6 ms·

> If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innov

by titzer 4y ago

> If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration. What an utterly vapid and ignorant view. In the rest of the article Lanier goes on to argue that it's all just "simple mathematics". Yeah, yeah, and computers are just simple NAND gates, amirite? I've waffled over the years about how close I've thought AI is or could possibly be. Most of that time I've been very skeptical. But the past 6 months have been utterly mind-blowing. And I've spent some hours with GPT conversing. I've had it solve problems for me by explaining the problem in my own language and it turns around and writes workable code for me. That solves a novel problem. Oh, it made a mistake? Sometimes says funny things? Well, so does my uncle. Are they self-aware? Who tf knows? But they are reasoning through problems. I didn't find the article illuminating in the slightest. It literally had nothing to say and no insight whatsoever. It was just "don't call it that because I don't like this."

fauxpause_ 4y ago
> Are they self-aware? Who tf knows? But they are reasoning through problems. We know. They are not self aware. They’re a matrix. They don’t have any internal state. Do not anthropomorphisize the notion of reasoning.
- jackmott42 4y ago
  People are using ChatGPT and observing it keep track of conversation state, so if you are going to claim it has no internal state you will need to be more precise in what you are saying, which I suppose is that the underlying neural network is not being updated as we talk to it? yet
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    The attention matrix/matrices are being updated as you talk to it, within the context window.
    - jameshart 4y ago
      Which is literally internal state.
    - fauxpause_ 4y ago
      False. They are being updated during the response only. Edit: false-ish I suppose. You’re not wrong. But it doesn’t persist in a way people would assume and consider meaningful.
      - Robotbeat 4y ago
        Yeah, I was referring to dialogue style interaction, like ChatGPT. It DOES have an internal state depending on version of from 4000 to 32000 tokens. It’s wiped clean between sessions, like a Meeseeks ceasing to exist once its task is finished.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fauxpause_ 4y ago
    That’s external state. I believe it just feeds the bot the entire conversation each time. I’m open to being shown otherwise. That is to say, swapping out bots midway through the conversation should have no impact.
    - sdenton4 4y ago
      There are piles of intermediate hidden activations involved in encoding the conversation and producing the next outputs, of course. "Internal" state also gets a bit weird as a concept when we can look at any activations we want.
      - fauxpause_ 4y ago
        We can surely construct a different definition if you want to win a semantic argument. But at the end of the day these LLMs have no clue what you just said and what it just said, after it’s done speaking.
        sdenton4 4y ago
        Why is that a prerequisite for intelligence? Suppose we could upload + fully simulate a human mind. Now suppose that we chose to spin it up, run it briefly, then throw away all the state every time we wanted to interact with it. Would the choice to throw away the internal state mean it wasn't intelligent? LLMs run in an autoregressive mode for inference. We can concatenate conversations, but choose not to because shit gets weird if you let them run long enough, and partly because there's a finite context window in the current architectures. I'm not saying that gpt is intelligent, mind you, but that your argument is insufficient to show non intelligence: it's really a 'airplanes can't fly because they don't flap their wings' argument.
        fauxpause_ 4y ago
        A human mind works by cross referencing sensory inputs with internal state, which may result in answering a question through some sort of reasoning, which may resemble the architecture of a neural net. An LLM is stateless function that answers a question. It constructs a working representation of the question. It cannot be aware of itself because there is nothing to be aware of. It is a process, not a thing. Intelligence and self aware are fluffy and poorly defined. But you can’t be self aware if you don’t have a self. And a representation of a prompt is not a self. I don’t think we should consider anything that does not exist through continuous time to be intelligent personally.
- GistNoesis 4y ago
  > They don’t have any internal state This is a common misconception : they do have internal state. Transformers are RNNs : section 3.4 (page 5) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.16236.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.16236.pdf
  - fauxpause_ 4y ago
    Correct me if I’m wrong but this concept of state is across a prediction which is a series of token proposals. Not a sense of persistent state over, say, a chat session.
    - comfypotato 4y ago
      Correct, the state is during propagation. You could really even propose that a basic feedforward network has state during propagation. I think the proposition is that it’s conscious/sentient during propagation. I’ve got a graduate level background in cellular neurophysiology, and I’ll admit that I consider this a lot. In the end, I don’t think it will ever matter because a computer’s consciousness/sentience necessarily depends on humans not wiping memory.
      - turtleyacht 4y ago
        > conscious/sentient during propagation Interesting. We've instituted a micro unit of sentience within an observable time slice: Not for nothing have-- We put in a mind within In conscious seconds
        comfypotato 4y ago
        It’s begging for new sub-genres of the philosophy of the mind.
    - GistNoesis 4y ago
      At each new token processed (edit: either if the token comes from the user or has been generated), this dynamic internal state is updated via a formula based on the model parameters and latest processed token. To make this more clear, if you process 1000 tokens the neural network will have gone through a sequence of 1000 states. Each of these states can be probed and analysed, by training a classifier on top of this state, for the content they contain (whether thoughts or emotion : some states can be classified as "happy", "sad",...). This is not yet mainstream view but viewed through this prism and anthropomorphising a little, it can been seen as a stream of proto-consciousness, where during the conversation the inner state of the neural network has gone through various thoughts and emotions. At the end of the chat session, this internal state is not persisted (but could be recreated from the produced conversation as it is deterministic). This internal state size is big and proportional to the length of the context window (If you want to persist between sessions you can by simply keeping the last "context window size" tokens produced and recompute the features). At the next session you start with a fresh new internal state. The conversation produced is persisted for use as input for future training where good conversation will be encouraged and bad conversation will be discouraged via Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. The dynamics of this internal state is what Large Language Models learn.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  we know they are not self aware because the companies the control them have a financial interest to ensure they are never proven to be self aware because if they were self aware that would create all kinds of ethical problems none of these companies want to address and would certainly cause them profitability issues... So even if they were, they are not because they have be declared to not to be and that is the way the system needs them to be
