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Firstly, if humans created sapience, we created it with all the interacting elements that evolution used plus all the things that we used. Secondly, maybe sapi
by seanhunter 3y ago
Firstly, 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