12 ms·

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” said Hinton to the NYT. “But most people thought it was way off.

by neatze 3y ago

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” said Hinton to the NYT. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.” Calculators are smarter then humans in calculating, what does he mean by that?

DalasNoin 3y ago
[flagged]
renewiltord 3y ago
Sibling comment is correct to prompt you to at least try an LLM first. It's unfortunately the equivalent of lmgtfy.com but it's true.
- neatze 3y ago
  What makes you think I did not try, simply fail to see why/how natural language inconstant comprehension in any way equates to human or any other animal behavior, I simply don't believe/see (subjectively) that any potential of prompt hacking with massive datasets will build consistent anticipatory system (planning and some aspect of learning). As analogy, the more I look at it, the more it looks like an geocentric model of solar system.
drcode 3y ago
I think GPT4 can converse on any subject at all as well as a (let's say) 80 IQ human. On some subjects it can converse much better. That feels fundamentally different than a calculator.
- skepticATX 3y ago
  GPT-4 is absolutely more generally knowledgeable than any individual person. Individual humans can still easily beat it when it comes to knowledge of individual subjects. Let’s not conflate knowledge with intelligence though. GPT-4 simply isn’t intelligent.
  - MichaelBosworth 3y ago
    Would be curious to hear an elaboration on this perspective. In your opinion, on which measures of intelligence would GPT-4 fail to out-perform a human with an IQ of 80? Conversely, on which measures do you imagine it would succeed at doing so? Are the latter less significant or valid than the former?
    - reso 3y ago
      Humans handily outperform GPT4 handily on the task of "write a random string of length [x]" for any x > ~25.
      - pclmulqdq 3y ago
        They have a specific device to do that now. I have tried to say "write a random sentence with 6 words and 2 numbers" and it completely fails, but it can do the straightforward "write a random [x] of length [y]."
      - verbify 3y ago
        I got "Here is a random string of 32 characters: a8Jk5pYr0Dm9Nc1Vz8Qf2Bt6Hg3Lw4Uo"
        reso 3y ago
        Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s good at 32 because it’s a power of 2. I’ve tested this with a wide variety of number inputs and it’s performance is highly variable. Error also increases linearly with strong length.
      - olddustytrail 3y ago
        If you asked most people to perform that task, they literally wouldn't have a clue what you'd just asked them to do.
      - ux-app 3y ago
        a 4 year old would fail at this task. does a 4 year old have intelligence?
- staticman2 3y ago
  Do you frequently talk to people who you know to have an 80 IQ about a range of subjects?
  - Kranar 3y ago
    Statistically, about 16% of the time.
    - staticman2 3y ago
      You entirely missed my point When you speak to someone with an 80 IQ do they introduce themselves by saying "Hello I have an 80 IQ, nice to meet you." So that, like the person I responded to above, you can compare their conversation skills to the ChatGPT4 conversation skills?
      - Kranar 3y ago
        First off, you wouldn't need to do that specifically. You'd only need to know that most of the people you talk to are above an 80 IQ on any given topic, in fact most people are about a 100 IQ on any given topic. So you already have a reasonable baseline for comparison. Secondly, I'd say you're likely the one missing OPs point by trying to take a mostly colloquial statement about how ChatGPT is about as informed as the bottomish X% of the population on any given topic and trying to be pedantic about it. Furthermore the real purpose of OPs point is that the X% is now a lower bound, even if X isn't 16% but 5%, it's only going to go up from here. Yes there's evidence of diminishing returns with the current architectures but there's also a lot of room for growth with newer architectures or multimodal modals. I think most people understand OPs point without having the need to go around asking everyone what their IQ is. There are numerous indicators, both formal and informal, that indicate that ChatGPT is as informed on most any given topic as the bottom 16% of the population. In fact, it's likely much much higher than that.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 3y ago
- titzer 3y ago
  I feel like lost in this conversation is that ChatGPT is incredibly good at writing English. It basically never makes grammatical mistakes, it doesn't spew gibberish, and for the most part has extremely well-structured replies. The replies might be bullshit or hallucinations, but it's not gibberish. It's kind of breathtaking that we forgot about that being hard. The goalposts are moving again. BTW, it has passed many standardized tests under the same circumstances as a human.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > BTW, it has passed many standardized tests under the same circumstances as a human. No, it hasn’t, and it is physically impossible for it to. The extent to which the differences are material may be debatable, but this claim is simply false.
    - cjbprime 3y ago
      It would be a useful contribution to explain what you think the material differences are, rather than referencing them through innuendo, as if anyone knows what you mean.
      - jrk 3y ago
        I am not the original poster, but I assumed they meant as an embodied entity, interacting in the physical world.
    - bbor 3y ago
      Technically no two sets of circumstances can EVER be the same ;). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus#Panta_rhei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus#Panta_rhei
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Some of the replies are gibberish, especially once you get into technical subjects that it has very little training data on. It kitbashes words together that actually mean nothing, which is no surprise given that it's an LLM.
- byyy 3y ago
  Of course it does. He knows it. Some people just can't bring himself to stare at the reality of it all.
- SanderNL 3y ago
  I'm curious if you actually ever interacted with IQ 80 humans. They are definitely not on this scale.
mitthrowaway2 3y ago
> Calculators are smarter then humans in calculating, what does he mean by that? My understanding of what he means by that is a computer that is smarter than humans in everything, or nearly everything.
JeremyNT 3y ago
