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Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Like, genuinely curious. This is the first I hear of someone cogently putting this thought out there, but it seems r

Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Like, genuinely curious. This is the first I hear of someone cogently putting this thought out there, but it seems rather painfully obvious -- even if perhaps incorrect, but certainly a perspective that is very easy to comprehend and one that merits a lot of discussion. Why is it almost nonexistent? I remember even in the hay day of crypto fever you'd still have A LOT of folks to provide counterarguments/differing perspectives, but with AI these seem to be rather extremely muted.

bombcar 3y ago
Crypto had more direct ways to scam people so others would speak against it. Those nonplussed by this wave of AI are just yawning.
srslack 3y ago
I'm not against machine learning, I'm against regulatory capture of it. It's an amazing technology. It still doesn't change the fact that they're just function approximators that are trained to minimize loss on a dataset.
- luxcem 3y ago
  > It still doesn't change the fact that they're just function approximators that are trained to minimize loss on a dataset. That fact does not entail what theses models can or cannot do. For what we know our brain could be a process that minimize an unknown loss function. But more importantly, what SOTA is now does not predict what it will be in the future. What we know is that there is rapid progress in that domain. Intelligence explosion could be real or not, but it's foolish to ignore its consequences because current AI models are not that clever yet.
  - tome 3y ago
    > For what we know our brain could be a process that minimize an unknown loss function. Every process minimizes a loss function.
iliane5 3y ago
> Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Like, genuinely curious. Because people have different definition of what intelligence is. Recreating the human brain in a computer would definitely be neat and interesting but you don't need that nor AGI to be revolutionary. LLMs, as perfect Chinese Rooms, lack a mind or human intelligence but demonstrate increasingly sophisticated behavior. If they can perform tasks better than humans, does their lack of "understanding" and "thinking" matter? The goal is to create a different form of intelligence, superior in ways that benefit us. Planes (or rockets!) don't "fly" like birds do but for our human needs, they are effectively much better at flying that birds ever could be.
- srslack 3y ago
  That changes nothing on the hyping of science fiction "risk" of those intelligences "escaping the box" and killing us all. The argument for regulation in that case would be because of the socio-economic risk of taking people's jobs, essentially. So, again: pure regulatory capture.
  - iliane5 3y ago
    There's no denying this is regulatory capture by OpenAI to secure their (gigantic) bag and that the "AI will kill us all" meme is not based in reality and plays on the fact that the majority of people do not understand LLMs. I was simply explaining why I believe your perspective is not represented in the discussions in the media, etc. If these models were not getting incredibly good at mimicking intelligence, it would not be possible to play on people's fears of it.
- api 3y ago
  I have a chain saw that can cut better than me, a car that can go faster, a computer that can do math better, etc. We've been doing this forever with everything. Building tools is what makes us unique. Why is building what amounts to a calculator/spreadsheet/CAD program for language somehow a Rubicon that cannot be crossed? Did people freak out this much about computers replacing humans when they were shown to be good at math?
dmreedy 3y ago
Because it reads as relatively naive and a pretty old horse in the debate of sentience I'm all for villainizing the figureheads of the current generation of this movement. The politics of this sea-change are fascinating and worthy of discussion. But out-of-hand dismissal of what has been accomplished smacks more to me of lack of awareness of the history of the study of the brain, cognition, language, and computers, than it does of a sound debate position.
adamsmith143 3y ago
>Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Because it's wrong and smart people know that.

bombcar 3y ago

Crypto had more direct ways to scam people so others would speak against it. Those nonplussed by this wave of AI are just yawning.

srslack 3y ago

I'm not against machine learning, I'm against regulatory capture of it. It's an amazing technology. It still doesn't change the fact that they're just function approximators that are trained to minimize loss on a dataset.

luxcem 3y ago
> It still doesn't change the fact that they're just function approximators that are trained to minimize loss on a dataset. That fact does not entail what theses models can or cannot do. For what we know our brain could be a process that minimize an unknown loss function. But more importantly, what SOTA is now does not predict what it will be in the future. What we know is that there is rapid progress in that domain. Intelligence explosion could be real or not, but it's foolish to ignore its consequences because current AI models are not that clever yet.
- tome 3y ago
  > For what we know our brain could be a process that minimize an unknown loss function. Every process minimizes a loss function.

iliane5 3y ago

> Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Like, genuinely curious. Because people have different definition of what intelligence is. Recreating the human brain in a computer would definitely be neat and interesting but you don't need that nor AGI to be revolutionary. LLMs, as perfect Chinese Rooms, lack a mind or human intelligence but demonstrate increasingly sophisticated behavior. If they can perform tasks better than humans, does their lack of "understanding" and "thinking" matter? The goal is to create a different form of intelligence, superior in ways that benefit us. Planes (or rockets!) don't "fly" like birds do but for our human needs, they are effectively much better at flying that birds ever could be.

srslack 3y ago
That changes nothing on the hyping of science fiction "risk" of those intelligences "escaping the box" and killing us all. The argument for regulation in that case would be because of the socio-economic risk of taking people's jobs, essentially. So, again: pure regulatory capture.
- iliane5 3y ago
  There's no denying this is regulatory capture by OpenAI to secure their (gigantic) bag and that the "AI will kill us all" meme is not based in reality and plays on the fact that the majority of people do not understand LLMs. I was simply explaining why I believe your perspective is not represented in the discussions in the media, etc. If these models were not getting incredibly good at mimicking intelligence, it would not be possible to play on people's fears of it.
api 3y ago
I have a chain saw that can cut better than me, a car that can go faster, a computer that can do math better, etc. We've been doing this forever with everything. Building tools is what makes us unique. Why is building what amounts to a calculator/spreadsheet/CAD program for language somehow a Rubicon that cannot be crossed? Did people freak out this much about computers replacing humans when they were shown to be good at math?

dmreedy 3y ago

Because it reads as relatively naive and a pretty old horse in the debate of sentience I'm all for villainizing the figureheads of the current generation of this movement. The politics of this sea-change are fascinating and worthy of discussion. But out-of-hand dismissal of what has been accomplished smacks more to me of lack of awareness of the history of the study of the brain, cognition, language, and computers, than it does of a sound debate position.

adamsmith143 3y ago

>Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Because it's wrong and smart people know that.