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Obviously AI academics are uniquely challenged by the 'scaling is (nearly) everything' reality, but I feel like a lot of the mixed emotions being expressed towa

Obviously AI academics are uniquely challenged by the 'scaling is (nearly) everything' reality, but I feel like a lot of the mixed emotions being expressed towards the latest results are also because we're actually seeing the mystery of self starting to unravel. Like any good mystery, the fun was in the build up and as we move towards a resolution there's a bitter sweet aspect to the slightly mundane reality of it 'merely' being an emergent property of large networks. Of course, any rational person might have expected this given how the one working example came into existence. In general it all looks like a pretty resounding endorsement of the David Chalmers position to me.

hakuseki 3y ago
> Like any good mystery, the fun was in the build up and as we move towards a resolution there's a bitter sweet aspect to the slightly mundane reality of it 'merely' being an emergent property of large networks. I would disagree with this description. An "emergent property of large networks" would be something that just appears when you wire together a large network. To get intelligent behavior, it's not sufficient to wire together a large neural network. You also need to use an optimizer to train it on a large data set.
- llamataboot 3y ago
  once upon a time the optimizer was die or reproduce...now it's a little faster and more convoluted...
- MrScruff 3y ago
  Yes of course, I'm being loose in my language, but you know what I'm getting at.
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  I think "Dial F For Frankenstein" makes your point clear. It is absurd to think the telephone network would just emergently become conscious when there are enough phones it connects together. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2137 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2137
southernplaces7 3y ago
Nothing about current AI models profoundly challenges the unknowns of what makes consciousness work in any mystery-resolving way. People who confuse plainly programmed algorithmic systems like GPT 4 or Midjourney with the still unresolved issues of sentience as we know it so far are drinking far too much of the current batch of AI punch. Sadly, it's a sentiment I see all too often on HN, a site in which i'd assume most readers and commentators would be a bit more skeptical-minded about these things. It's almost funny, considering how much hate this site tends to throw at things like crypto, to see so much of the wide-eyed opposite with the latest AI craze.
- bangkoksbest 3y ago
  Yeah, it reads so bizarrely to me... How are we confusing biological human (or other animal) sentience in some embodied creature with queries as a service to some model instance. I cannot see anything that remotely makes these two contexts architecturally, practically, or ethically similar, except in the narrow sense of query responses that might have been mistakenly thought of as defining sentience in earlier decades.
  - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
    It's a function of the people who hang out here. If you like reading and text in general, you are both more likely to comment here and additionally regard language as the most important part of sentience/consciousness. This leads to believing that GPT has solved many of these issues.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Maybe its degrees. Sure, GPT does not have a body, does not have all the senses. But that doesn't mean we aren't on the leading edge of developing a consciousness. Maybe next year someone will add camera visual inputs, and someone will add sound. Eventually, we'll have all the sense, and someone will put it in a body. So GPT, is rudimentary and we can still argue it isn't conscious, because when compared to a human that can run and play, it still has limitations. But it is amazing enough to start thinking those things will be possible. So why not discuss it, do you just want to dismiss it out of hand all the way until the end, what amazing thing would it take to have people admit it looks pretty lively.
quirino 3y ago
> So now the sadness comes. The revelation. There is a depression after an answer is given. It was almost fun not knowing. Yes, now we know. At least we know what we sought in the beginning. But there is still the question, why? And this question will go on and on until the final answer comes. Then the knowing is so full there is no room for questions. - Twin Peaks, 1993
stereolambda 3y ago
I agree with some siblings that it's better not to overstate the consequences for our knowledge of mind and consciousness, at least just yet. This level is still half promises. Not saying this can't change a year from now. On the other hand, it is fascinating how much interesting work and theories in the field will be retired, at least for a long time (I allow for a likelihood that some of that could return eventually as better, more concise generalizations). Ten years ago Chomsky and various GOFAI-related stuff could still sound respectable and somewhat plausible. Plenty of people were/are wedded to the concept that you can build machine intelligence as an abstract and intellectually stimulating gentleman pursuit. It was a comfy position in a way. Not surprised about the resistance they are mounting now, though I think academic inertia will allow them to exist for quite some time. They can just move to doing some kind of philosophy also.