This quote is the first thing I've seen that really makes me worried. I don't think of ChatGPT as being "smart" at all, and comparing it to a human seems nonsensical to me. Yet here is a Turing award winning preeminent expert in the field telling me that AI smarter than humans is less (implied: much less) than 30 years away and quitting his job due to the ramifications.
- Version467 3y ago
  He is far from the only one. If you're interested in exploring this further I can really recommend taking a look at some of the papers that explore GPT-4's capabilities. Most prominent among them are the "Sparks of AGI" paper from Microsoft, as well as the technical report from openai. Both of them are obviously to be taken with a grain of salt, but they serve as a pretty good jumping off point. There are some pretty good Videos on Youtube exploring these papers if you don't want to read them yourself. Also take a look at the stuff that Rob Miles has published over on Computerphile, as well as his own channel. He's an Alignment Researcher with a knack for explaining. He covers not just the theoretical dangers, but also real examples of misaligned ai, that alignment researchers have predicted would occur as capabilities grow. Also I think it's important to mention that just a short while ago virtually no-one thought that shoving more layers into an llm would be enough to reach AGI. It's still unclear that it will get us all the way there, but recent developments have made a lot of ai researchers rethink that possibility, with many of them significantly shortening their own estimates as to when and how we will get there. It's very unusual that the people that are better informed and closer to the research are more worried than the rest of the world and it's worth keeping this in mind as you explore the topic.
  - defgeneric 3y ago
    > Also I think it's important to mention that just a short while ago virtually no-one thought that shoving more layers into an llm would be enough to reach AGI. This was basically the strategy of the OpenAI team if I understand them correctly. Most researchers in the field looked down on LLMs and it was a big surprise when they turned out to perform so well. It also seems to be the reason the big players are playing catch up right now.
chrsjxn 3y ago
That statement seems like such science fiction that it's kind of baffling an AI expert said it. What does it even mean for the AI to be smarter than people? I certainly can't see a way for LLMs to generate "smarter" text than what's in their training data. And even the best case interactions I've seen online still rely on human intelligence to guide the AI to good outcomes instead of bad ones. Writing is a harder task to automate than calculation, but the calculator example seems pretty apt.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
  > I certainly can't see a way for LLMs to generate "smarter" text than what's in their training data. Their training data contains much more knowledge than any single human has ever had, though. If they had equivalent linguistic, understanding and reasoning abilities to a human, but with so much stored knowledge, and considering that they also win in processing speed and never get tired, that would already make them much "smarter" than humans. Not to mention that LLMs are just the current state of the art. We don't know if there will be another breakthrough which will counter the limitation you are mentioning. We do know that AI breakthroughs are relatively common lately.
  - chrsjxn 3y ago
    So much of this is going to hinge on what "smarter" means. My local library has heaps more knowledge than most individual people, but it'd be weird to call it "smarter" than a person. And automation is generally cheaper and faster than human labor, but that's not a very compelling definition of "smarter" either. But, as of right now, LLMs can't generate new knowledge or validate their own outputs. We'll need a pretty significant breakthrough for that to change, and breakthroughs are pretty unpredictable.
    - ux-app 3y ago
      >But, as of right now, LLMs can't generate new knowledge my bar for tech singularity is an AI that can clean a toilet. GPT's language model is already sophisticated enough to "understand" this instruction. It's missing spatial understanding and a way to interact with the real world, but I'd be honestly very surprised if there isn't a GPT or equivalent already hooked up to cameras/motors/actuators in a lab somewhere. within our lifetimes we'll be reading papers with titles like: "does my roomba have feelings?"
Mike_12345 3y ago
> Calculators are smarter then humans in calculating, what does he mean by that? He means AGI.
theptip 3y ago
Calculators are not smarter than humans. Don’t be obtuse. He means the same thing anyone means when they say something like “Alice is smarter than Bob”.
- byyy 3y ago
  It's quite obvious that these LLMs are approaching and encroaching on human intelligence. It's so strange to see people continuously be in denial. They clearly aren't fully there yet but two things must be noted: 1. At times and in certain instances LLMs do produce superior output to humans. 2. There is a clear trendline of improvement in AI for the past decade. From voice recognition in Alexa to Dall-E to chatGPT. The logical projection of this trendline points to an inescapble and likely possibility that if AI is not superior now it will be in the future. There is a huge irrational denial of the above logical deduction. I think it's because chatGPT hit us in a way that was too sudden. It's like if I saw a flying saucer and I told you I saw it, your first reaction is disbelief even if I produce logical evidence for it. I mean the GP you replied to knows what the guy is talking about, but he just doesn't want to admit it.
  - theptip 3y ago
    Agreed. There is a phenomenon that I haven’t found a good name for, which I first observed in self-driving cars: “AI made a mistake that only a really dumb human could make, therefore AI is really dumb”. If you imagine the spider chart of capabilities, it’s certain that AI will be super-human on average before it is super-human on each dimension, so even when it can replace 50% of current jobs it’s likely to have its own “cognitive biases” that seem dumb to us. I think this is a cognitive bias on our part (pattern matching instead of properly probability-weighting, maybe the conjunctive fallacy). I regret the snark in my post but I find the “pretend not to understand someone’s clear point” rhetorical device obnoxious. I am aware of a few reasonable arguments against Hinton’s position (I don’t happen to agree with them), but they require more finesse to construct.
gdiamos 3y ago
These results are predicted by LLM Scaling Laws and the GPT authors knew it before they started.
- hipjiveguy 3y ago
  where are these laws?

