7 ms·

Every single retort of “these machines aren’t smart or intelligent” requires answering the question, “what is intelligence”? I struggle to see how GPT-4 is not

Every single retort of “these machines aren’t smart or intelligent” requires answering the question, “what is intelligence”? I struggle to see how GPT-4 is not intelligent by any definition that applies to a human.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago
Indeed. The internet and public gatherings are chock full of humans regurgitating rehashed nonsensical statements. Compared against these folks, GPT-4 is more intelligent.
commandlinefan 3y ago
> what is intelligence The only way anybody has ever come up with to measure it is test-taking - which machines can already do far better than we can. Real intelligence is creativity, but good luck measuring that.
- maxdoop 3y ago
  Not sure most would agree that "creativity == intelligence", but I'll go with it: Even assuming that definition, it begs the question of, "what is creativity?"
- winter_blue 3y ago
  > Real intelligence is creativity Well said. Even Jim Keller (a key designer involved with a lot of major CPUs, in his interview with Lex Freidman) said that there might be some sort of magic, or something magical about human consciousness / the human soul. I agree with that. That's something that a machine will never have.
  - abc_lisper 3y ago
    I think you may be in denial. Douglas Hosftadter thought very deeply about it, wrote a book(GEB) which won a pulitzer 40 years ago, about the "magic" in the brain. He has been worried about developments in AI for 5 years now.
  - ux-app 3y ago
    >That's something that a machine will never have. hehe, this is typical goal post moving. never is a long time.
  - wharfjumper 3y ago
    Can you provide some examples of creativity that you think a machine will never have?
  - cjbprime 3y ago
    You sound like someone who's never asked GPT-4 to write a rap battle about $SUBJECT in the style of $CELEBRITY where every word starts with $LETTER..
- svachalek 3y ago
  I don't know how to measure it, but I'm pretty sure ChatGPT is more creative than the average human already. Somewhat ironically its weakness is logic, but I don't think that will be hard to shore up with non-LLM tech. I think within a couple of years, human exceptionalism will have to retreat to the old "but it doesn't have real emotions" standby as any more practical use of intelligence is ceded to AI.
  - nevertoolate 3y ago
    I’m interested in why a human would want a more intelligent entity to exist, especially an entity trained on human thought patterns. Or you just say that you know that humanity will be enslaved by non-biologicals? You talk about exceptionalism, in the derogatory, but it was quite true that humanity once? could have been a benevolent leader of Earth or even the Solar system and beyond and now it seems a non-biological will be the ruler, which for me is just a shadow of the biological who created it, and misses the point from the human standpoint.
    - klibertp 3y ago
      Because people actually don't like to think. They hate being confronted with unfamiliarity, which is the prerequisite for all learning. They dislike coming up with original ideas, as they have none and would need to work to get some. It's tiring to concentrate for a long time, and it's mentally draining. People routinely give up trying to come up with a solution or even trying to solve the problem altogether when they can't find a quick and easy solution. That's the level of creativity and intelligence in most people - they don't want thinking too much to get in the way of just experiencing life, preferably in bite-sized episodes of 30 minutes (minus ads). Being handed all the correct solutions without the need to work for them in any way is a nightmare for artists and artisans, craftsmen and researchers, curious puzzle-solvers and Ayn Rand believers. It's pretty much a paradise for everyone else.
      - beanbean01 3y ago
        Depends on the researchers. Mathematicians might mind, but I am going to guess (assuming there was a plan in place to make sure they didn't wind up on the street) climate researchers wouldn't mind being made obsolete tomorrow.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I'm not sure why "creativity" is a yard-stick. Machines could do creativity better than us for a while now - take a bunch of inputs, collect some possible outputs by mashing the inputs together with a random modulating factor, pick the best one. Computers are much, much better at every step here except "pick the best one", and that's only because it's humans who decide on how ideas are to be rated, and our rating is so absurdly complex that we can't even explain it to ourselves, much less write it down as code. If anything, transformer models are closing the gap on that last bit, as they're built by taking the approach of "if we can't describe exactly how we rate and rank things, then let's shove so many examples at the model that it eventually gets a feel for it".
