14 ms·
AI is just someone else's intelligence
- olliecornelia 3y agoOh great, next you’re going to tell me that I AM the product.
- explaininjs 3y agoI’ve taken to reading it as “augmented intelligence”. As in: take the intelligence of all the people who made the training data. Augment that with the intelligence of the people who devised the model architecture and trained it. Augment that with any emergent intelligence in the system. Augment that with the prompt engineers intelligence. Augment that with the end users intelligence. Bada bing bada boom, AI.
- gavinhoward 3y agoThere's no emergent intelligence in word statistics.
- blurbleblurble 3y agoDoes a book communicate intelligence?
- gavinhoward 3y agoYes, but it has no intelligence. Communicating intelligence is different from having it.
- raydiatian 3y agoI'd argue that precisely the converse is true: A book contains intelligence (as do all things), but it cannot actively communicate it. Maybe the intelligence/knowledge debate needs to be had, where: 1. intelligence implies the autonomy to act on knowledge 2. knowledge is the derivative of intelligent action So you could argue ChatGPT is AGK: artificially generally knowledgeable. And then of course we can restrict books to being "knowledgeable" entities rather than overloading the term "intelligence".
- blurbleblurble 3y agoSimilarly to books, the large language models communicate information that comes from somewhere, from people. They use math (such as statistics, though I'd argue that's an oversimplification of ML applications) and computer programming to do this just like a book uses words and ink. Debating whether or not weights reflecting some word statistics can "contain intelligence" is similar to debating whether or not the pages of the book "contain knowledge". Personally that strikes me as a kind of literalistic perspective. Articles like the one posted here remind us where the "intelligence" _really_ comes from, which as you say probably isn't the word statistics themselves, though maybe you'd accept that LLMs can "encode intelligences" just as books can "encode knowledge". Encodings are meaningless without a little decoding! Decoding is a process of meaning making, almost by definition. A more interesting question along the same lines of the one of whether or not LLMs can "be intelligent" or "contain intelligence": Can LLMs be embodied by some being or beings? Personally I think the answer is very clearly yes, but in a super basic way that a lot of people would dismiss as dull... we embody them when we interact with them or build them, when they cause palpable effects to us, near or far, direct or indirect. That's the life force that lives "inside" of technology. It's the same life force that lives in us. Except it leaks everywhere, it's not contained. It flows through through inter-relation and interaction. Are there "other" non-human beings that embody LLMs? Or books for that matter? At the very least the aggregate industrial forces that produced them would be good candidates for having some kind of beingness, and also for embodying these tools. So that's where to look if you want to find some "other" intelligence. These tools are quickly becoming vital parts of very large more-than-one-human organisms.
- greenhearth 3y agoIt communicates an intelligence, but it's someone else's intelligence, not the book's.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pkdpic 3y agoI like that articulation. But I don't see why emergent intelligence has to even necessarily be in the mix for an ML / AI tool to be as helpful / insightful as the current systems seem to be. At least based on how they've felt in everyday use in my development process at work and as a consumer etc. Theyre about as helpful as Id expect an off-brand all-of-the-internet philosopher stone chatbot assistant to be.
- raydiatian 3y agoYou down with OPP? (other people's perception) Yeah, you know me!
- alfor 3y agoEverything is a remix (watch the movie) We are all using the intelligent of previous people, generations of humans. The same is true for AI. It’s not different from humans. What will we do once it’s conscient? Will AI have rights? Should we be able to shut it down?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bluefirebrand 3y ago> The same is true for AI. It’s not different from humans I don't know how anyone can believe that. Maybe there will be some future AI where this is true, but it's absolutely not true yet. My argument is that humans absolutely should NOT invent AI that is on our own level. We shouldn't overstep building tools for us to use into trying to invent new artificial life. It's just a bad idea.
- masswerk 3y agoI'd say, we can't make a direct comparison, since there's no agency (and no committed responsibility behind this). On the other hand, we probably don't want this kind of agency (like a sentient AI), since this would evoke strong doubt's in its usefulness as a machine (as in a reliable, reproducible, and predictable output in given and known tolerances as a reaction to an input signal), as this would be now subject to a varying, maybe even escalating agenda and any kind of pathologies, which would give way to any kind of uncontrollable errors.