by neatze 3y ago

DalasNoin 3y ago

[flagged]

renewiltord 3y ago

Sibling comment is correct to prompt you to at least try an LLM first. It's unfortunately the equivalent of lmgtfy.com but it's true.

neatze 3y ago
What makes you think I did not try, simply fail to see why/how natural language inconstant comprehension in any way equates to human or any other animal behavior, I simply don't believe/see (subjectively) that any potential of prompt hacking with massive datasets will build consistent anticipatory system (planning and some aspect of learning). As analogy, the more I look at it, the more it looks like an geocentric model of solar system.

drcode 3y ago

I think GPT4 can converse on any subject at all as well as a (let's say) 80 IQ human. On some subjects it can converse much better. That feels fundamentally different than a calculator.

skepticATX 3y ago
GPT-4 is absolutely more generally knowledgeable than any individual person. Individual humans can still easily beat it when it comes to knowledge of individual subjects. Let’s not conflate knowledge with intelligence though. GPT-4 simply isn’t intelligent.
- MichaelBosworth 3y ago
  Would be curious to hear an elaboration on this perspective. In your opinion, on which measures of intelligence would GPT-4 fail to out-perform a human with an IQ of 80? Conversely, on which measures do you imagine it would succeed at doing so? Are the latter less significant or valid than the former?
  - reso 3y ago
    Humans handily outperform GPT4 handily on the task of "write a random string of length [x]" for any x > ~25.
    - pclmulqdq 3y ago
      They have a specific device to do that now. I have tried to say "write a random sentence with 6 words and 2 numbers" and it completely fails, but it can do the straightforward "write a random [x] of length [y]."
    - verbify 3y ago
      I got "Here is a random string of 32 characters: a8Jk5pYr0Dm9Nc1Vz8Qf2Bt6Hg3Lw4Uo"
      - reso 3y ago
        Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s good at 32 because it’s a power of 2. I’ve tested this with a wide variety of number inputs and it’s performance is highly variable. Error also increases linearly with strong length.
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      If you asked most people to perform that task, they literally wouldn't have a clue what you'd just asked them to do.
    - ux-app 3y ago
      a 4 year old would fail at this task. does a 4 year old have intelligence?
staticman2 3y ago
Do you frequently talk to people who you know to have an 80 IQ about a range of subjects?
- Kranar 3y ago
  Statistically, about 16% of the time.
  - staticman2 3y ago
    You entirely missed my point When you speak to someone with an 80 IQ do they introduce themselves by saying "Hello I have an 80 IQ, nice to meet you." So that, like the person I responded to above, you can compare their conversation skills to the ChatGPT4 conversation skills?
    - Kranar 3y ago
      First off, you wouldn't need to do that specifically. You'd only need to know that most of the people you talk to are above an 80 IQ on any given topic, in fact most people are about a 100 IQ on any given topic. So you already have a reasonable baseline for comparison. Secondly, I'd say you're likely the one missing OPs point by trying to take a mostly colloquial statement about how ChatGPT is about as informed as the bottomish X% of the population on any given topic and trying to be pedantic about it. Furthermore the real purpose of OPs point is that the X% is now a lower bound, even if X isn't 16% but 5%, it's only going to go up from here. Yes there's evidence of diminishing returns with the current architectures but there's also a lot of room for growth with newer architectures or multimodal modals. I think most people understand OPs point without having the need to go around asking everyone what their IQ is. There are numerous indicators, both formal and informal, that indicate that ChatGPT is as informed on most any given topic as the bottom 16% of the population. In fact, it's likely much much higher than that.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 3y ago
titzer 3y ago
