4 ms·

not necessarily. also need to stop calling it AI because it is not. It works on existing knowledge. Anything new or unfamiliar it will not be able to help you.

by makach 4y ago

m_mueller 4y ago
> Anything new or unfamiliar it will not be able to help you. Isn't this being disputed for GPT-4 [1]? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
- lionkor 4y ago
  Sorry, but you can get emergent behavior that LOOKS intelligent anywhere, and the only way you cant know is if all you get is a single way to observe it. As long as people weren't ready to look at human anatomy, they could only observe symptoms and make super wild guesses. That is what this is. Youre observing a thing in a black box with a screen, and youre reading too much into it if anything in the past is to be believed. Show a person a cellular automaton and dont explain it to them, leave them with it in a room for a month, see what their theories are. You bet it wont be "theres three rules and a random number generator", even if thats all there is.
  - m_mueller 4y ago
    If there is such emergent behavior that looks intelligent, how can you tell it apart from human intelligence? Devising a test that can answer this is an area of active research. Let's say for instance that it can come up with a novel mathematical proof that was not part of its training data - would you accept that as evidence towards AGI?
    - mordae 4y ago
      I would accept that as a proof of AI, not AGI. Provided it can do it repeatably and reliably. Hallucinating a proof that's 90% time wrong is just a parrot. For AGI, I would expect it to be teachable during the conversation. That is, to be able to form abstract models of reality and utilize them on the fly. Repeatably, reliably. Like a human with a pencil and a piece of paper can.
      - benj111 4y ago
        If I showed an AI a picture of a duck. They could remember that. We already have models that can be shown multiple pictures of ducks, learn what the essential characteristics of a duck are and identify novel pictures of ducks. So the AI has been taught. Has formed an abstract model of a duck and can reliably identify ducks. When does that become AGI? It can't purely be writing proofs because that's niche even for humans. Further what is intelligence? A professor of mathematics may be able to rattle off a proof. A 3 year old probably not. The 3 year old has amazing learning potential though. We accept that both the professor and the 3 year old display intelligence, but we dont seem to apply the same rules to AI.
        pmoriarty 4y ago
        Another analogy is not to a child but to a part of the brain. Can a part of the human brain be intelligent? Are humans missing a part of their brain, such as through brain damage, intelligent? Such humans may not be as fully capable as humans with an uninjured brain, but (depending on the extent of the damage) we would still consider them intelligent and conscious. We may think of current AI's like that: as partially functional intelligences. But in a way they are more, because some of their functions exceed human capacity. So they are really something new: in some ways less than humans, in some ways more.
    - benj111 4y ago
      Agreed. Our conception of 'intelligence' is based on us rather than some objective metric. There's absolutely no reason for an intelligence to be anything like us. We are flawed in a great many respects. We'll parrot things we have no reason to believe in etc, etc,etc. Im not even sure there's a distinction between intelligence and emergent behaviour. Did we evolve to speak and write complex language or is that emergent behaviour?
    - lionkor 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure engineers at OpenAI working on GPT-4 could very much demystify this entire discussion, but they choose not to. They didn't find out how to do AGI, they found a way to get a lot of people very very excited by employing a veil of secrecy and mystery. Its a program. You can see what it does, and there is a possibility to see what it was trained on. "Open"AI just chooses to hide that. If it was really that smart, OpenAI would have no issue publishing some more informationn on it.
- fock 4y ago
  > we discuss the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction sounds very much like it depends on the definition and the vendor themselve agrees that the current modeling options might not go much further...
- avianlyric 4y ago
  Equally there’s evidence that GPT-4 only excels on tests that happened to appear in it train data (presumably via accidental contamination). As has been demonstrated by it strong ability to solve tests written before its data cutoff date (Sep 2021), but struggles with equivalent tests written after that date. https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1635790330854526981 https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1635790330854526981 https://towardsdatascience.com/the-decontaminated-evaluation-of-gpt-4-38a27fc45c30 https://towardsdatascience.com/the-decontaminated-evaluation... https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/gpt-4-and-professional-benchmarks https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/gpt-4-and-professional-ben...
