16 ms·

It's not thinking, plain and simple. Anything it generates means nothing to the algorithm. When you read it and interpret what was generated you're experiencin

It's not thinking, plain and simple. Anything it generates means nothing to the algorithm. When you read it and interpret what was generated you're experiencing something like the Barnum-Forer effect. It's sort of like reading a horoscope and believing it predicted your future.

fnordpiglet 4y ago
Except for when as an expert in a field you ask it questions about that are subtle and it answers in a cogent and insightful way, and as an expert you are fully aware of that. It’s not reasonable to call that a Barnum-Forer effect. It’s perhaps not thinking (but perhaps we need to more clearly define thinking), but its not a self-deception either.
myrmidon 4y ago
What gives you any confidence that the way GPT4 comes up with answers is qualitatively different from humans? Why should the emulation of human though, a result of unguided evolution, require anything more than properly wired silicon?
- agentultra 4y ago
  That's highly reductive of our capacities. We are not weighted transformers that can be explained in an arxiv paper. GPT, at the end of the day, is a statistical inference model. That's it. It's not going to wake up one day, decide it prefers eggs benny and has had enough of your idle chatter because of that sarcastic remark you made last week. Could we simulate a plausibly realistic human brain on silicon someday? I don't know, maybe? But that's not what GPT is and we're no where near being able to do that. You can scale up the tokens an LLM can manage and all you get is a more accurate model with more weights and transformers. It's not going to wake up one day, have feelings, religion, decide things for itself, look in a mirror and reflect on its predicament, lament the poor response it gave a user, and decide it doesn't want to live with regret and correct its mistakes.
  - myrmidon 4y ago
    > That's highly reductive of our capacities. I'm not saying that GPT4 is as capable as a human-- it can not be, by design, because its architecture lacks memory/feedback paths that we have. What I'm saying is that HOW it thinks might already be quite close in essence to how WE think. > We are not weighted transformers that can be explained in an arxiv paper. GPT, at the end of the day, is a statistical inference model. That's it. That is true but uninteresting-- my counterpoint is: If you concede that our brain is "simulatable", then you basically ALREADY reduced yourself to a register based VM-- the only remaining question is: what ressources (cycles/memory) are required to emulate human thought in real time, and what is the "simplest" program to achieve it (that might be something not MUCH more complicated than GPT4!).
    - goatlover 4y ago
      > If you concede that our brain is "simulatable", then you basically ALREADY reduced yourself to a register based VM-- the only remaining question is: what ressources (cycles/memory) are required to emulate human thought in real time We haven't emulated brains yet, so we don't know. The OpenWorm project is interesting, but I don't know to what extent they've managed to faithfully recreate an accurate digital version of a nematode worm. I do know they had it driving around a robot. Thing is that the our brains are only part of the nervous system, which extends throughout the body. So I don't know what happens if you only simulate just the brain part. Seems to me that the rest of the body kind of matters for proper functioning.
      - myrmidon 4y ago
        I personally believe that while interesting, projects like OpenWorm or humanbrainproject are extremely indirect and unpromising regarding AGI (or even for improving our understanding of human thinking in general). To me, these are like building an instruction set emulator by scanning a SoC and then cobbling together a SPICE simulation of all the individual transistors-- the wrong level of abstraction and unlikely to EVER give decent performance. People also like to point out that human neurons are diverse and hard to simulate accurately-- yeah sure, but to me that seems completely irrelevant to AGI, in the very same way that physically exact transistor modelling is irrelevant when implementing emulators.
- TuringTest 4y ago
  > What gives you any confidence that the way GPT4 comes up with answers is qualitatively different from humans? For a start, GPT-4 doesn't include in its generation the current state of its internal knowledge used so far; any text built can only use at most the few words already generated in the current session as a kind of short-term memory. Biological brains OTOH have a rhythm with feedback mechanisms which adapt to the situation where they're doing the thinking.
  - myrmidon 4y ago
    > For a start, GPT-4 doesn't include in its generation the current state of its internal knowledge used so far Sure. But are you certain that you NEED write access to long term memory to think? Would your thinking capabilities degrade meaningfully if that was taken away?
    - TuringTest 4y ago
      Yes, I would say that a brain without the capacity to form new memories has degraded thinking capabilities.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Except for when as an expert in a field you ask it questions about that are subtle and it answers in a cogent and insightful way, and as an expert you are fully aware of that. It’s not reasonable to call that a Barnum-Forer effect. It’s perhaps not thinking (but perhaps we need to more clearly define thinking), but its not a self-deception either.

