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If LLMs are an understanding of the world it would mean humans in a few decades found a way to create sapience with many orders of magnitude fewer interacting e
by causality0 3y ago
If LLMs are an understanding of the world it would mean humans in a few decades found a way to create sapience with many orders of magnitude fewer interacting elements than evolution did. I find that doubtful, at least in light of the fact every other way we've replicated biological computation requires many more computational elements.
- XorNot 3y agoWhy would that be surprising though? The natural world climbs up to understanding from a severe disadvantage. Chemicals don't understand the world - the natural world had to be randomly build every bit of its systems from scratch, before it could produce a succinct descriptive system for it. LLMs on the other hand start out with a succinct descriptive system, and translate that to the world of chemicals and photons via some very complicated naturally evolved systems.
- seanhunter 3y agoFirstly, if humans created sapience, we created it with all the interacting elements that evolution used plus all the things that we used. Secondly, maybe sapience isn't as big of a deal as we thought compared with all the other things that evolution did. Remember that biological entities have to figure out survival, reproduction etc. Sapience emerges as a byproduct but the selective pressure is towards those things so sapience is only selected for to the extent that it also moves forward those other goals. By contrast, LLM training is just focussed on the task of making the model better. The model doesn't have to figure out how to feed itself, ward off predators, not accidentally die in the myriad ways things die, reproduce itself etc. It's way more specific. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that the complexity would be lower given it's not trying to achieve nearly as much.
- furyofantares 3y agoAlright, I give. What the heck is "sapience"?
- seanhunter 3y agoGenerally people use that word to mean "wisdom" or at least "some reasoning ability distinct from what animals have". Edit to add: From a personal perspective I don't see any reason to think humans have qualitatively different reasoning abilities from animals, or a unique "soul" or anything like that, so the term "sapience" doesn't really have a special resonance with me like it might for someone who thinks those things. That may affect some judgements here I don't know.
- coldtea 3y agoYou know, the capacity of though/intelligence/understanding the world? As in "homo sapiens" (same latin root)
- furyofantares 3y agoSounds by a wide margin even less well defined than AGI or sentience
- pzo 3y agoGood point. I would even add humans brain have to process a lot of sensory input: video, audio, touch, smell, taste. And communication channel for human is very inefficient - you have to translate your thoughs to language then to audio then someone alse doing the same in reverse. If you texting you have to slowly type something then someone else need to do text recognition in their brain. LLM are like handicapped humans that are visual, hearing impaired, with long covid no taste or smell and can focus only thinking and very efficient communication channel as text/tokens sent via wire on the internet
- ilaksh 3y agoGPT-4 can understand images. That feature is just not released to the general public yet.
- seanhunter 3y agoYes. One of the astonishing examples in the paper I quoted earlier [1] is an image produced in response to the prompt "Produce Javacript code that creates a random graphical image that looks like a painting of Kandinsky”. The response by GPT-4 does kind of look quite a lot like a Kandinsky. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf
- jiggawatts 3y agoElephant and whale brains are both bigger than human brains, but they're less intelligent than us. Much of the volume of their brains goes towards controlling a larger body. Conversely, some birds have much smaller brains than any primate but can learn to solve simple puzzles and problems.
- whimsicalism 3y agoIf humans actually went to the moon, it would mean that humans in a few decades found a way to access a niche that nature never did. In all seriousness, it's interesting all of these dualisms we like to hold on to. Humans are part of nature. It is unsurprising that further sapience would branch off from an already sapient race as opposed to re-emerge elsewhere.