SirMaster 3y ago
I thought intelligence was like self-awareness etc. Like isn't that why humans are "more intelligent" than animals? Plenty of animals can do things that humans can't do, but that doesn't make them necessarily "intelligent". The fact that it seems trivially simple to fool and trick ChatGPT makes me feel like it's not very intelligent, but that's just me. Obviously you can trick humans, but IMO it takes more effort than to trick ChatGPT. It just way too often makes such simple and stupid mistakes that it makes it hard for me to think of it as "intelligent".
- svachalek 3y ago
  Try pointing over a cat's shoulder and looking scared. It doesn't work not because they're too smart, but because they can't even pick up on what you're trying to say. ChatGPT has sub-human intelligence, but it's already vastly ahead of everything that's not human. Think about it being on a Moore's Law schedule from here, doubling every two years or so, and we're only a few years away from being the cat in this scenario.
  - fennecfoxy 3y ago
    Eh that's not because cats are stupid but because they have different body language. Dogs are more likely to react to our fear since they've evolved so closely with us for so long, with a working relationship.
- brookst 3y ago
  Sentience != intelligence
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Sentience != sapience != intelligence. However, the whole bundle consists of things that are objectively measurable, and things that seem just philosophical - in the sense that we can't really do better than accept them at face value (otherwise they'd be in the "objectively measurable" set). The current models are rapidly closing or already fulfilling the objectively measurable criteria; as for the rest, at some point they'll have no worse standing than you and me.
m3kw9 3y ago
It’s intelligent but very short sighted, it can’t plan far beyond and really self generate independently beyond the initial few prompts
- grogenaut 3y ago
  yes but is the memory for context able to grow linearly or is it an exponential growth that is required. If it's linear then it's going to get better really fast. If it's exponential it's going to be a bit more moors law like. I have a feeling all of these things are limited by time/space/speed of light/heat/density limitations. Could be things can't get that much smarter than humans with in an OOM... tho they might get a lot more able to cooperate / delegate.
kovac 3y ago
To me real intelligence is the ability to reason coherently. Humans, even when they are wrong, work in a way coherent with their prinicples/beliefs/axioms. Consider Sheldon from Big Bang Theory who does a very convincing job as a theoretical physicist, at least to the untrained ear, merely by memorising lines. However, as soon as he is questioned on something he didn't memorise, the act falls apart in a way a real Physicist wouldn't even in a domain he doesn't specialise in. For a trained ear, though, even during the act, the inconsistencies are audible.
zeroxp 3y ago
Most arguments I've had about this take on a totally different tone when you ask the person if they believe there is more to human consciousness than what is inside the brain. I.e, is there some spiritual element animating our consciousness. Often, people say yes. Those people almost universally cannot be convinced that a machine is intelligent. But, if they agree the brain is an organ, its not hard to convince them that the functions of that organ can be simulated, like any other.
dorte 3y ago
I'm not really sure you have to define what intelligence is to say this isn't it (yet) — https://postimg.cc/G4x640kB https://postimg.cc/G4x640kB (this is GPT-3 to be fair). edit. tried the same with GPT-4, doesn't look like it understand either, but can't ask follow up questions since I do not have access (and what really make the other answer so incredibly dumb is not so much that it gets it wrong the first time, but that it keeps not getting it despite the very not subtle hints): https://postimg.cc/ftWJXhtJ https://postimg.cc/ftWJXhtJ
beanbean01 3y ago
To properly explain this would take longer than the length of the comment limit (is there a length limit? I don't know, but even if there isn't I don't feel like explaining this for the 70th time), but here's why: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.06627.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.06627.pdf To sum up: a human can think outside of their training distribution, an LLM cannot. A larger training distribution simply means you have to go farther outside the norm. In order to solve this problem would require multiple other processing architectures besides an LLM, and a human-like AGI cannot be reached by simply predicting upcoming words. Functional language processing (formal reasoning, social cognition, etc) require other modules in the brain. This explains the various pejorative names given to LLMs - stochastic parrots, Chinese Rooms - etc, etc, etc.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

