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> The fact that GPT-4 can pass his tests says much more about the tests than about the capabilities of GPT-4. "Deep Blue beating Kasparov shows that ultimately

• deleted 3y ago
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• carschno 3y ago
  > What is the real criterion for a machine to be considered intelligent? This is actually the core of the debate. The answer is that there is no real criterion because we do not understand intelligence. Or, put differently, the one-dimensional understanding of intelligence we typically entertain is a simplification. This is very inconvenient so we just pretend intelligence was a well-defined concept. That in turn leads to all kinds of confusion and pointless arguments as you have pointed out.
  • palata 3y ago
    You mean IQ tests are not meaningful? Many will be disappointed :).
    • melagonster 3y ago
      this is a famous common misunderstanding, people is trying to stop it spread, but the work is difficult.
    • lamp987 3y ago
      They strongly predict various other things, therefore they are meaningful. Them being imperfect does not imply them being meaningless. That would be a low-IQ leap in logic, so to speak.
  • belorn 3y ago
    While there is not definitive criterion for intelligent there is a lot of intuition. For example, I can find a book to be very intelligently written, but at the same time the book itself is not intelligent. No matter how clever answers it has to complicated questions, the book is still just an inanimate object created by a human. The definition of intelligence has to be stretched quite far in order to bypass our intuition on this. We see similar situations when people anthropomorphize animals, or ask questions like do plants have feelings. Biology research can look at neurons and DNA sequences and find all kind of similarities to humans, but it still requires a bit of a jump when we start applying human philosophy concepts to non-humans. I find it easier to look at it as metaphors. ChatGPT has intelligence similar to how the planet has an intelligence , or how the internet is like a brain with every single connected device their neurons.
  • pulvinar 3y ago
    Is the average human intelligent? If I had to choose between an average human or GPT4 to help me with my work, I would choose GPT4. Seems many people think of intelligence like they think of magic. Once they learn how the trick is done, it’s no longer magic.
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    • skepticATX 3y ago
      Are you sure about that? GPT-4 falls apart on many tasks that humans find trivial, such as planning. Intelligence is multi-faceted and quite frankly the average technologists understanding of human cognition is quite poor. Intelligence is not just information retrieval.
      • pulvinar 3y ago
        I'm sure, because I specifically chose GPT-4 because of its intelligence. Otherwise it wouldn't be of use to me-- I already have a slew of tools and sources available, but it takes more than that to pick out just the right solution and present it. It also quite good at planning its replies, that I see.
  • laratied 3y ago
    IMO we first need to clean up our language and precisely define the word intelligence so we all know what we are even talking about. I would imagine we actually understand intelligence but in ordinary language it is a placeholder for a number of different meanings and concepts. Same problem with "consciousness", same problem with "sentience". I think when we say we don't understand these words it is really that they can't be understood as they are used in ordinary language because they can't objectively mean all the values people assign to these words. In the face of AI, why would we not have to further define and expand our language for communication purposes? That actually seems obvious if you think about it for 2 seconds.
    • JdeBP 3y ago
      "sentience" has an additional problem that science fiction authors conflate it with "sapience". I suspect that some influential science fiction editor made a mistake early on and it stuck. Outwith science fiction, I've less commonly come across the conflation, and people generally use the dictionary meanings, more in accord with the Latin roots, of "sentient" meaning being capable of sensation/feeling and "sapient" meaning being capable of intelligent thought.
• hutzlibu 3y ago
  "What is the real criterion for a machine to be considered intelligent?" For me, AGI. Intelligence is a very complex problem, we tended to meassure it by extreme outliers, evolution did not optimize fore. Like abstract math. Machines clearly are better at everything with calculations. A criterium we reserved for "intelligence". But "simple" things like understanding what a rock is, are still too hard for AI. They can reproduce and recombine some text snippets about rocks, but they do not understand, what a rock is. Or anything as far as I am aware. So they are clearly useful and do things, we described as intelligenz when humans are doing it. But human intelligence is still superior as it is a general intelligence.
  • p-e-w 3y ago
    > They can reproduce and recombine some text snippets about rocks, but they do not understand, what a rock is. What is the difference between "recombin[ing] some text snippets about rocks", and understanding what a rock is? I'm not asking philosophically. I'm asking how you can tell the two apart. (BTW, transformer LLMs do not operate by recombining text snippets.)
    • palata 3y ago
      > I am not asking philosophically. That is a philosophical question, though... To me, it sounds like this: "How can I prove that I 'exist'? I'm not asking philosophically, I'm just asking how to do it".
  • kingkongjaffa 3y ago
    Your rock thing gets to the heart of the issue, LLM’s are a statistical mimic of what an actual intelligence might say.
    • quickthrower2 3y ago
      An actual intelligence is just a matter of the architecture and compute power though, right?
  • moffkalast 3y ago
• worrycue 3y ago
  > What is the real criterion for a machine to be considered intelligent? What does it have to do for people to not retroactively downplay it by invoking mechanistic pseudo-explanations? When it’s capabilities are no longer a proper subset of an average competent human’s?