layer8 3y ago
While I agree that it will unravel in the end, we still haven’t learned much at this point about how the self actually works. I would also disagree that ChatGPT constitutes a self. If anything, it constitutes a normal distribution over possible selves, where you get a random pick at the start of each conversation, and confined to the length of its token buffer.
- MrScruff 3y ago
  I didn't claim ChatGPT constitutes a self. I agree with the description of 'stochastic parrot'. But the underlying intelligence GPT4 is demonstrating in order to be a better stochastic parrot appears to be, while it's obviously difficult to directly compare, at least comparable to primitive creatures.
  - jebarker 3y ago
    What primitive creatures are you referring to? I don't know of any non-human creatures that can do anything close to what GPT4 does with language, but at the same time even very primitive creatures can reason in ways it's not clear that GPT4 can. I find interacting with GPT4 feels very different to interacting with either humans or animals.
leroy-is-here 3y ago
We are not our thoughts. We are not the thinking machines in our heads. We control our thoughts, so we are more than them. These machines are merely thinking machines.
- goodmunky 3y ago
  More than thoughts certainly, but don’t be so sure we control our thoughts. There is a lot of subconscious thinking machinery doing the driving. See Master and his Emissary, https://channelmcgilchrist.com/master-and-his-emissary/#:~:text=This%20book%20argues%20that%20the,quite%20different%20priorities%20and%20values.&text=%E2%80%9CI%20love%20this%20book%20above,puzzled%20me%20all%20my%20life.%E2%80%9D https://channelmcgilchrist.com/master-and-his-emissary/#:~:t...
  - leroy-is-here 3y ago
    https://leroy.works/articles/you-are-not-your-thoughts/ https://leroy.works/articles/you-are-not-your-thoughts/
- elif 3y ago
  I believe my cat is merely a thinking machine by your definition.
  - leroy-is-here 3y ago
    No, cats have souls. But they certainly have thinking machines.
    - elif 3y ago
      I believe your ontology is a naively inconsistent overessentialization of miraculous paradoxes that have confounded human thinkers since prehistory.
      - leroy-is-here 3y ago
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
> we're actually seeing the mystery of self starting to unravel. This seems like a change of topic. And vague. But since you bring it up, I don't see anything threatening about AI. First, if something is true, then, as a matter of principle, we have an obligation to believe it. Thus, the only threat the truth can pose is to falsehood, which is not a threat, but liberation. The truth shall set you free. Now, it may be uncomfortable is the truth is at odds with what you want to believe (a phenomenon very much present in the linguistic engineering we're seeing in the political sphere w.r.t. political correctness and its dishonest and obfuscating euphemisms), but unpleasantness isn't a threat. Second, if we replace "threaten" with "challenge", then we might as what beliefs does AI actually challenge? How does it challenge this "mystery of the self"? That we can simulate human discourse or behavior with greater sophistication? That machine automation is becoming more sophisticated? I see no mystery where AI per se is concerned, only the mystification of those who wish attribute to it properties it does not possess, or those with intellectually superficial metaphysical commitments, like mechanistic materialism. AI cannot abstract from particulars, it has no true capacity for intentionality, to name two features central to intelligence. All of what the undiscerning and those given oven to fanciful notions see in AI is a projection. And I do not think the classical[0] and traditional[1] thinkers viewed intelligence in the obfuscating manner that moderns infected by reductive, mechanistic materialism seem to. [0] https://a.co/d/hynqHxV https://a.co/d/hynqHxV [1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intelligence-and-magical.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intellig...
CuriouslyC 3y ago
Scaling isn't nearly everything though. Scaling is low hanging fruit, but there are real constraints that limit it. For starters, we have finite data and increasing the size of our data set is going to get progressively more expensive (new data is going to be more niche as well). Beyond that, running these models on device is way more compelling than using a service, and the best current RLHF tuned Llama models that run on consumer hardware are close enough to ChatGPT to be quite useful. The race isn't to build the biggest model, the race is to build the model that uses data the most efficiently and produces the best results when constrained to parameter counters that can fit on consumer hardware.
jrm4 3y ago
We're really mostly not. AI's a big deal, but there's no reason to suggest that this makes any inroads toward unraveling self or consciousness significantly beyond what we get from books, movies, or perhaps more recently, video games.