I feel like lost in this conversation is that ChatGPT is incredibly good at writing English. It basically never makes grammatical mistakes, it doesn't spew gibberish, and for the most part has extremely well-structured replies. The replies might be bullshit or hallucinations, but it's not gibberish. It's kind of breathtaking that we forgot about that being hard. The goalposts are moving again. BTW, it has passed many standardized tests under the same circumstances as a human.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > BTW, it has passed many standardized tests under the same circumstances as a human. No, it hasn’t, and it is physically impossible for it to. The extent to which the differences are material may be debatable, but this claim is simply false.
  - cjbprime 3y ago
    It would be a useful contribution to explain what you think the material differences are, rather than referencing them through innuendo, as if anyone knows what you mean.
    - jrk 3y ago
      I am not the original poster, but I assumed they meant as an embodied entity, interacting in the physical world.
  - bbor 3y ago
    Technically no two sets of circumstances can EVER be the same ;). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus#Panta_rhei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus#Panta_rhei
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Some of the replies are gibberish, especially once you get into technical subjects that it has very little training data on. It kitbashes words together that actually mean nothing, which is no surprise given that it's an LLM.
byyy 3y ago
Of course it does. He knows it. Some people just can't bring himself to stare at the reality of it all.
SanderNL 3y ago
I'm curious if you actually ever interacted with IQ 80 humans. They are definitely not on this scale.

mitthrowaway2 3y ago

> Calculators are smarter then humans in calculating, what does he mean by that? My understanding of what he means by that is a computer that is smarter than humans in everything, or nearly everything.

JeremyNT 3y ago

This quote is the first thing I've seen that really makes me worried. I don't think of ChatGPT as being "smart" at all, and comparing it to a human seems nonsensical to me. Yet here is a Turing award winning preeminent expert in the field telling me that AI smarter than humans is less (implied: much less) than 30 years away and quitting his job due to the ramifications.

Version467 3y ago
He is far from the only one. If you're interested in exploring this further I can really recommend taking a look at some of the papers that explore GPT-4's capabilities. Most prominent among them are the "Sparks of AGI" paper from Microsoft, as well as the technical report from openai. Both of them are obviously to be taken with a grain of salt, but they serve as a pretty good jumping off point. There are some pretty good Videos on Youtube exploring these papers if you don't want to read them yourself. Also take a look at the stuff that Rob Miles has published over on Computerphile, as well as his own channel. He's an Alignment Researcher with a knack for explaining. He covers not just the theoretical dangers, but also real examples of misaligned ai, that alignment researchers have predicted would occur as capabilities grow. Also I think it's important to mention that just a short while ago virtually no-one thought that shoving more layers into an llm would be enough to reach AGI. It's still unclear that it will get us all the way there, but recent developments have made a lot of ai researchers rethink that possibility, with many of them significantly shortening their own estimates as to when and how we will get there. It's very unusual that the people that are better informed and closer to the research are more worried than the rest of the world and it's worth keeping this in mind as you explore the topic.
- defgeneric 3y ago
  > Also I think it's important to mention that just a short while ago virtually no-one thought that shoving more layers into an llm would be enough to reach AGI. This was basically the strategy of the OpenAI team if I understand them correctly. Most researchers in the field looked down on LLMs and it was a big surprise when they turned out to perform so well. It also seems to be the reason the big players are playing catch up right now.