  • carlmr 3y ago
    >When it’s capabilities are no longer a proper subset of an average competent human’s? Interesting, I'd say that it's definitely already the case with the current iterations. The average human can't write as well as ChatGPT, or speak as many languages, or translate between them. The average human can't code , even if often subtly wrong, in most programming languages. It's definitely not a proper subset of average human intelligence anymore.
    • worrycue 3y ago
      Good point. My criteria is bad. Technically speaking, Microsoft Excel's capabilities aren't a proper subset of an average competent human's either. Perhaps, When an average competent human's capabilities within their field are a subset of the AI's (for all fields of interest). is a better criteria. Basically if an AI is going to be a doctor, I want it to at least match the average doctor in capability. What I'm concern about are blind spots that the AI might have that the average human (within their field) doesn't. A jetliner pilot AI is worthless even if it can do fighter jet maneuvers with a jetliner but goes schizo if a bird flew in front of it during landing.
• saithound 3y ago
  Err, did you miss the part where I wrote that the post is not meant to imply that ChatGPT is not impressive?! Deep Blue beating Kasparov in chess showcased Deep Blue's capabilities; Deep Blue beating Bryan Caplan would not have showcased these capabilities, despite the capabilities being there. The analogous hypothetical situation would be a Not-so-deep Blue that fails to beat not just Kasparov, but any random chess master with a nonzero Elo score, but manages to beat Bryan Caplan. After his defeat, Caplan would write an article claiming that he's "known to be very good at chess". This would definitely say more about Caplan's chess skill than the chess engine's capabilities. And none of this would imply that chess engines are in any way impossible or unlikely, or that the capabilities are not impressive. Indeed, a chess engine that beat Caplan would have been impressive in 1975, even though we were still very far from Deep Blue or Stockfish at that point.
  • p-e-w 3y ago
    You did write that, but you first wrote that GPT-4's performance says more about the task than about its capabilities. Which is the exact same pattern that has been used to "deal with" advances in AI since forever. And Caplan is a university professor, not a random person. He's not an amateur at giving tests. It's literally (part of) his job. So what happened here is not at all analogous to your chess examples.
    • palata 3y ago
      I would say that the OP is entitled to share their opinion. Which I tend to agree with. Also I would question if the job of a university professor is really to give tests, or rather to teach and conduct research. Tests are just an annoyance (that is deemed necessary). Because one passes the university tests does not mean they necessarily understand the topic very deeply, I think it's pretty obvious. That's actually an interesting point: university students can totally pass exams by "mimicking": not understanding the topic, but solving the exam problems in a way similar to the exercises they learned beforehand. I argue that the test is not perfect at discriminating those who understand from those who mimick impressively well.
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• peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  > What is the real criterion for a machine to be considered intelligent? I reckon not many have ever said that machines can't be intelligent, in any way. I think the most compelling question is: what makes them "human like" intelligent. Passing a multiple choice test is not an actual measure of human intelligence, it's IMO a test of "semantic searching" abilities, that machines can be trained to emulate.
• trabant00 3y ago
  > What is the real criterion for a machine to be considered intelligent? There is no need to come up with a perfect criteria list for human like intelligence. And maybe it is even impossible, as we can only use the rational part of the brain to understand the whole. But when a human like intelligent machine will be here we will all know it without a doubt. It will have the impact of the wheel, the control of fire, things like that. Nobody stood around to argue about how hot things need to get to catch fire or when exactly a wheel becomes a wheel as opposed to a rolling tree trunk when their neighbors where throwing torches on their straw roofs from war chariots. Arguing about definitions, criterion, moving the goal post, etc, is just overthinking. You will drop to your knees with eyes full of tears and mouth wide open when you will experience true AI. That's how you will know.
• lr4444lr 3y ago
  I repeat Djikstra's refrain: asking whether a computer can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim.
  • SanderNL 3y ago
    How does that work? What’s the answer? Submarines certainly partake in whatever aspects of swimming are responsible for traveling in or under water.
• mr_mitm 3y ago
  I recently learned that this moving of the goal post with regards to AI is a known effect, and it's been a thing for at least a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
  • posterboy 3y ago
    Bit of a bland coinage. It's a kind of anchoring, which is a fairly difficult tolic in psychology.
• scotty79 3y ago
  > What is the real criterion for a machine to be considered intelligent? Get a nobel prize or two, then we'll talk.
• thelittleone 3y ago
  Taking these shortcomings a step further, it may not be long before we can't tell reality from simulation, since we've all so plugged in. A friend who lived in the amazon with me for sometime did a diet with datura, a potent psychoactive. He described his experience as one moment sitting in a cafe completely lucid and chatting with friends, then a moment later he is somewhere else altogether, this continued for some time and of course none of it was real despite it beinf indiscerbible to him within that experience. People often lose their sanity with this as a result of inability to find a way back to the old known "reality". With AI and neural link like interfaces... we have interesting times ahead.