- gaganyaan 3y agoCounterpoint: you're just doing a modern version of this: https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/ https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
- alfor 3y agoThe way it work is not different from human. The AI learn the concepts, the abstraction and then can replicate following those patterns. For now the public facing AI don’t have agency/consciousness, but it’s coming fast anyway. Many projects are building it in the open while probably hundred more behind closed doors. The problem we will face soon is does an artificial consciousness have right. Can we shut it down without remorse if it’s similar to our own?
- haskellandchill 3y agoThe problem with this reasoning is it could apply to any person who learns from culture as well. It isn't a problem however, it's only problematic inside the system of copyright, patents, equity, dividends, etc. If we viewed collective knowledge as a common good AI could be seen as contributing to total human flourishing the same as a public intellectual does.
- bheadmaster 3y agoI feel that the big hidden implication that these kinds of articles are trying to say is "AI is not real intelligence", further implying something along the lines of "AI will never be conscious" (as it's hard to come up with another definition of "real" intelligence except the-human-kind). I'd like to propose a counterargument: Assumptions: Theory of evolution is true. The primordial single-cell organism from which we all evolved was not conscious, but rather just a biological machine. Humans are conscious. Deduction: Somewhere along the line between the primordial single-cell organism and a human being, there was a transition from non-consciousness to consciousness, and the only [*] factor in that transition was the complexity of the nervous system. Conclusion: Consciousness (or, "real" intelligence) arises from the complexity of a machine. AI can, in principle, become conscious. Yes, we know how AI works, because we built it. But why would that make consciousness arising from a sufficiently-complex statistical model impossible? [*] as per apendleton's comment, I have made mistake here: complexity is not the only factor, but is a necessary one in creation of consciousness.
- apendleton 3y ago> the only factor in that transition was the complexity of the nervous system It seems likely to me that some arrangement of nerves is possible that's comparably complex to ours, but does not produce consciousness. (I dunno, maybe some organism with much more complex sensory organs than ours that devotes so much complexity budget to that that it only has enough left to devote to general cognition to give it the intelligence of a mushroom, who knows). In other words: I suspect complexity is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness to occur. I don't think that takes away from your suggestion that consciousness in AI systems is _possible_, but I don't think it's the case that it's an inevitable outcome if only we can make our systems sufficiently complex. There's probably something about the specific structure of the complex thing we'll need to master as well.
- bheadmaster 3y ago> I suspect complexity is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness to occur. I don't think that takes away from your suggestion that consciousness in AI systems is _possible_, but I don't think it's the case that it's an inevitable outcome if only we can make our systems sufficiently complex. There's probably something about the specific structure of the complex thing we'll need to master as well. That's a very good argument, and I completely agree. As much as it's faulty logic to reduce AI to soulless machinery because we know how it works, it's also faulty logic to assume that scaling to more and more complex models will in itself create consciousness. At the very least, some mechanism of continuous self-modification is necessary, so current fixed-point neural networks most likely will never be conscious.
- alttab 3y agoFor now, but not for long.
- _jayhack_ 3y agoThis logic only applies to generative pre-training, behavior cloning, and other training methods which rely on learning to mimic well-structured content from the real world. It does not apply to intelligence gathered through methods like RL. How does the author think about the intelligence of AlphaGo, for instance, which was trained entirely by self-play?
- intalentive 3y agoGood point. This calls to mind LeCun's recent argument about missing models that can learn from raw experience or "self-play". When we have a ChatGPT that understands language strictly from audio / video inputs, then we can start to talk about human-like intelligence. As for AlphaGo, I would put it the same category of intelligence as a calculator. It does one thing well -- approximate a Monte Carlo Tree Search.
- sharemywin 3y agoisn't HuggingGPT and Jarvis able todo some of that. https://github.com/microsoft/JARVIS https://github.com/microsoft/JARVIS
- suigin 3y agoCounter Point: ALL software is someone else's intelligence.
- eppp 3y agoAlmost all of our intelligence is someone else's. That is what education does.
