2 ms·

Plenty of people I know can't solve quadratic equations or more than 4-5 digits of pi, and nobody claims they're not intelligent. Once again it's a kind of bac

by taneq 3y ago

Plenty of people I know can't solve quadratic equations or more than 4-5 digits of pi, and nobody claims they're not intelligent. Once again it's a kind of backhanded milestone for AI that in less than a year the goalposts have moved from "can it even once hold a half-coherent conversation" to "if anyone can think of a question it can't answer then it's dumb and not AI".

bee_rider 3y ago
It is definitely a nice milestone, for researchers. I do think, though, that one of the rewards of making LLMs promising was the discovery that the bar for “what is useful” for any task is higher than what the average person can do. That could be seen as moving the goalposts, but another way of looking at it is: we’ve finally bothered to install a scoreboard. Like, if a person can’t solve a quadratic equation, they probably just aren’t useful for manipulating equations. Which is fine, of course, the average person is also not a very good hammer or screwdriver. We’re all specialized, the bar for usefulness is probably something more like “how would a person who’s taken an intro college course on this do it.”
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  The goal isn’t to be more or less useful than a person. It’s to expand the capabilities of computers. And computers are exceptionally good at mathematics tasks already. Why do we care if LLMs are good at things that are already exceptionally well done with computers? The point is they’re exceptionally good at things computers to date have been exceptionally bad at. The rest is weird goalpost moving noise - I wouldn’t use ChatGPT to solve a quadratic equation, I would use Mathematica, or any number of numeric libraries and runtimes. But I challenge you to get Mathematica to summarize a book, carry on a conversation, or even call an api based on natural human language without a rigorous specification apriori. These are holy grails of NLP, which is a capability that is enhancing of the existing capabilities offered by computing technologies today.
  - cmpalmer52 3y ago
    What we need are LLMs that can use the tools for mathematics (and other disciplines) that already exist and to write and execute new programs to hopefully solve novel problems, or at least to be able to glue the existing tools together with shells.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Well, this project can use LLMs do decide routes to take then delegates to a path finding algorithm. That’s why it’s interesting IMO. There are increasing number of things that do that. But I would note the LLMs don’t have to use the tools - a new tool can use the LLM, and be the coordinator between tasks to solve. A lot of the challenges folks are struggling with is making a LLM reliably invoke APIs and stuff. I suspect doing that lobotomizes the LLMs just as guard rails and safety does. Better, IMO, is to manage the LLM in an extrinsic framework like this.
glial 3y ago
Agreed, it's apologetics for human intelligence.
- __loam 3y ago
  More like a reasonable response to VC funded hysterics.
  - glial 3y ago
    That too, but this trend has been going on for decades in the field of linguistics. "Language is X," people say. Oh, it turns out that prairie dogs can do X. "Oh, well then language is X-prime!" Turns out parrots can do X-prime. "Oh, umm, maybe language is X-prime-prime! Whatever it is, only humans can do it!"
    - __loam 3y ago
      I find it pretty insane to argue that the human mind isn't somehow exceptional considering we're currently communicating through devices and massive infrastructure require centuries of research produced by those minds.
      - taneq 3y ago
        I don't think anyone's arguing that we're not exceptional at all. After all, those prairie dogs aren't sitting around arguing about whether humans are actually on their level. Really what we're wondering when discussing AI is whether we're exceptional enough to build machines smarter than ourselves? Has the Singularity already happened, and was it us?
      - glial 3y ago
        It's not the status of the human mind we're talking about here, it's definitions of 'language' and 'intelligence.' It seems offensive to some people that those labels might be applied to entities other than humans.
        3y ago

by taneq 3y ago

bee_rider 3y ago

It is definitely a nice milestone, for researchers. I do think, though, that one of the rewards of making LLMs promising was the discovery that the bar for “what is useful” for any task is higher than what the average person can do. That could be seen as moving the goalposts, but another way of looking at it is: we’ve finally bothered to install a scoreboard. Like, if a person can’t solve a quadratic equation, they probably just aren’t useful for manipulating equations. Which is fine, of course, the average person is also not a very good hammer or screwdriver. We’re all specialized, the bar for usefulness is probably something more like “how would a person who’s taken an intro college course on this do it.”

fnordpiglet 3y ago
The goal isn’t to be more or less useful than a person. It’s to expand the capabilities of computers. And computers are exceptionally good at mathematics tasks already. Why do we care if LLMs are good at things that are already exceptionally well done with computers? The point is they’re exceptionally good at things computers to date have been exceptionally bad at. The rest is weird goalpost moving noise - I wouldn’t use ChatGPT to solve a quadratic equation, I would use Mathematica, or any number of numeric libraries and runtimes. But I challenge you to get Mathematica to summarize a book, carry on a conversation, or even call an api based on natural human language without a rigorous specification apriori. These are holy grails of NLP, which is a capability that is enhancing of the existing capabilities offered by computing technologies today.
- cmpalmer52 3y ago
  What we need are LLMs that can use the tools for mathematics (and other disciplines) that already exist and to write and execute new programs to hopefully solve novel problems, or at least to be able to glue the existing tools together with shells.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Well, this project can use LLMs do decide routes to take then delegates to a path finding algorithm. That’s why it’s interesting IMO. There are increasing number of things that do that. But I would note the LLMs don’t have to use the tools - a new tool can use the LLM, and be the coordinator between tasks to solve. A lot of the challenges folks are struggling with is making a LLM reliably invoke APIs and stuff. I suspect doing that lobotomizes the LLMs just as guard rails and safety does. Better, IMO, is to manage the LLM in an extrinsic framework like this.

glial 3y ago

Agreed, it's apologetics for human intelligence.

__loam 3y ago
More like a reasonable response to VC funded hysterics.
- glial 3y ago
  That too, but this trend has been going on for decades in the field of linguistics. "Language is X," people say. Oh, it turns out that prairie dogs can do X. "Oh, well then language is X-prime!" Turns out parrots can do X-prime. "Oh, umm, maybe language is X-prime-prime! Whatever it is, only humans can do it!"
  - __loam 3y ago
    I find it pretty insane to argue that the human mind isn't somehow exceptional considering we're currently communicating through devices and massive infrastructure require centuries of research produced by those minds.
    - taneq 3y ago
      I don't think anyone's arguing that we're not exceptional at all. After all, those prairie dogs aren't sitting around arguing about whether humans are actually on their level. Really what we're wondering when discussing AI is whether we're exceptional enough to build machines smarter than ourselves? Has the Singularity already happened, and was it us?
    - glial 3y ago
      It's not the status of the human mind we're talking about here, it's definitions of 'language' and 'intelligence.' It seems offensive to some people that those labels might be applied to entities other than humans.
      - 3y ago