But we developed other capabilities along the way to allow us to be good at that!" And that's the point. GPT-4, for example, is very very good at producing pleasing and useful output for a given input. It uses a simulated neural net to do that. Why would one assume that on the way toward becoming excellent at that task that a neural net wouldn't also acquire other abilities that we associate with reasoning or cognition? When we test GPT-4 for these things (like Theory of Mind) we actually find them. "Ah hah!" you say, "Humans are set up to learn from the get go, and machines must be trained from scratch." However if you consider the entirety of our genetic legacy together with our childhoods, those are our equivalent "training" from scratch. I don't think it can be easily dismissed that we're seeing something significant here. It's not human-level intelligence yet. Part of the reason for that is that human brains are vastly more complex than any LLM at the moment (100s of trillions of "parameters" in LLM-speak, along with other advantages). But we're seeing the emergence of something important. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUJOcVPdDvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUJOcVPdDvg

leereeves 4y ago
That emergence is precisely what I'm looking for evidence of. Human beings evolved to eat and reproduce and yet here we are, building computers and inventing complex mathematical models of language and debating whether they're intelligent. We're so far from the environment we evolved to solve that we've clearly demonstrated the ability to adapt. ChatGPT doing well at a language task isn't demonstrating that same ability to adapt because that's the task it was designed and trained to do. ChatGPT doing something completely different would be the impressive example. In short: I don't categorically reject the possibility that LLMs might become capable of more than being "statistics-based text generators", I simply require evidence.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago