3 ms·

An interesting fallacy I see emerging is 'this system doesn't have animal-style intelligence, therefore it is lesser' The entire point of neural nets is removi

by RC_ITR 3y ago

An interesting fallacy I see emerging is 'this system doesn't have animal-style intelligence, therefore it is lesser' The entire point of neural nets is removing the biases of animal intelligence and letting the computer brute force solutions during training. We are now learning the early stages of the amazing things that can lead to. From an outside perspective, it's not crazy to argue that symbolic reasoning is a crutch that animals developed since they are imperfect data collectors and limited by their wetware compute resources. Those constraints may not end up being meaningful for these models (to be clear, I don't even mean Transformers per se, we are likely to continue developing really clever model architectures that may look completely difference from what we know today). I am 100% on board with the substance of you argument, but I'd encourage you to really think critically about the implications.

sandworm101 3y ago
Why do you assume that the animal is also not brute forcing the problem? Brute forcing is the basis of evolution. The algorithm running inside the head of the mouse is the survivor of a million iterative generations as the species brute-forced the entire "get to the food" survival problem. I encourage those touting computers as something new to comprehend the concept of deep time, that no matter how many times you run simulations, the natural world has almost certainly run more.
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  > Brute forcing is the basis of evolution. The goal function of animal intelligence is very different from the goal function of model training. > The algorithm running inside the head of the mouse is the survivor of a million iterative generations as the species brute-forced the entire "get to the food" survival problem. That’s my entire point. There are problems beyond “get the food.” Said differently, the fact that computers aren’t good at “get the food” is not a strong criticism of computers. It just means their goal functions are different. I didn’t say computers are “better,” just that they have a fundamentally different approach to problem solving that may end up being better. It will probably end up being complimentary! This isn’t either or; AI is a tool built by humans to expand their own capabilities. > I encourage those touting computers as something new to comprehend the concept of deep time, that no matter how many of times you run simulations, the natural world has almost certainly run more. And yet no animal figures out how to evolve wheels to move faster. The entire point I’m making is that, sure it’s hard to make computers do certain things (like walk on two legs), but there are plenty of different avenues to achieve things. I encourage evolution maximalists to think a lot more about how engineered and complex the world around them is.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Brute forcing is the basis of evolution. The algorithm running inside the head of the mouse is the survivor of a million iterative generations as the species brute-forced the entire "get to the food" survival problem. Here is an interesting corollary: the same is the case with humans. Evolution being what it is, whatever makes the mouse brain tick, and whatever makes our brains tick, must have been relatively easy for evolution to stumble upon and scale up, and it must have been delivering continuous improvements to survival. Otherwise, natural selection wouldn't be able to home in on the solution. In short: the fundamentals of intelligence have to be something simple enough to be discoverable by accident. This is one of the main reasons I believe that LLMs aren't unrelated to how our own brains work. We tried to make a simple yet generic system, somewhat emulating what we see in nature, and then we kept scaling it up, until it surprised us with suddenly gaining capabilities we consider to be advanced cognitive functions. Just how many such structures could be there in nature, so that evolution and AI researchers stumbled on two entirely unrelated ones? It's too much of a coincidence.

by RC_ITR 3y ago

sandworm101 3y ago

Why do you assume that the animal is also not brute forcing the problem? Brute forcing is the basis of evolution. The algorithm running inside the head of the mouse is the survivor of a million iterative generations as the species brute-forced the entire "get to the food" survival problem. I encourage those touting computers as something new to comprehend the concept of deep time, that no matter how many times you run simulations, the natural world has almost certainly run more.

RC_ITR 3y ago
> Brute forcing is the basis of evolution. The goal function of animal intelligence is very different from the goal function of model training. > The algorithm running inside the head of the mouse is the survivor of a million iterative generations as the species brute-forced the entire "get to the food" survival problem. That’s my entire point. There are problems beyond “get the food.” Said differently, the fact that computers aren’t good at “get the food” is not a strong criticism of computers. It just means their goal functions are different. I didn’t say computers are “better,” just that they have a fundamentally different approach to problem solving that may end up being better. It will probably end up being complimentary! This isn’t either or; AI is a tool built by humans to expand their own capabilities. > I encourage those touting computers as something new to comprehend the concept of deep time, that no matter how many of times you run simulations, the natural world has almost certainly run more. And yet no animal figures out how to evolve wheels to move faster. The entire point I’m making is that, sure it’s hard to make computers do certain things (like walk on two legs), but there are plenty of different avenues to achieve things. I encourage evolution maximalists to think a lot more about how engineered and complex the world around them is.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Brute forcing is the basis of evolution. The algorithm running inside the head of the mouse is the survivor of a million iterative generations as the species brute-forced the entire "get to the food" survival problem. Here is an interesting corollary: the same is the case with humans. Evolution being what it is, whatever makes the mouse brain tick, and whatever makes our brains tick, must have been relatively easy for evolution to stumble upon and scale up, and it must have been delivering continuous improvements to survival. Otherwise, natural selection wouldn't be able to home in on the solution. In short: the fundamentals of intelligence have to be something simple enough to be discoverable by accident. This is one of the main reasons I believe that LLMs aren't unrelated to how our own brains work. We tried to make a simple yet generic system, somewhat emulating what we see in nature, and then we kept scaling it up, until it surprised us with suddenly gaining capabilities we consider to be advanced cognitive functions. Just how many such structures could be there in nature, so that evolution and AI researchers stumbled on two entirely unrelated ones? It's too much of a coincidence.