Indeed. The internet and public gatherings are chock full of humans regurgitating rehashed nonsensical statements. Compared against these folks, GPT-4 is more intelligent.

commandlinefan 3y ago

> what is intelligence The only way anybody has ever come up with to measure it is test-taking - which machines can already do far better than we can. Real intelligence is creativity, but good luck measuring that.

maxdoop 3y ago
Not sure most would agree that "creativity == intelligence", but I'll go with it: Even assuming that definition, it begs the question of, "what is creativity?"
winter_blue 3y ago
> Real intelligence is creativity Well said. Even Jim Keller (a key designer involved with a lot of major CPUs, in his interview with Lex Freidman) said that there might be some sort of magic, or something magical about human consciousness / the human soul. I agree with that. That's something that a machine will never have.
- abc_lisper 3y ago
  I think you may be in denial. Douglas Hosftadter thought very deeply about it, wrote a book(GEB) which won a pulitzer 40 years ago, about the "magic" in the brain. He has been worried about developments in AI for 5 years now.
- ux-app 3y ago
  >That's something that a machine will never have. hehe, this is typical goal post moving. never is a long time.
- wharfjumper 3y ago
  Can you provide some examples of creativity that you think a machine will never have?
- cjbprime 3y ago
  You sound like someone who's never asked GPT-4 to write a rap battle about $SUBJECT in the style of $CELEBRITY where every word starts with $LETTER..
svachalek 3y ago
I don't know how to measure it, but I'm pretty sure ChatGPT is more creative than the average human already. Somewhat ironically its weakness is logic, but I don't think that will be hard to shore up with non-LLM tech. I think within a couple of years, human exceptionalism will have to retreat to the old "but it doesn't have real emotions" standby as any more practical use of intelligence is ceded to AI.
- nevertoolate 3y ago
  I’m interested in why a human would want a more intelligent entity to exist, especially an entity trained on human thought patterns. Or you just say that you know that humanity will be enslaved by non-biologicals? You talk about exceptionalism, in the derogatory, but it was quite true that humanity once? could have been a benevolent leader of Earth or even the Solar system and beyond and now it seems a non-biological will be the ruler, which for me is just a shadow of the biological who created it, and misses the point from the human standpoint.
  - klibertp 3y ago
    Because people actually don't like to think. They hate being confronted with unfamiliarity, which is the prerequisite for all learning. They dislike coming up with original ideas, as they have none and would need to work to get some. It's tiring to concentrate for a long time, and it's mentally draining. People routinely give up trying to come up with a solution or even trying to solve the problem altogether when they can't find a quick and easy solution. That's the level of creativity and intelligence in most people - they don't want thinking too much to get in the way of just experiencing life, preferably in bite-sized episodes of 30 minutes (minus ads). Being handed all the correct solutions without the need to work for them in any way is a nightmare for artists and artisans, craftsmen and researchers, curious puzzle-solvers and Ayn Rand believers. It's pretty much a paradise for everyone else.
    - beanbean01 3y ago
      Depends on the researchers. Mathematicians might mind, but I am going to guess (assuming there was a plan in place to make sure they didn't wind up on the street) climate researchers wouldn't mind being made obsolete tomorrow.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
I'm not sure why "creativity" is a yard-stick. Machines could do creativity better than us for a while now - take a bunch of inputs, collect some possible outputs by mashing the inputs together with a random modulating factor, pick the best one. Computers are much, much better at every step here except "pick the best one", and that's only because it's humans who decide on how ideas are to be rated, and our rating is so absurdly complex that we can't even explain it to ourselves, much less write it down as code. If anything, transformer models are closing the gap on that last bit, as they're built by taking the approach of "if we can't describe exactly how we rate and rank things, then let's shove so many examples at the model that it eventually gets a feel for it".