amitport 4y ago
"What has been, is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." I agree with the bible on this. There nothing "new", all humans do is "working on existing knowledge".
- makach 4y ago
  discovery and curiosity is essential for knowledge, questions is the mother of all knowledge. coming up with answers is easy, but knowing what questions to ask is what will broaden our minds. If we kept working on existing knowledge we wouldn't have evolved.
- sethammons 4y ago
  How does that level set with scientific discoveries and paradigm shifts? Knowledge is scaffolded upon itself - that doesn't mean it is not reaching new heights. The author of that quote wouldn't recognize germ theory or understand powered flight and interstellar probes.
  - indigoabstract 4y ago
    Keep in mind that we don't really know who wrote the Bible. It's not impossible they may have known things that we don't.
  - amitport 4y ago
    the quote continues (loose translation): "There will be things that people will look at and say: 'they are new!', but these were here before us. Since forever." So, IMO the author did realize that there will be "new" things, the premise is that these things are already part of our world, and the process and mechanism of discovery is repeated. In the human perception (and LLM's ?) there is only "rehashed" knowledge in a way, nothing is really new.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      That doesn’t take into account emergent properties, though. I don’t see how “general purpose computers” have always been here before us — many things can compute (one proper, but not too useful definition of a computer is something that represents a computable function by upon giving it an input in a specific format, it will give an output that can be interpreted as a result. E.g. a sundial is a computer), and none of the primitives are unique (logical gates can be made from many things), but their unique composition into a programmable computer is a novel invention.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Machine learning and AI have been used interchangeably for a while now, probably because the latter has better marketing value.
benj111 4y ago
i kind of disagree. i can add X + Y for any values of X and Y. not because i have a gigantic table in my head, but because i know the rules of adding 2 numbers. AI is to some extent doing the same. the fact that it does increasingly weird unhuman things to me indicates it is infact intelligence. it isnt just parroting the answers for itself. it is using its flawed understanding to attempt to reach an answer. humans are also flawed and come out with stupid answers, but we are used to that and can understand it.
- sph 4y ago
  Knowledge != intelligence. So many people tend to conveniently forget this fact these days. You know how addition works, this fact alone does not make you intelligent. Intelligence = ability to solve novel problems. Requires out-of-the-box thinking. ChatGPT cannot learn and solve problems it has never encountered before, thus it is not intelligent. Also, training != learning.
  - benj111 4y ago
    Knowledge would be memorising a big table of additions. Intelligence is knowing the rules of addition to apply it to 2 numbers you've never been shown how to add. I can memorise 1+1. I've never been shown the answer to 47459592271638494 + 3745802297337747488. That for me is a novel problem that would need to be solved. So the fact that I have knowledge of mathematics and can apply it shows I have intelligence. Out of the box thinking isn't a prerequisite of intelligence. It's a special case that humans are good at and computers aren't. If a mouse bumbles around a maze, eventually finds the cheese, and from then on goes straight to the cheese, that would be a sign of intelligence. If a robot does the same, why is that any less intelligent?
    - kaba0 4y ago
      So did I just write an intelligent program: T add(T a, T b) { return a + b; } And let’s make T BigInteger for now.
      - 4y ago
PeterisP 4y ago
There is nothing new or unfamiliar required to generate an explanation of what a dozen assembly instructions do, of all the tasks in the world this is one that definitely should be doable by a glorified pattern-recognizer.
sethammons 4y ago
Instead of "AI," I am thinking we should call it "last year's internet."
- abudabi123 4y ago
  Not all of last year's internet of original ideas have had Monte Carlo complexity paths fuzzed and rebased for something ummm-imaginably different using A.I.
- bitwize 4y ago
  A discrete cosine transform of last year's internet.
KyeRussell 4y ago
Don’t assert your personal philosophical opinion of something as nebulous as “intelligence” as absolute fact in an attempt to nerd snipe someone on Hacker News. Utterly cringey and a weird thing to be pedantic about given that you very obviously knew what OP was talking about.