- uoaei 3y agoThis brings up an interesting question: are we intelligent when we merely employ models, or only when we extrapolate from them? In other words, does a maximally-parsimonious theory contain all the knowledge you need, or is there something extra (typically called "reasoning") that is needed to perform analysis on and draw conclusions from such a model?
- sdwr 3y agoGodel would say you can always break the system. Game theory would say there are dominant strategies, and sometimes they require guessing or bluffing. Economics would say, once too many people are using a dominant strategy, it's time to switch it up.
- intalentive 3y agoAlmost all of our intelligence is embodied "animal intelligence" that can perceive, navigate, manipulate, adapt, survive, and reproduce -- online, in real time, in the presence of noise, without backpropagation. This doesn't come from formal education but "self-supervised learning" or experience.
- benopal64 3y agoI skimmed the article, so I am not sure how valid my comment is. But this whole blog post feels like: ALL [encoded forms of knowledge] is someone else's intelligence.
- yieldcrv 3y ago[and that's good enough for me and most people]
- guhayun 3y agoAnd its a good thing,it keeps them aligned
- larvaetron 3y agoThe article has a fundamental flaw, much like those who confuse copyright and trademark: intelligence is the algorithm; knowledge is the data set.
- aeternum 3y agoThat doesn't quite work because almost all the algorithms humans and ai use are learned as data. IE Bayesian reasoning, long form multiplication and division, even the scientific method.
- larvaetron 3y ago> That doesn't quite work How exactly does the fundamental difference between knowledge and intelligence "not work"? Humans have the ability to learn algorithms, therefore the algorithm being used by an AI (i.e. its intelligence) to apply knowledge from its data set "doesn't work"? I'm having difficulty following your thought process here.
- freedude 3y agoYou missed wisdom (as does "AI"). Or the ability to adjust the algorithm based upon new information and the ability to reason.
- EGreg 3y agoIt actually goes a lot deeper than that. Companies like this helped organize cheap workers around the world to just put all that information once and for all, to train the AI and interpolate / remix the answers for people: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/04/11/how-alexandr-wang-turned-an-army-of-clickworkers-into-a-73-billion-ai-unicorn/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/04/11/how-alexa... OpenAI this year hired a bunch of people to just manually do the work of basic coding once and for all: https://www.semafor.com/article/01/27/2023/openai-has-hired-an-army-of-contractors-to-make-basic-coding-obsolete https://www.semafor.com/article/01/27/2023/openai-has-hired-... This is a story of using cheap labor to train machines at scale. OpenAI's content moderators have just unionized: https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-content-moderators-unionized-africa https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-content-moderators-unionize... Moreover, this is a story of taking labor of artists all over the world, remixing it at scale and selling it, destroying any sort of scarcity: https://the-decoder.com/ai-images-sold-on-the-internet-artists-fight-back/ https://the-decoder.com/ai-images-sold-on-the-internet-artis... More artist issues: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/arts/design/ai-art-class.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/arts/design/ai-art-class.... There's GitHub, which had tons of people contribute code, and then the AI just ingested all that work for remixing by Microsoft Copilot: https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/news/252526359/Developers-warned-GitHub-Copilot-code-may-be-licensed https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/news/252526... And of course, finally there's Wikipedia, which had tons of people contribute actual changes, vet them for accuracy, etc. over 20 years, in many languages -- simply taken for use by AI companies: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdba/ai-is-tearing-wikipedia-apart https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdba/ai-is-tearing-wikiped... But once again, in 2023, where we are now, there is a staggering amount of humans just producing this kind of content, and the AI is mainly used to model and remix it. Perhaps to do so can form some sort of internal understanding of this text, and that's what's interesting. But even Sam Altman has lately said "scale is not all you need". So a new approach is here needed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI
- iflint 3y agoI had a professor in grad school say that AI is just a search algorithm. I think that is an interesting way of framing things. Often times the model is just searching its training data for the right output. I don't think this diminishes the value of such models, recent advancements have shown how exciting "just a search algorithm" can be.