SirMaster 3y ago

I thought intelligence was like self-awareness etc. Like isn't that why humans are "more intelligent" than animals? Plenty of animals can do things that humans can't do, but that doesn't make them necessarily "intelligent". The fact that it seems trivially simple to fool and trick ChatGPT makes me feel like it's not very intelligent, but that's just me. Obviously you can trick humans, but IMO it takes more effort than to trick ChatGPT. It just way too often makes such simple and stupid mistakes that it makes it hard for me to think of it as "intelligent".

svachalek 3y ago
Try pointing over a cat's shoulder and looking scared. It doesn't work not because they're too smart, but because they can't even pick up on what you're trying to say. ChatGPT has sub-human intelligence, but it's already vastly ahead of everything that's not human. Think about it being on a Moore's Law schedule from here, doubling every two years or so, and we're only a few years away from being the cat in this scenario.
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  Eh that's not because cats are stupid but because they have different body language. Dogs are more likely to react to our fear since they've evolved so closely with us for so long, with a working relationship.
brookst 3y ago
Sentience != intelligence
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Sentience != sapience != intelligence. However, the whole bundle consists of things that are objectively measurable, and things that seem just philosophical - in the sense that we can't really do better than accept them at face value (otherwise they'd be in the "objectively measurable" set). The current models are rapidly closing or already fulfilling the objectively measurable criteria; as for the rest, at some point they'll have no worse standing than you and me.

m3kw9 3y ago

It’s intelligent but very short sighted, it can’t plan far beyond and really self generate independently beyond the initial few prompts

grogenaut 3y ago
yes but is the memory for context able to grow linearly or is it an exponential growth that is required. If it's linear then it's going to get better really fast. If it's exponential it's going to be a bit more moors law like. I have a feeling all of these things are limited by time/space/speed of light/heat/density limitations. Could be things can't get that much smarter than humans with in an OOM... tho they might get a lot more able to cooperate / delegate.

kovac 3y ago

To me real intelligence is the ability to reason coherently. Humans, even when they are wrong, work in a way coherent with their prinicples/beliefs/axioms. Consider Sheldon from Big Bang Theory who does a very convincing job as a theoretical physicist, at least to the untrained ear, merely by memorising lines. However, as soon as he is questioned on something he didn't memorise, the act falls apart in a way a real Physicist wouldn't even in a domain he doesn't specialise in. For a trained ear, though, even during the act, the inconsistencies are audible.

zeroxp 3y ago

Most arguments I've had about this take on a totally different tone when you ask the person if they believe there is more to human consciousness than what is inside the brain. I.e, is there some spiritual element animating our consciousness. Often, people say yes. Those people almost universally cannot be convinced that a machine is intelligent. But, if they agree the brain is an organ, its not hard to convince them that the functions of that organ can be simulated, like any other.

dorte 3y ago

I'm not really sure you have to define what intelligence is to say this isn't it (yet) — https://postimg.cc/G4x640kB https://postimg.cc/G4x640kB (this is GPT-3 to be fair). edit. tried the same with GPT-4, doesn't look like it understand either, but can't ask follow up questions since I do not have access (and what really make the other answer so incredibly dumb is not so much that it gets it wrong the first time, but that it keeps not getting it despite the very not subtle hints): https://postimg.cc/ftWJXhtJ https://postimg.cc/ftWJXhtJ

beanbean01 3y ago

To properly explain this would take longer than the length of the comment limit (is there a length limit? I don't know, but even if there isn't I don't feel like explaining this for the 70th time), but here's why: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.06627.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.06627.pdf To sum up: a human can think outside of their training distribution, an LLM cannot. A larger training distribution simply means you have to go farther outside the norm. In order to solve this problem would require multiple other processing architectures besides an LLM, and a human-like AGI cannot be reached by simply predicting upcoming words. Functional language processing (formal reasoning, social cognition, etc) require other modules in the brain. This explains the various pejorative names given to LLMs - stochastic parrots, Chinese Rooms - etc, etc, etc.