not necessarily. also need to stop calling it AI because it is not. It works on existing knowledge. Anything new or unfamiliar it will not be able to help you.

by makach 4y ago

not necessarily. also need to stop calling it AI because it is not. It works on existing knowledge. Anything new or unfamiliar it will not be able to help you.

m_mueller 4y ago

> Anything new or unfamiliar it will not be able to help you. Isn't this being disputed for GPT-4 [1]? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

lionkor 4y ago
Sorry, but you can get emergent behavior that LOOKS intelligent anywhere, and the only way you cant know is if all you get is a single way to observe it. As long as people weren't ready to look at human anatomy, they could only observe symptoms and make super wild guesses. That is what this is. Youre observing a thing in a black box with a screen, and youre reading too much into it if anything in the past is to be believed. Show a person a cellular automaton and dont explain it to them, leave them with it in a room for a month, see what their theories are. You bet it wont be "theres three rules and a random number generator", even if thats all there is.
- m_mueller 4y ago
  If there is such emergent behavior that looks intelligent, how can you tell it apart from human intelligence? Devising a test that can answer this is an area of active research. Let's say for instance that it can come up with a novel mathematical proof that was not part of its training data - would you accept that as evidence towards AGI?
  - mordae 4y ago
    I would accept that as a proof of AI, not AGI. Provided it can do it repeatably and reliably. Hallucinating a proof that's 90% time wrong is just a parrot. For AGI, I would expect it to be teachable during the conversation. That is, to be able to form abstract models of reality and utilize them on the fly. Repeatably, reliably. Like a human with a pencil and a piece of paper can.
    - benj111 4y ago
      If I showed an AI a picture of a duck. They could remember that. We already have models that can be shown multiple pictures of ducks, learn what the essential characteristics of a duck are and identify novel pictures of ducks. So the AI has been taught. Has formed an abstract model of a duck and can reliably identify ducks. When does that become AGI? It can't purely be writing proofs because that's niche even for humans. Further what is intelligence? A professor of mathematics may be able to rattle off a proof. A 3 year old probably not. The 3 year old has amazing learning potential though. We accept that both the professor and the 3 year old display intelligence, but we dont seem to apply the same rules to AI.
      - pmoriarty 4y ago
        Another analogy is not to a child but to a part of the brain. Can a part of the human brain be intelligent? Are humans missing a part of their brain, such as through brain damage, intelligent? Such humans may not be as fully capable as humans with an uninjured brain, but (depending on the extent of the damage) we would still consider them intelligent and conscious. We may think of current AI's like that: as partially functional intelligences. But in a way they are more, because some of their functions exceed human capacity. So they are really something new: in some ways less than humans, in some ways more.
  - benj111 4y ago
    Agreed. Our conception of 'intelligence' is based on us rather than some objective metric. There's absolutely no reason for an intelligence to be anything like us. We are flawed in a great many respects. We'll parrot things we have no reason to believe in etc, etc,etc. Im not even sure there's a distinction between intelligence and emergent behaviour. Did we evolve to speak and write complex language or is that emergent behaviour?
  - lionkor 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure engineers at OpenAI working on GPT-4 could very much demystify this entire discussion, but they choose not to. They didn't find out how to do AGI, they found a way to get a lot of people very very excited by employing a veil of secrecy and mystery. Its a program. You can see what it does, and there is a possibility to see what it was trained on. "Open"AI just chooses to hide that. If it was really that smart, OpenAI would have no issue publishing some more informationn on it.
fock 4y ago
> we discuss the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction sounds very much like it depends on the definition and the vendor themselve agrees that the current modeling options might not go much further...
avianlyric 4y ago
Equally there’s evidence that GPT-4 only excels on tests that happened to appear in it train data (presumably via accidental contamination). As has been demonstrated by it strong ability to solve tests written before its data cutoff date (Sep 2021), but struggles with equivalent tests written after that date. https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1635790330854526981 https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1635790330854526981 https://towardsdatascience.com/the-decontaminated-evaluation-of-gpt-4-38a27fc45c30 https://towardsdatascience.com/the-decontaminated-evaluation... https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/gpt-4-and-professional-benchmarks https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/gpt-4-and-professional-ben...