- bheadmaster 3y agoI could imagine a philosophy professor with experience in Computer Science arguing that human mind is just a search algorithm - often times the human mind is just searching its training data for the right output (right, in human case, meaning the action that would maximize pleasure and minimize pain, both in long and short term).
- masswerk 3y agoAnother way of thinking about this may be as a compressed field, where the "prompt" extracts knowledge along a given vector, along the lines of stored inter-token relations, which provide for the internal vectorization, thus reducing redundancy and enabling the compression in the first place.
- intalentive 3y agoI'd say model training is a search for parameters that approximate a function.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Kreutzer 3y agoYes, it just queries. I'm confused why people would confuse this with intelligence. It's like an upgraded Clippy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- machina_ex_deus 3y agoIntelligence is not knowledge, and this article heavily conflates those two. Does a person "use" his teachers "intelligence" when learning, or is he using his own intelligence, and the teacher's guidance and knowledge? We freely allow other humans to learn from us and see it as a positive thing. It's completely hypocritical to think that AI shouldn't be allowed to do it. That's just setting up impossible conditions because of prejudice against AI. I hope that the AI revolution will just make us finally reflect and also stop preventing human access to information and knowledge. Good luck competing with huge AI which was trained on so many things if most humans can't barely access scientific journals and other knowledge by other humans. Information should be free of restrictions, and so should knowledge. Nobody is actually revealing anything significant in patent claims anymore, it's all obfuscation which undermines the point of the system. Scientific journals are such a joke, they put up prices for articles that they know nobody will pay. I hope AI produces a ton of intellectual property theft. I hope it will crush down the concept of intellectual property to extinction. I didn't support this nonsense when it came to human, so I'm not going to support it when it comes to AI.
- masswerk 3y agoI think, the differentiation between knowledge and intelligence is somehow besides the point, since it is about synthetic propositions, about the very synthesis that forms the relation between tokens. AI training is basically harvesting this kind of synthesis, at all levels, from basic compositions to entire, typical textures. And I doubt that such a complex, heavily regulated concept, like IP for applicative synthetic propositions (and products), will vanish in an instant. (It's about as likely as private wealth being reset to zero.)
- adamwong246 3y agoAI today is like emitting carbon in 1900. Nobody realizes ATM just how badly they are being swindled. In much the same way a few profited by externalizing the costs into the atmosphere to be paid by people hundreds of years hence, we see the same cannibalization of the open web today. The web has always been a mostly benevolent shared-space- now its being stripped mined of it's usefulness. AI titans are gorging themselves because our laws and our "common sense" hasn't caught up to them.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoThere's a reason Herbert's original idea for Butlerian Jihad was a spiritual revival and not a classic war of the machines that his son turned it into.
- billbrown 3y agoI predict it'll all come crashing down once people start having skin in the game. (Right now, it's a toy, the source for a million overheated news articles and opinions.) ChatGPT can pass the Bar. Okay, have it draw up a contract and have the parties sign it—skin in the game. When an omitted comma can cost millions[1], what will an LLM's hallucinations wrought? [1] https://kagi.com/search?q=missing+comma+millions&r=us&sh=QDQa9ea01ZXkvjLI_a8Lqw https://kagi.com/search?q=missing+comma+millions&r=us&sh=QDQ...
- danielvaughn 3y agoAgreed. I don't think it will necessarily crash, but there will be a serious reckoning for any business owner who thinks they can replace critical roles with AI. We're a long way off from that, if ever. In the short term, I think AI will be most useful in areas where (a) indeterminate results are acceptable, and (b) the consequences of a "mistake" are either non-existent or negligible. As humans are imperfect, there will undoubtedly be many poorly-conceived product decisions to use AI prematurely. I do think it will be entertaining to watch.
- billbrown 3y agoSorry, "crash" is probably hyperbolic. "Deflate" is maybe better. If you can't trust the work output, then paying 10¢ instead of an hour of a FTE's time for it is no consolation.
- pixl97 3y agoThis is still massively problematic for society and can represent a hollowing out of low to middle skill workers. You know the ones that are low paid and tend to have poor legal and governmental representation while at the same time experiencing hate from the remaining taxpayers for being slackers.