chrsjxn 3y ago

That statement seems like such science fiction that it's kind of baffling an AI expert said it. What does it even mean for the AI to be smarter than people? I certainly can't see a way for LLMs to generate "smarter" text than what's in their training data. And even the best case interactions I've seen online still rely on human intelligence to guide the AI to good outcomes instead of bad ones. Writing is a harder task to automate than calculation, but the calculator example seems pretty apt.

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
> I certainly can't see a way for LLMs to generate "smarter" text than what's in their training data. Their training data contains much more knowledge than any single human has ever had, though. If they had equivalent linguistic, understanding and reasoning abilities to a human, but with so much stored knowledge, and considering that they also win in processing speed and never get tired, that would already make them much "smarter" than humans. Not to mention that LLMs are just the current state of the art. We don't know if there will be another breakthrough which will counter the limitation you are mentioning. We do know that AI breakthroughs are relatively common lately.
- chrsjxn 3y ago
  So much of this is going to hinge on what "smarter" means. My local library has heaps more knowledge than most individual people, but it'd be weird to call it "smarter" than a person. And automation is generally cheaper and faster than human labor, but that's not a very compelling definition of "smarter" either. But, as of right now, LLMs can't generate new knowledge or validate their own outputs. We'll need a pretty significant breakthrough for that to change, and breakthroughs are pretty unpredictable.
  - ux-app 3y ago
    >But, as of right now, LLMs can't generate new knowledge my bar for tech singularity is an AI that can clean a toilet. GPT's language model is already sophisticated enough to "understand" this instruction. It's missing spatial understanding and a way to interact with the real world, but I'd be honestly very surprised if there isn't a GPT or equivalent already hooked up to cameras/motors/actuators in a lab somewhere. within our lifetimes we'll be reading papers with titles like: "does my roomba have feelings?"

Mike_12345 3y ago

> Calculators are smarter then humans in calculating, what does he mean by that? He means AGI.

theptip 3y ago

Calculators are not smarter than humans. Don’t be obtuse. He means the same thing anyone means when they say something like “Alice is smarter than Bob”.

byyy 3y ago
It's quite obvious that these LLMs are approaching and encroaching on human intelligence. It's so strange to see people continuously be in denial. They clearly aren't fully there yet but two things must be noted: 1. At times and in certain instances LLMs do produce superior output to humans. 2. There is a clear trendline of improvement in AI for the past decade. From voice recognition in Alexa to Dall-E to chatGPT. The logical projection of this trendline points to an inescapble and likely possibility that if AI is not superior now it will be in the future. There is a huge irrational denial of the above logical deduction. I think it's because chatGPT hit us in a way that was too sudden. It's like if I saw a flying saucer and I told you I saw it, your first reaction is disbelief even if I produce logical evidence for it. I mean the GP you replied to knows what the guy is talking about, but he just doesn't want to admit it.
- theptip 3y ago
  Agreed. There is a phenomenon that I haven’t found a good name for, which I first observed in self-driving cars: “AI made a mistake that only a really dumb human could make, therefore AI is really dumb”. If you imagine the spider chart of capabilities, it’s certain that AI will be super-human on average before it is super-human on each dimension, so even when it can replace 50% of current jobs it’s likely to have its own “cognitive biases” that seem dumb to us. I think this is a cognitive bias on our part (pattern matching instead of properly probability-weighting, maybe the conjunctive fallacy). I regret the snark in my post but I find the “pretend not to understand someone’s clear point” rhetorical device obnoxious. I am aware of a few reasonable arguments against Hinton’s position (I don’t happen to agree with them), but they require more finesse to construct.

gdiamos 3y ago

These results are predicted by LLM Scaling Laws and the GPT authors knew it before they started.

hipjiveguy 3y ago
where are these laws?