myrmidon 4y ago

What gives you any confidence that the way GPT4 comes up with answers is qualitatively different from humans? Why should the emulation of human though, a result of unguided evolution, require anything more than properly wired silicon?

agentultra 4y ago
That's highly reductive of our capacities. We are not weighted transformers that can be explained in an arxiv paper. GPT, at the end of the day, is a statistical inference model. That's it. It's not going to wake up one day, decide it prefers eggs benny and has had enough of your idle chatter because of that sarcastic remark you made last week. Could we simulate a plausibly realistic human brain on silicon someday? I don't know, maybe? But that's not what GPT is and we're no where near being able to do that. You can scale up the tokens an LLM can manage and all you get is a more accurate model with more weights and transformers. It's not going to wake up one day, have feelings, religion, decide things for itself, look in a mirror and reflect on its predicament, lament the poor response it gave a user, and decide it doesn't want to live with regret and correct its mistakes.
- myrmidon 4y ago
  > That's highly reductive of our capacities. I'm not saying that GPT4 is as capable as a human-- it can not be, by design, because its architecture lacks memory/feedback paths that we have. What I'm saying is that HOW it thinks might already be quite close in essence to how WE think. > We are not weighted transformers that can be explained in an arxiv paper. GPT, at the end of the day, is a statistical inference model. That's it. That is true but uninteresting-- my counterpoint is: If you concede that our brain is "simulatable", then you basically ALREADY reduced yourself to a register based VM-- the only remaining question is: what ressources (cycles/memory) are required to emulate human thought in real time, and what is the "simplest" program to achieve it (that might be something not MUCH more complicated than GPT4!).
  - goatlover 4y ago
    > If you concede that our brain is "simulatable", then you basically ALREADY reduced yourself to a register based VM-- the only remaining question is: what ressources (cycles/memory) are required to emulate human thought in real time We haven't emulated brains yet, so we don't know. The OpenWorm project is interesting, but I don't know to what extent they've managed to faithfully recreate an accurate digital version of a nematode worm. I do know they had it driving around a robot. Thing is that the our brains are only part of the nervous system, which extends throughout the body. So I don't know what happens if you only simulate just the brain part. Seems to me that the rest of the body kind of matters for proper functioning.
    - myrmidon 4y ago
      I personally believe that while interesting, projects like OpenWorm or humanbrainproject are extremely indirect and unpromising regarding AGI (or even for improving our understanding of human thinking in general). To me, these are like building an instruction set emulator by scanning a SoC and then cobbling together a SPICE simulation of all the individual transistors-- the wrong level of abstraction and unlikely to EVER give decent performance. People also like to point out that human neurons are diverse and hard to simulate accurately-- yeah sure, but to me that seems completely irrelevant to AGI, in the very same way that physically exact transistor modelling is irrelevant when implementing emulators.
TuringTest 4y ago
> What gives you any confidence that the way GPT4 comes up with answers is qualitatively different from humans? For a start, GPT-4 doesn't include in its generation the current state of its internal knowledge used so far; any text built can only use at most the few words already generated in the current session as a kind of short-term memory. Biological brains OTOH have a rhythm with feedback mechanisms which adapt to the situation where they're doing the thinking.
- myrmidon 4y ago
  > For a start, GPT-4 doesn't include in its generation the current state of its internal knowledge used so far Sure. But are you certain that you NEED write access to long term memory to think? Would your thinking capabilities degrade meaningfully if that was taken away?
  - TuringTest 4y ago
    Yes, I would say that a brain without the capacity to form new memories has degraded thinking capabilities.