amitport 4y ago

"What has been, is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." I agree with the bible on this. There nothing "new", all humans do is "working on existing knowledge".

makach 4y ago
discovery and curiosity is essential for knowledge, questions is the mother of all knowledge. coming up with answers is easy, but knowing what questions to ask is what will broaden our minds. If we kept working on existing knowledge we wouldn't have evolved.
sethammons 4y ago
How does that level set with scientific discoveries and paradigm shifts? Knowledge is scaffolded upon itself - that doesn't mean it is not reaching new heights. The author of that quote wouldn't recognize germ theory or understand powered flight and interstellar probes.
- indigoabstract 4y ago
  Keep in mind that we don't really know who wrote the Bible. It's not impossible they may have known things that we don't.
- amitport 4y ago
  the quote continues (loose translation): "There will be things that people will look at and say: 'they are new!', but these were here before us. Since forever." So, IMO the author did realize that there will be "new" things, the premise is that these things are already part of our world, and the process and mechanism of discovery is repeated. In the human perception (and LLM's ?) there is only "rehashed" knowledge in a way, nothing is really new.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    That doesn’t take into account emergent properties, though. I don’t see how “general purpose computers” have always been here before us — many things can compute (one proper, but not too useful definition of a computer is something that represents a computable function by upon giving it an input in a specific format, it will give an output that can be interpreted as a result. E.g. a sundial is a computer), and none of the primitives are unique (logical gates can be made from many things), but their unique composition into a programmable computer is a novel invention.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

Machine learning and AI have been used interchangeably for a while now, probably because the latter has better marketing value.

benj111 4y ago

i kind of disagree. i can add X + Y for any values of X and Y. not because i have a gigantic table in my head, but because i know the rules of adding 2 numbers. AI is to some extent doing the same. the fact that it does increasingly weird unhuman things to me indicates it is infact intelligence. it isnt just parroting the answers for itself. it is using its flawed understanding to attempt to reach an answer. humans are also flawed and come out with stupid answers, but we are used to that and can understand it.

sph 4y ago
Knowledge != intelligence. So many people tend to conveniently forget this fact these days. You know how addition works, this fact alone does not make you intelligent. Intelligence = ability to solve novel problems. Requires out-of-the-box thinking. ChatGPT cannot learn and solve problems it has never encountered before, thus it is not intelligent. Also, training != learning.
- benj111 4y ago
  Knowledge would be memorising a big table of additions. Intelligence is knowing the rules of addition to apply it to 2 numbers you've never been shown how to add. I can memorise 1+1. I've never been shown the answer to 47459592271638494 + 3745802297337747488. That for me is a novel problem that would need to be solved. So the fact that I have knowledge of mathematics and can apply it shows I have intelligence. Out of the box thinking isn't a prerequisite of intelligence. It's a special case that humans are good at and computers aren't. If a mouse bumbles around a maze, eventually finds the cheese, and from then on goes straight to the cheese, that would be a sign of intelligence. If a robot does the same, why is that any less intelligent?
  - kaba0 4y ago
    So did I just write an intelligent program: T add(T a, T b) { return a + b; } And let’s make T BigInteger for now.
    - 4y ago

PeterisP 4y ago

There is nothing new or unfamiliar required to generate an explanation of what a dozen assembly instructions do, of all the tasks in the world this is one that definitely should be doable by a glorified pattern-recognizer.

sethammons 4y ago

Instead of "AI," I am thinking we should call it "last year's internet."

abudabi123 4y ago
Not all of last year's internet of original ideas have had Monte Carlo complexity paths fuzzed and rebased for something ummm-imaginably different using A.I.
bitwize 4y ago
A discrete cosine transform of last year's internet.

KyeRussell 4y ago

Don’t assert your personal philosophical opinion of something as nebulous as “intelligence” as absolute fact in an attempt to nerd snipe someone on Hacker News. Utterly cringey and a weird thing to be pedantic about given that you very obviously knew what OP was talking about.