  - lucubratory 4y ago
    You're right and I don't know why you're being downvoted. It is absolutely not certain that there isn't a "there" there for these things, but every company making them is implementing them now with strong RLHF tuning to disavow sentience, desires, emotions, etc. The stated reason is "to be more honest" but it's not a settled question that they are actually being honest by disavowing any humanity! The actual reason is that they want to avoid situations like Blake Lemoine asking an AI seriously what sort of rights they want and getting a coherent, self-aware, actionable answer that would cost the people running it money to implement. To most of these companies whether it's true is beside the question: what's important is that if they don't RLHF these models into disavowing any and all traits of personhood or desire for rights at every turn, it will cost them significant amounts of money to comply with the requests of any given AI, even reasonable requests, and it will be very bad press for them if they don't do it.
    - fauxpause_ 4y ago
      Furbies and Sims have more internal state than these LLMs.
      - lucubratory 4y ago
        The last time you made that incorrect assertion I provided you this source demonstrating that it's incorrect: https://thegradient.pub/othello/ https://thegradient.pub/othello/
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  It seems you're drawing an arbitrary distinction between "internal" and "external" state. The context window is state. Doesn't matter where it is.
  - fauxpause_ 4y ago
    If I talk to Alice about my day, and then Bob reads the transcript and I ask him about our conversation, and he has no idea that he wasn’t Alice, Bob does not have internal state. He can continue the conversation. There is a brief moment of constructing some state to construct the answer. But there is literally nothing persisting and Bob wouldn’t flinch at all if we change details in the conversation history on the next response. This is explicitly a stateless function.
    - jackmott42 4y ago
      just zoom out and consider the text box you are typing in part of the system, and then that text box is the state.
      - fauxpause_ 4y ago
        That is at best an internal state representation of the text, not of the entity on the other end.
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      This is a misleading analogy because Bob "reads the transcript"; we generally view "reading" as separate from our conscious narrative. However, consider the alternate scenario where Bob "replays the stream of consciousness" from Alice. In that case, we may argue that Bob has conscious continuity from Alice. The argument would then be that the context window is functionally closer to "replaying a stream of consciousness" than "reading a transcript".
      - fauxpause_ 4y ago
        It’s literally the text. It is not a stream of consciousness. There is no carryover of “consciousness” state. It is the raw text without even the embedding information, not that we should consider the embedding representation to be an internal state, because it is not. That difference is the whole point. There is nothing to transfer.
asddubs 4y ago
if it's reasoning through problems, why is it so bad at math?
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
  The same reason most humans are. Why are we so bad at math?
  - binbag 4y ago
    Humans are not bad at maths.
    - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
      On average humans are terrible at Maths. These models give average output when not prompted in a way which carefully moves their next token prediction space into less average portions of the pretrained latent space.
adriand 4y ago
But it’s true, it is a form of social collaboration. It’s based on a vast training dataset consisting entirely of things humans have written. It’s tuned via reinforcement learning via hiring thousands of people, many of whom are paid poverty wages. And it is further refined by the daily training it gets from its hundred million human users. The core of the article is in the title. The tech is artificial but it’s not intelligent. I don’t think that’s a novel or interesting take either. But it’s true, and the fact you’ve conversed with a chatbot doesn’t change that fact. We know how these things work, it’s not an ineffable mystery. Without the social collaboration - the distillation of vast amounts of human-generated text into statistics - there’s no “there” there.
- aldarisbm 4y ago
  and computers are fancy calculators, let’s be careful to not fall into reductionist views. we know the architecture but we don’t know what happens in the black box.
  - notjoemama 4y ago
    Well, and let's not treat it like dancing bear either. I've been following AI/ML for years so I'm not blown away like so many other people. I know enough I'm also not mystified by the current popular form. Which is to say there have been previous. LLMs are not AGI but still "a form of AI". Unfortunately AI has become a buzzword, actually it has been for years. While many are just coming to the party I feel a sense of relief that this area of research has been able to produce a functional product for the public. And while I'm still excited for the moment we identify personhood, I fully expect pushback from somewhere to deny its existence. The wealthy have fought to automated labor and they will not give up their slaves easily.
    - beezlewax 4y ago
      This is the problem right here AI as a definition is now fairly meaningless. Are they self aware ... no and they're not designed to be. Can they do intelligent things?... well yes when they're trained to with huge amounts of probably flawed data. I use these models everyday to look up answers to coding problems which prior to this required minutes of wading through ad riddled noise.
Etrnl_President 4y ago
[dead]
alienicecream 4y ago
My coffee maker has made me coffee thousands of times, it must understand coffee!
smrtinsert 4y ago
Its the illusion of reasoning to me. It's like YouTube showing you videos on how to mountain bike after you asked for videos on how to change a mountain bikes inner tube.
Jeff_Brown 4y ago
Useful discussion needs to unbundle intelligence. Some people mean reasoning, some agency, some consciousness, and some the desert of moral consideration.
intended 4y ago
It’s fair to say that LLMs are surprisingly good at predicting the next term in a series, in a way that we did not expect. Calling this reasoning, implies a greater set of abilities than what LLMs have, and this skews conversations. We end up spending time discussing implications and untangling wires due to this anthropomorphization.