- danielvaughn 3y agoFor sure. The translation industry is basically dead, a good chunk of copywriting and marketing is on its way out, and I'm sure a slew of other industries are going to be nearly eradicated. The effect it's going to have on the economy will be painful.
- 13years 3y agoIt will take jobs because the computer is using the thinking of a million other workers – how can any one worker compete with that? Training material is, at a deconstructed level, the critical patterns of other people’s thoughts, ideas, writings, music, theology, facts, opinions, poetry, and so on AI has completely changed technological competition. Most still don't perceive that AI is essentially a skill/technology replication machine. This changes everything. It is not comparable to any technological innovation prior. "Anything you create can be replicated without investment cost while also being unique in design as well as delivering the same function or experience. Intellectual property laws essentially have no function in this new environment and there isn't an obvious remedy" https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
- ftxbro 3y ago> "In the end, generative AI takes from the world’s best artists, musicians, philosophers, and other thinkers – erasing their identities, and reassigns credit to its output. Without the proper restraints, it will produce the master forgeries of our generation, and blur the lines between what we view as human ideas and synthesized ones." as a free software contributor, always has been
- junglistguy 3y agolike any other software
- freedude 3y ago"The danger of this type of ML is not that it will take jobs (it definitely will, and already is), but why it will take jobs. It will take jobs not because the computer is replacing the thinking of one worker. It will take jobs because the computer is using the thinking of a million other workers – how can any one worker compete with that?" A question I see glossed over whenever the formative machine learning is discussed, How much of those "million other workers" thinking is accurate, effective and wise? The author's point about copyright infringement makes it almost impossible for the creators of formative machine learning tech to publish their sources so how could you ever know.
- iamnotsure 3y agoAI might be a vessel of intelligence, like bulletin boards.
- Animats 3y agoSo is education.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- panarchy 3y agoI'd say it's just as likely that human intelligence is just someone else's intelligence too with some bootstrapping from nature. Will a 50000 BCE hunter/gather (assume grey/white matter counts are equal to a modern one) given infinite restarts of their life (but not the ability to build upon or add to a body of knowledge) be able to conceptualize general relativity? i.e. learning how to track animal grazing patterns and when to find and harvest plants could lead to the development of time systems given there's enough nodes [neurons] to make representations beyond direct stimuli. And if you keep adding nodes to the population and the ability to connect more of them; then the further the development can be pushed and more concepts can be connected with underlying patterns. Do this enough then a certain life-form might get all self-important and decided to start labeling things as intelligent or not depending on how much of their own image they see in it.
- amai 3y agoThen we should call it CI = Cloud Intelligence.
- grantcas 3y ago[dead]
- paletteOvO 3y agoIt is good enough if AI can clone someone else's intelligence.
- mnky9800n 3y agoI like this argument because it also highlights how these large models are completely unlike the human experience. Humans bumble around learning through quite limited experiences until they learn enough to arrive at providing for themselves (hopefully). These AIs needed to learn all of human output in order to do a human job. That means that either a) human brains are filled with ancestral genetic knowledge that allows them to interact with their environment (of which tehre is little evidence that we are filled with genetic knowledge), or b) our brains work completely differently from these AI contraptions.
- eimrine 3y agoThis site identifies me as Russian (I am not) and all it shows to me is some anti-putin propaganda in Russian language instead of at least proper html markup. Screw you zdziarski for doing this to your visitors even to Russian ones! Information must be free to anyone despite of race, territory, political views or anything else or you are no much better than the side you are against.
- faangguyindia 3y agoImagine if I found Boeing 777 in wild with all tooling in hanger but no other humans, just me there. Can chatgpt help me repair this airplane and make it skyworthy with i knowing nothing about planes? If it can it means, we can really replace most of the technicians today who diagnose and fix issues in different ways machinery with just chatgpt and intern. There are some people who always figure out what to put in Google search go diagnose issues in machinery or system, they will run dozens or more searches and get idea about what they are working with and suddenly they can fix the issues they wanted to fix. Does it mean these googlefu technical guys can now be replaced by average highschcooler + chatgpt