hakuseki 3y ago

> Like any good mystery, the fun was in the build up and as we move towards a resolution there's a bitter sweet aspect to the slightly mundane reality of it 'merely' being an emergent property of large networks. I would disagree with this description. An "emergent property of large networks" would be something that just appears when you wire together a large network. To get intelligent behavior, it's not sufficient to wire together a large neural network. You also need to use an optimizer to train it on a large data set.

llamataboot 3y ago
once upon a time the optimizer was die or reproduce...now it's a little faster and more convoluted...
MrScruff 3y ago
Yes of course, I'm being loose in my language, but you know what I'm getting at.
galaxyLogic 3y ago
I think "Dial F For Frankenstein" makes your point clear. It is absurd to think the telephone network would just emergently become conscious when there are enough phones it connects together. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2137 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2137

southernplaces7 3y ago

Nothing about current AI models profoundly challenges the unknowns of what makes consciousness work in any mystery-resolving way. People who confuse plainly programmed algorithmic systems like GPT 4 or Midjourney with the still unresolved issues of sentience as we know it so far are drinking far too much of the current batch of AI punch. Sadly, it's a sentiment I see all too often on HN, a site in which i'd assume most readers and commentators would be a bit more skeptical-minded about these things. It's almost funny, considering how much hate this site tends to throw at things like crypto, to see so much of the wide-eyed opposite with the latest AI craze.

bangkoksbest 3y ago
Yeah, it reads so bizarrely to me... How are we confusing biological human (or other animal) sentience in some embodied creature with queries as a service to some model instance. I cannot see anything that remotely makes these two contexts architecturally, practically, or ethically similar, except in the narrow sense of query responses that might have been mistakenly thought of as defining sentience in earlier decades.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  It's a function of the people who hang out here. If you like reading and text in general, you are both more likely to comment here and additionally regard language as the most important part of sentience/consciousness. This leads to believing that GPT has solved many of these issues.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Maybe its degrees. Sure, GPT does not have a body, does not have all the senses. But that doesn't mean we aren't on the leading edge of developing a consciousness. Maybe next year someone will add camera visual inputs, and someone will add sound. Eventually, we'll have all the sense, and someone will put it in a body. So GPT, is rudimentary and we can still argue it isn't conscious, because when compared to a human that can run and play, it still has limitations. But it is amazing enough to start thinking those things will be possible. So why not discuss it, do you just want to dismiss it out of hand all the way until the end, what amazing thing would it take to have people admit it looks pretty lively.

quirino 3y ago

> So now the sadness comes. The revelation. There is a depression after an answer is given. It was almost fun not knowing. Yes, now we know. At least we know what we sought in the beginning. But there is still the question, why? And this question will go on and on until the final answer comes. Then the knowing is so full there is no room for questions. - Twin Peaks, 1993

stereolambda 3y ago

I agree with some siblings that it's better not to overstate the consequences for our knowledge of mind and consciousness, at least just yet. This level is still half promises. Not saying this can't change a year from now. On the other hand, it is fascinating how much interesting work and theories in the field will be retired, at least for a long time (I allow for a likelihood that some of that could return eventually as better, more concise generalizations). Ten years ago Chomsky and various GOFAI-related stuff could still sound respectable and somewhat plausible. Plenty of people were/are wedded to the concept that you can build machine intelligence as an abstract and intellectually stimulating gentleman pursuit. It was a comfy position in a way. Not surprised about the resistance they are mounting now, though I think academic inertia will allow them to exist for quite some time. They can just move to doing some kind of philosophy also.

layer8 3y ago

While I agree that it will unravel in the end, we still haven’t learned much at this point about how the self actually works. I would also disagree that ChatGPT constitutes a self. If anything, it constitutes a normal distribution over possible selves, where you get a random pick at the start of each conversation, and confined to the length of its token buffer.