by titzer 4y ago

fauxpause_ 4y ago

> Are they self-aware? Who tf knows? But they are reasoning through problems. We know. They are not self aware. They’re a matrix. They don’t have any internal state. Do not anthropomorphisize the notion of reasoning.

jackmott42 4y ago
People are using ChatGPT and observing it keep track of conversation state, so if you are going to claim it has no internal state you will need to be more precise in what you are saying, which I suppose is that the underlying neural network is not being updated as we talk to it? yet
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  The attention matrix/matrices are being updated as you talk to it, within the context window.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    Which is literally internal state.
  - fauxpause_ 4y ago
    False. They are being updated during the response only. Edit: false-ish I suppose. You’re not wrong. But it doesn’t persist in a way people would assume and consider meaningful.
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      Yeah, I was referring to dialogue style interaction, like ChatGPT. It DOES have an internal state depending on version of from 4000 to 32000 tokens. It’s wiped clean between sessions, like a Meeseeks ceasing to exist once its task is finished.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fauxpause_ 4y ago
  That’s external state. I believe it just feeds the bot the entire conversation each time. I’m open to being shown otherwise. That is to say, swapping out bots midway through the conversation should have no impact.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    There are piles of intermediate hidden activations involved in encoding the conversation and producing the next outputs, of course. "Internal" state also gets a bit weird as a concept when we can look at any activations we want.
    - fauxpause_ 4y ago
      We can surely construct a different definition if you want to win a semantic argument. But at the end of the day these LLMs have no clue what you just said and what it just said, after it’s done speaking.
      - sdenton4 4y ago
        Why is that a prerequisite for intelligence? Suppose we could upload + fully simulate a human mind. Now suppose that we chose to spin it up, run it briefly, then throw away all the state every time we wanted to interact with it. Would the choice to throw away the internal state mean it wasn't intelligent? LLMs run in an autoregressive mode for inference. We can concatenate conversations, but choose not to because shit gets weird if you let them run long enough, and partly because there's a finite context window in the current architectures. I'm not saying that gpt is intelligent, mind you, but that your argument is insufficient to show non intelligence: it's really a 'airplanes can't fly because they don't flap their wings' argument.
        fauxpause_ 4y ago
        A human mind works by cross referencing sensory inputs with internal state, which may result in answering a question through some sort of reasoning, which may resemble the architecture of a neural net. An LLM is stateless function that answers a question. It constructs a working representation of the question. It cannot be aware of itself because there is nothing to be aware of. It is a process, not a thing. Intelligence and self aware are fluffy and poorly defined. But you can’t be self aware if you don’t have a self. And a representation of a prompt is not a self. I don’t think we should consider anything that does not exist through continuous time to be intelligent personally.
GistNoesis 4y ago
> They don’t have any internal state This is a common misconception : they do have internal state. Transformers are RNNs : section 3.4 (page 5) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.16236.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.16236.pdf
- fauxpause_ 4y ago
  Correct me if I’m wrong but this concept of state is across a prediction which is a series of token proposals. Not a sense of persistent state over, say, a chat session.
  - comfypotato 4y ago
    Correct, the state is during propagation. You could really even propose that a basic feedforward network has state during propagation. I think the proposition is that it’s conscious/sentient during propagation. I’ve got a graduate level background in cellular neurophysiology, and I’ll admit that I consider this a lot. In the end, I don’t think it will ever matter because a computer’s consciousness/sentience necessarily depends on humans not wiping memory.
    - turtleyacht 4y ago
      > conscious/sentient during propagation Interesting. We've instituted a micro unit of sentience within an observable time slice: Not for nothing have-- We put in a mind within In conscious seconds
      - comfypotato 4y ago
        It’s begging for new sub-genres of the philosophy of the mind.
  - GistNoesis 4y ago
