4 ms·

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 human

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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
Sentience != intelligence
- TeMPOraL 4y 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.
  - brookst 4y ago
    What's the objective measure of sentience? I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think it is possible we will have AGI, even ASI, long before we have sentience in AI. Of course, I'm a little skeptical of measures of sentience, so even if I'm right it will certainly be debatable.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      > What's the objective measure of sentience? I don't know. My point is that if there is some objective indicator that's correlated with sentience, LLMs are probably already close to us on it, maybe even beating us on it. And if, at some point, a ML model reaches our levels at every objective measure we can think of, then we'll have no choice but to grant it is intelligent/sentient/sapient.
      - brookst 4y ago
        I don't think there is an objective measure of sentience. But sentience itself involves self-reflection, which there is no evidence LLMs do at all. When you submkt a prompt, a giant mathematical operation happens, and when it is complete, it stops. ChatGPT is not sitting there thinking "oh man, I should have said..."
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        That's because time also stops, until you reply. Then ChatGPT reads both what you said and what it said earlier, and the giant mathematical operation is run over those two inputs together. It may very well be that self-reflection happens inside that operation. For humans, time does not stop - we constantly process both sensory information and our own thoughts, and even if you cut out external stimuli via e.g. sensory deprivation tank, the brain will just loop on its own output instead, of which you'll suddenly become much more aware.
        brookst 4y ago
        The difference is that ChatGPT is literally not running when it doesn't have a prompt. It is not "looping on its own output", it's just not there. Sentience is that internal loop you point out. LLMs (today) don't have that. When you prompt for "write a tagline for an ice cream shop", there is no identity that remembers other prompts about ice cream, or which reflects on how taglines have changed over time, or anything else. The results can be astoundingly good, even intelligent, but there's no sentience. If you somehow turned off a person after each sentence, upon waking up to the next prompt their first thought would be "that was weird, I must have passed out", and we could use fMRI to track brain activity indicating that thought. We are even more capable of inspecting LLMs, and there is no equivalent activity. LLMs start and end with the tokens going in and out, and a huge matrix that transforms them. I'm generally an open minded, probabilities-rather-than-certainties person, but I'd say the odds of LLMs having sentience that we can't detect are about the same as the odds of a television having sentience that we can't detect: as close to zero as we can measure.
ssnistfajen 4y ago
Sentience and self-awareness are not unique to homo sapiens at all. Humans became more intelligent due to developing oral and literary traditions that allowed the preservation and accumulation of knowledge. Everything that made a modern human "intelligent" is a direct result of that accumulation of knowledge, not some sort of biological miracle.

svachalek 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago

Sentience != intelligence

TeMPOraL 4y 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.
- brookst 4y ago
  What's the objective measure of sentience? I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think it is possible we will have AGI, even ASI, long before we have sentience in AI. Of course, I'm a little skeptical of measures of sentience, so even if I'm right it will certainly be debatable.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > What's the objective measure of sentience? I don't know. My point is that if there is some objective indicator that's correlated with sentience, LLMs are probably already close to us on it, maybe even beating us on it. And if, at some point, a ML model reaches our levels at every objective measure we can think of, then we'll have no choice but to grant it is intelligent/sentient/sapient.
    - brookst 4y ago
      I don't think there is an objective measure of sentience. But sentience itself involves self-reflection, which there is no evidence LLMs do at all. When you submkt a prompt, a giant mathematical operation happens, and when it is complete, it stops. ChatGPT is not sitting there thinking "oh man, I should have said..."
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        That's because time also stops, until you reply. Then ChatGPT reads both what you said and what it said earlier, and the giant mathematical operation is run over those two inputs together. It may very well be that self-reflection happens inside that operation. For humans, time does not stop - we constantly process both sensory information and our own thoughts, and even if you cut out external stimuli via e.g. sensory deprivation tank, the brain will just loop on its own output instead, of which you'll suddenly become much more aware.
        brookst 4y ago
        The difference is that ChatGPT is literally not running when it doesn't have a prompt. It is not "looping on its own output", it's just not there. Sentience is that internal loop you point out. LLMs (today) don't have that. When you prompt for "write a tagline for an ice cream shop", there is no identity that remembers other prompts about ice cream, or which reflects on how taglines have changed over time, or anything else. The results can be astoundingly good, even intelligent, but there's no sentience. If you somehow turned off a person after each sentence, upon waking up to the next prompt their first thought would be "that was weird, I must have passed out", and we could use fMRI to track brain activity indicating that thought. We are even more capable of inspecting LLMs, and there is no equivalent activity. LLMs start and end with the tokens going in and out, and a huge matrix that transforms them. I'm generally an open minded, probabilities-rather-than-certainties person, but I'd say the odds of LLMs having sentience that we can't detect are about the same as the odds of a television having sentience that we can't detect: as close to zero as we can measure.

ssnistfajen 4y ago

Sentience and self-awareness are not unique to homo sapiens at all. Humans became more intelligent due to developing oral and literary traditions that allowed the preservation and accumulation of knowledge. Everything that made a modern human "intelligent" is a direct result of that accumulation of knowledge, not some sort of biological miracle.