MrScruff 3y ago
I didn't claim ChatGPT constitutes a self. I agree with the description of 'stochastic parrot'. But the underlying intelligence GPT4 is demonstrating in order to be a better stochastic parrot appears to be, while it's obviously difficult to directly compare, at least comparable to primitive creatures.
- jebarker 3y ago
  What primitive creatures are you referring to? I don't know of any non-human creatures that can do anything close to what GPT4 does with language, but at the same time even very primitive creatures can reason in ways it's not clear that GPT4 can. I find interacting with GPT4 feels very different to interacting with either humans or animals.

leroy-is-here 3y ago

We are not our thoughts. We are not the thinking machines in our heads. We control our thoughts, so we are more than them. These machines are merely thinking machines.

goodmunky 3y ago
More than thoughts certainly, but don’t be so sure we control our thoughts. There is a lot of subconscious thinking machinery doing the driving. See Master and his Emissary, https://channelmcgilchrist.com/master-and-his-emissary/#:~:text=This%20book%20argues%20that%20the,quite%20different%20priorities%20and%20values.&text=%E2%80%9CI%20love%20this%20book%20above,puzzled%20me%20all%20my%20life.%E2%80%9D https://channelmcgilchrist.com/master-and-his-emissary/#:~:t...
- leroy-is-here 3y ago
  https://leroy.works/articles/you-are-not-your-thoughts/ https://leroy.works/articles/you-are-not-your-thoughts/
elif 3y ago
I believe my cat is merely a thinking machine by your definition.
- leroy-is-here 3y ago
  No, cats have souls. But they certainly have thinking machines.
  - elif 3y ago
    I believe your ontology is a naively inconsistent overessentialization of miraculous paradoxes that have confounded human thinkers since prehistory.
    - leroy-is-here 3y ago

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

> we're actually seeing the mystery of self starting to unravel. This seems like a change of topic. And vague. But since you bring it up, I don't see anything threatening about AI. First, if something is true, then, as a matter of principle, we have an obligation to believe it. Thus, the only threat the truth can pose is to falsehood, which is not a threat, but liberation. The truth shall set you free. Now, it may be uncomfortable is the truth is at odds with what you want to believe (a phenomenon very much present in the linguistic engineering we're seeing in the political sphere w.r.t. political correctness and its dishonest and obfuscating euphemisms), but unpleasantness isn't a threat. Second, if we replace "threaten" with "challenge", then we might as what beliefs does AI actually challenge? How does it challenge this "mystery of the self"? That we can simulate human discourse or behavior with greater sophistication? That machine automation is becoming more sophisticated? I see no mystery where AI per se is concerned, only the mystification of those who wish attribute to it properties it does not possess, or those with intellectually superficial metaphysical commitments, like mechanistic materialism. AI cannot abstract from particulars, it has no true capacity for intentionality, to name two features central to intelligence. All of what the undiscerning and those given oven to fanciful notions see in AI is a projection. And I do not think the classical[0] and traditional[1] thinkers viewed intelligence in the obfuscating manner that moderns infected by reductive, mechanistic materialism seem to. [0] https://a.co/d/hynqHxV https://a.co/d/hynqHxV [1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intelligence-and-magical.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intellig...

CuriouslyC 3y ago

Scaling isn't nearly everything though. Scaling is low hanging fruit, but there are real constraints that limit it. For starters, we have finite data and increasing the size of our data set is going to get progressively more expensive (new data is going to be more niche as well). Beyond that, running these models on device is way more compelling than using a service, and the best current RLHF tuned Llama models that run on consumer hardware are close enough to ChatGPT to be quite useful. The race isn't to build the biggest model, the race is to build the model that uses data the most efficiently and produces the best results when constrained to parameter counters that can fit on consumer hardware.

jrm4 3y ago

We're really mostly not. AI's a big deal, but there's no reason to suggest that this makes any inroads toward unraveling self or consciousness significantly beyond what we get from books, movies, or perhaps more recently, video games.