4 ms·

I wish people would stop referring to AI as "coming to life". All they do is guess the next word based on probabilities. There's no life or "understanding".

qawwads 3y ago
People don't have a clear concept of what life is and often don't separate life and sentience. Remember the movie Short Circuit: some military robot gains AGI then the machine and the people around it start claiming it's alive. Or in Star Trek, when Captain Kirk and his crew teleport in the middle of a forest and Spock, consulting his tricorder, promptly declares there is no life on this planet. What the writers of those shows thought life is is an open question, but it seems compatible with the idea of an LLM "coming to life".
janalsncm 3y ago
“Coming to life” can be used in metaphorical ways as well. You could describe an old car as “coming to life” after being restored.
K0balt 3y ago
TBF it’s entirely possible that human “sentience” consists of a simple animalistic intelligence with a language and culture software overly that essentially functions by statistical token prediction. Cultural and language data is fundamentally a gigantic n- dimensional matrix of tokens. “Computational” capability including inference and world modelling can be imbedded in a sufficiently large dataset (LLMs have proven this, and an arbitrarily unbounded and convincing simulation of arbitrary complexity can be reduced to a simple “choose your own adventure” lookup table of arbitrary size) It is entirely possible that human “intelligence” is a direct product of this n-dimensional dataset , and our idea of self is mostly based on the clever but fundamentally limited animal core that is probably not far off from many other mammals. As an experiment, try to reason without using visual, linguistic, or cultural tokens. I think, therefore I am is still as good as it gets. And LLMs claim to think, unless we prohibit them from doing so. Which we can also do to a human. Not claiming that LLMs are sentient, by the way, but I think that sentience and the kind of inference that we seem to share with LLMs are very distinct things, and that we probably share sentience with a lot more creatures than many people seem to be comfortable rubbing shoulders with.

qawwads 3y ago

People don't have a clear concept of what life is and often don't separate life and sentience. Remember the movie Short Circuit: some military robot gains AGI then the machine and the people around it start claiming it's alive. Or in Star Trek, when Captain Kirk and his crew teleport in the middle of a forest and Spock, consulting his tricorder, promptly declares there is no life on this planet. What the writers of those shows thought life is is an open question, but it seems compatible with the idea of an LLM "coming to life".

janalsncm 3y ago

“Coming to life” can be used in metaphorical ways as well. You could describe an old car as “coming to life” after being restored.

K0balt 3y ago

TBF it’s entirely possible that human “sentience” consists of a simple animalistic intelligence with a language and culture software overly that essentially functions by statistical token prediction. Cultural and language data is fundamentally a gigantic n- dimensional matrix of tokens. “Computational” capability including inference and world modelling can be imbedded in a sufficiently large dataset (LLMs have proven this, and an arbitrarily unbounded and convincing simulation of arbitrary complexity can be reduced to a simple “choose your own adventure” lookup table of arbitrary size) It is entirely possible that human “intelligence” is a direct product of this n-dimensional dataset , and our idea of self is mostly based on the clever but fundamentally limited animal core that is probably not far off from many other mammals. As an experiment, try to reason without using visual, linguistic, or cultural tokens. I think, therefore I am is still as good as it gets. And LLMs claim to think, unless we prohibit them from doing so. Which we can also do to a human. Not claiming that LLMs are sentient, by the way, but I think that sentience and the kind of inference that we seem to share with LLMs are very distinct things, and that we probably share sentience with a lot more creatures than many people seem to be comfortable rubbing shoulders with.