5 ms·

Agreed. One of the more interesting things about AI is how it forces humanity on a trip to consider what it means to be human. There is no soul, creativity or i

Agreed. One of the more interesting things about AI is how it forces humanity on a trip to consider what it means to be human. There is no soul, creativity or inspiration. There's only (very complex) agency. And that's completely fine.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago
Or you can say the opposite and claim that there is soul, creativity, or inspiration in everything, even in inanimate objects (basically panpsychism, in contrast to materialism). But regardless of what kind of monism you take, the advent of current statistical AI models forces us to reconsider the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, which forms the basis of liberal thought.
- danans 4y ago
  > But regardless of what kind of monism you take, the advent of current statistical AI models forces us to reconsider the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, which forms the basis of liberal thought. Didn't we dispose of Cartesian dualism a long time ago? It may have been useful for disposing of superstitions which preceded it, but anyone who has observed the effects of a stroke or has taken a psychotropics understands that mind and body are not made of separate stuff, and I know of no modern system of thought that stipulates that as an axiom. LLMs just demonstrate that emergent information structures at the complexity of human language need not be only biological.
vimax 4y ago
To me it shows how fundamental language is to intelligence. Not just that LLMs are very capable by themselves, but significantly improve speech and image models. We’ll need to break out of the Chomsky hierarchies and develop some new theories of language. Vocal communication isn’t unique to humans, a new theory should be more broadly applicable to non human and non vocal languages. I’m excited to see what big questions will be answered, and what new questions arise.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >We’ll need to break out of the Chomsky hierarchies and develop some new theories of language. We might need to develop some "new theories of language", covering other areas, but why exactly do you think we'd need to "break out of the Chomsky hierarchies"? Nothing about LLMs challenges Chomsky hierarchies. They do challenge Chomsky's ideas about language being an innate human quality, but that's about it. Besides that's not related to the Chomsky hierarchy of language, e.g. regular, context-free and so on. Those will continue to remain a hierarchy describing languages based on capability levels, whether there's AI, and AGI, or not.
  - vimax 4y ago
    The Chomsky hierarchy will remain unchanged and very useful for constructed languages. I didn't mean break out, as in create a higher level. LLMs are not going to magically become more than a turing machine or anything. I meant we need to stop thinking about spoken language in terms of the hierarchy and try to find another approach. You can't tell me with a straight face that actual spoken language fits well in that hierarchy. It seems we can shoehorn it in with a 100B parameter turing machine definition, but that just makes my point that the constructed language hierarchy is not well suited for describing spoken languages if it takes such a large definition. We should be able to find something like a new probabilistic theory of language that will do a much better job of describing spoken languages. Such a theory could help explain some LLM behaviors we see, and apply generally to other forms of noisy communication.
    - visarga 4y ago
      > 100B parameter ... not well suited for describing spoken languages if it takes such a large definition. Humans by contrast use about 700T synapses to support our own understanding of language.
- visarga 4y ago
  > To me it shows how fundamental language is to intelligence. I believe most human intelligence is based on language. We are smart because language gives us the keys to solving all sorts of situations based on the experience of prior generations. We are wondering if GPT architecture can generate real understanding, but forgetting the training corpus. The language corpus is the real magic here. The source and accumulation point of intelligence. Take a baby and give it access to language, you get a modern human. Take a random init neural net, use language corpus for training, you get GPT4. It doesn't matter what the model is - brain or transformer, it doesn't matter if it's a transformer or just a RNN (RWKV). What matters is the training signal. We should not get so hung up on the model architecture and substrate when thinking about LLM capabilities. Language is a separate evolutionary system of ideas and concepts. It is a self replicator, like DNA. Language just got a new pathway for self replication with LLMs. Every new token visits the whole model and by extension the distillation of our culture before being emitted.
coldtea 4y ago
>There is no soul, creativity or inspiration. There's only (very complex) agency. That's highly debatable. For starters, who said there's no creativity or inspiration in humans, or for that matter, that there can't be in a complex A.I.? How we achieve that creativity or inspiration is irreleant, as long the entity (human or AI) showcases creativity and inspiration. Nor is it much clear why all being "only (a very complex) agency" would preclude creativity and inspiration. That's like a worse version of "a human can't be creative or have feelings because it's all a bunch of molecules". There is such a thing as emergent properties. >And that's completely fine. That's also highly debatable. I mean, that it would be "completely fine" if you were right and there wasn't "creativity of inspiration".
mensetmanusman 4y ago
That’s a weak explanation, because there doesn’t need to be a mind for any of that to be true.
bloaf 4y ago
There are deep philosophical implications, just not these. There has been a long history of reifying the behaviors of living things in general (e.g. vitalism) and humans in particular (e.g. dualism). The success of LLMs challenges a lot of philosophy dealing with what behaviors are and are not possible in the absence of these categorical districtions. I have had casual debates years ago, in which strong dualists asserted that the kind of creativity exhibited by today's LLMs is simply impossible. No doubt those folks are busy inventing "special philosophical creativity" that LLMs "aren't really doing," but they've lost credibility. LLMs have demonstrated that there was never any need to invoke categorical districtions between human behavior and math-as-implemented-by-physics. The gap is closed, there is no more room for gods.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  We are the gods now. https://youtu.be/ygRNEy8mPjk https://youtu.be/ygRNEy8mPjk Or maybe we will create a god.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago

Or you can say the opposite and claim that there is soul, creativity, or inspiration in everything, even in inanimate objects (basically panpsychism, in contrast to materialism). But regardless of what kind of monism you take, the advent of current statistical AI models forces us to reconsider the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, which forms the basis of liberal thought.

danans 4y ago
> But regardless of what kind of monism you take, the advent of current statistical AI models forces us to reconsider the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, which forms the basis of liberal thought. Didn't we dispose of Cartesian dualism a long time ago? It may have been useful for disposing of superstitions which preceded it, but anyone who has observed the effects of a stroke or has taken a psychotropics understands that mind and body are not made of separate stuff, and I know of no modern system of thought that stipulates that as an axiom. LLMs just demonstrate that emergent information structures at the complexity of human language need not be only biological.

vimax 4y ago

To me it shows how fundamental language is to intelligence. Not just that LLMs are very capable by themselves, but significantly improve speech and image models. We’ll need to break out of the Chomsky hierarchies and develop some new theories of language. Vocal communication isn’t unique to humans, a new theory should be more broadly applicable to non human and non vocal languages. I’m excited to see what big questions will be answered, and what new questions arise.

coldtea 4y ago
>We’ll need to break out of the Chomsky hierarchies and develop some new theories of language. We might need to develop some "new theories of language", covering other areas, but why exactly do you think we'd need to "break out of the Chomsky hierarchies"? Nothing about LLMs challenges Chomsky hierarchies. They do challenge Chomsky's ideas about language being an innate human quality, but that's about it. Besides that's not related to the Chomsky hierarchy of language, e.g. regular, context-free and so on. Those will continue to remain a hierarchy describing languages based on capability levels, whether there's AI, and AGI, or not.
- vimax 4y ago
  The Chomsky hierarchy will remain unchanged and very useful for constructed languages. I didn't mean break out, as in create a higher level. LLMs are not going to magically become more than a turing machine or anything. I meant we need to stop thinking about spoken language in terms of the hierarchy and try to find another approach. You can't tell me with a straight face that actual spoken language fits well in that hierarchy. It seems we can shoehorn it in with a 100B parameter turing machine definition, but that just makes my point that the constructed language hierarchy is not well suited for describing spoken languages if it takes such a large definition. We should be able to find something like a new probabilistic theory of language that will do a much better job of describing spoken languages. Such a theory could help explain some LLM behaviors we see, and apply generally to other forms of noisy communication.
  - visarga 4y ago
    > 100B parameter ... not well suited for describing spoken languages if it takes such a large definition. Humans by contrast use about 700T synapses to support our own understanding of language.
visarga 4y ago
> To me it shows how fundamental language is to intelligence. I believe most human intelligence is based on language. We are smart because language gives us the keys to solving all sorts of situations based on the experience of prior generations. We are wondering if GPT architecture can generate real understanding, but forgetting the training corpus. The language corpus is the real magic here. The source and accumulation point of intelligence. Take a baby and give it access to language, you get a modern human. Take a random init neural net, use language corpus for training, you get GPT4. It doesn't matter what the model is - brain or transformer, it doesn't matter if it's a transformer or just a RNN (RWKV). What matters is the training signal. We should not get so hung up on the model architecture and substrate when thinking about LLM capabilities. Language is a separate evolutionary system of ideas and concepts. It is a self replicator, like DNA. Language just got a new pathway for self replication with LLMs. Every new token visits the whole model and by extension the distillation of our culture before being emitted.

coldtea 4y ago

>There is no soul, creativity or inspiration. There's only (very complex) agency. That's highly debatable. For starters, who said there's no creativity or inspiration in humans, or for that matter, that there can't be in a complex A.I.? How we achieve that creativity or inspiration is irreleant, as long the entity (human or AI) showcases creativity and inspiration. Nor is it much clear why all being "only (a very complex) agency" would preclude creativity and inspiration. That's like a worse version of "a human can't be creative or have feelings because it's all a bunch of molecules". There is such a thing as emergent properties. >And that's completely fine. That's also highly debatable. I mean, that it would be "completely fine" if you were right and there wasn't "creativity of inspiration".

mensetmanusman 4y ago

That’s a weak explanation, because there doesn’t need to be a mind for any of that to be true.

bloaf 4y ago

There are deep philosophical implications, just not these. There has been a long history of reifying the behaviors of living things in general (e.g. vitalism) and humans in particular (e.g. dualism). The success of LLMs challenges a lot of philosophy dealing with what behaviors are and are not possible in the absence of these categorical districtions. I have had casual debates years ago, in which strong dualists asserted that the kind of creativity exhibited by today's LLMs is simply impossible. No doubt those folks are busy inventing "special philosophical creativity" that LLMs "aren't really doing," but they've lost credibility. LLMs have demonstrated that there was never any need to invoke categorical districtions between human behavior and math-as-implemented-by-physics. The gap is closed, there is no more room for gods.

Robotbeat 4y ago
We are the gods now. https://youtu.be/ygRNEy8mPjk https://youtu.be/ygRNEy8mPjk Or maybe we will create a god.