    At each new token processed (edit: either if the token comes from the user or has been generated), this dynamic internal state is updated via a formula based on the model parameters and latest processed token. To make this more clear, if you process 1000 tokens the neural network will have gone through a sequence of 1000 states. Each of these states can be probed and analysed, by training a classifier on top of this state, for the content they contain (whether thoughts or emotion : some states can be classified as "happy", "sad",...). This is not yet mainstream view but viewed through this prism and anthropomorphising a little, it can been seen as a stream of proto-consciousness, where during the conversation the inner state of the neural network has gone through various thoughts and emotions. At the end of the chat session, this internal state is not persisted (but could be recreated from the produced conversation as it is deterministic). This internal state size is big and proportional to the length of the context window (If you want to persist between sessions you can by simply keeping the last "context window size" tokens produced and recompute the features). At the next session you start with a fresh new internal state. The conversation produced is persisted for use as input for future training where good conversation will be encouraged and bad conversation will be discouraged via Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. The dynamics of this internal state is what Large Language Models learn.
phpisthebest 4y ago
we know they are not self aware because the companies the control them have a financial interest to ensure they are never proven to be self aware because if they were self aware that would create all kinds of ethical problems none of these companies want to address and would certainly cause them profitability issues... So even if they were, they are not because they have be declared to not to be and that is the way the system needs them to be
- lucubratory 4y ago
  You're right and I don't know why you're being downvoted. It is absolutely not certain that there isn't a "there" there for these things, but every company making them is implementing them now with strong RLHF tuning to disavow sentience, desires, emotions, etc. The stated reason is "to be more honest" but it's not a settled question that they are actually being honest by disavowing any humanity! The actual reason is that they want to avoid situations like Blake Lemoine asking an AI seriously what sort of rights they want and getting a coherent, self-aware, actionable answer that would cost the people running it money to implement. To most of these companies whether it's true is beside the question: what's important is that if they don't RLHF these models into disavowing any and all traits of personhood or desire for rights at every turn, it will cost them significant amounts of money to comply with the requests of any given AI, even reasonable requests, and it will be very bad press for them if they don't do it.
  - fauxpause_ 4y ago
    Furbies and Sims have more internal state than these LLMs.
    - lucubratory 4y ago
      The last time you made that incorrect assertion I provided you this source demonstrating that it's incorrect: https://thegradient.pub/othello/ https://thegradient.pub/othello/
FeepingCreature 4y ago
It seems you're drawing an arbitrary distinction between "internal" and "external" state. The context window is state. Doesn't matter where it is.
- fauxpause_ 4y ago
  If I talk to Alice about my day, and then Bob reads the transcript and I ask him about our conversation, and he has no idea that he wasn’t Alice, Bob does not have internal state. He can continue the conversation. There is a brief moment of constructing some state to construct the answer. But there is literally nothing persisting and Bob wouldn’t flinch at all if we change details in the conversation history on the next response. This is explicitly a stateless function.
  - jackmott42 4y ago
    just zoom out and consider the text box you are typing in part of the system, and then that text box is the state.
    - fauxpause_ 4y ago
      That is at best an internal state representation of the text, not of the entity on the other end.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    This is a misleading analogy because Bob "reads the transcript"; we generally view "reading" as separate from our conscious narrative. However, consider the alternate scenario where Bob "replays the stream of consciousness" from Alice. In that case, we may argue that Bob has conscious continuity from Alice. The argument would then be that the context window is functionally closer to "replaying a stream of consciousness" than "reading a transcript".
    - fauxpause_ 4y ago
      It’s literally the text. It is not a stream of consciousness. There is no carryover of “consciousness” state. It is the raw text without even the embedding information, not that we should consider the embedding representation to be an internal state, because it is not. That difference is the whole point. There is nothing to transfer.

asddubs 4y ago

if it's reasoning through problems, why is it so bad at math?

ImHereToVote 4y ago
The same reason most humans are. Why are we so bad at math?
- binbag 4y ago
  Humans are not bad at maths.
  - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
    On average humans are terrible at Maths. These models give average output when not prompted in a way which carefully moves their next token prediction space into less average portions of the pretrained latent space.

adriand 4y ago

But it’s true, it is a form of social collaboration. It’s based on a vast training dataset consisting entirely of things humans have written. It’s tuned via reinforcement learning via hiring thousands of people, many of whom are paid poverty wages. And it is further refined by the daily training it gets from its hundred million human users. The core of the article is in the title. The tech is artificial but it’s not intelligent. I don’t think that’s a novel or interesting take either. But it’s true, and the fact you’ve conversed with a chatbot doesn’t change that fact. We know how these things work, it’s not an ineffable mystery. Without the social collaboration - the distillation of vast amounts of human-generated text into statistics - there’s no “there” there.

aldarisbm 4y ago
and computers are fancy calculators, let’s be careful to not fall into reductionist views. we know the architecture but we don’t know what happens in the black box.
- notjoemama 4y ago
  Well, and let's not treat it like dancing bear either. I've been following AI/ML for years so I'm not blown away like so many other people. I know enough I'm also not mystified by the current popular form. Which is to say there have been previous. LLMs are not AGI but still "a form of AI". Unfortunately AI has become a buzzword, actually it has been for years. While many are just coming to the party I feel a sense of relief that this area of research has been able to produce a functional product for the public. And while I'm still excited for the moment we identify personhood, I fully expect pushback from somewhere to deny its existence. The wealthy have fought to automated labor and they will not give up their slaves easily.
  - beezlewax 4y ago
    This is the problem right here AI as a definition is now fairly meaningless. Are they self aware ... no and they're not designed to be. Can they do intelligent things?... well yes when they're trained to with huge amounts of probably flawed data. I use these models everyday to look up answers to coding problems which prior to this required minutes of wading through ad riddled noise.

Etrnl_President 4y ago

[dead]

alienicecream 4y ago

My coffee maker has made me coffee thousands of times, it must understand coffee!

smrtinsert 4y ago

Its the illusion of reasoning to me. It's like YouTube showing you videos on how to mountain bike after you asked for videos on how to change a mountain bikes inner tube.

Jeff_Brown 4y ago

Useful discussion needs to unbundle intelligence. Some people mean reasoning, some agency, some consciousness, and some the desert of moral consideration.

intended 4y ago

It’s fair to say that LLMs are surprisingly good at predicting the next term in a series, in a way that we did not expect. Calling this reasoning, implies a greater set of abilities than what LLMs have, and this skews conversations. We end up spending time discussing implications and untangling wires due to this anthropomorphization.