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> LLMs won't get intelligent. That's a fact based on their MO. I kind of agree. However, I see a real possibility that in the near future LLM behaviour would b

> LLMs won't get intelligent. That's a fact based on their MO. I kind of agree. However, I see a real possibility that in the near future LLM behaviour would be practically indistinguishable from intelligent/sentient behavior. And at that point we (or at least I) are facing some really interesting/difficult questions, namely how do you know an intelligent looking thing actually is intelligent (or sentient). How do you prove me you/LLM are/aren't a philosophical zombie? How we are supposed to treat very much intelligent/sentient looking things when we are not sure if they are sentient/intelligent or not? Let's face it, lots of people are dumb as rock (too often very much me included). Why we should be able to treat something badly just because we think we know they can't be intelligent, even if they walk , look and quack like intelligent duck? I personally have started to think that the behavior of humans should be judged by the behaviour, not the target. If you want to behave like an asshole towards a teddy bear, then you most likely are an asshole.

savolai 3y ago
It seems to me that the real question here is what is true human intelligence. Ai has made it plain to see, by being able to replicate it so convincingly, that much of what we have considered intelligence has been pattern matching or acting as complex parrots. There is much more to the abilities of human body-mind-emotional-experiential being, but it is only slowly becoming mainstream. (Edit: Of course there are also many analytical skills that AI cannot match at this point. My point is that we shouldn’t overlook any area of human capacity.) One salient question in this is: will we reach a level of intelligence where we become beings capable of actual collaboration that doesn’t waste so much effort in conflicts, or one that is capable of living in harmony within its environment? What capabilities of awareness, trauma work, emotional maturity and self reflection does this require? What resources hidden inside humanity that we have forgotten do we need to wield? Does AI have something to contribute to this process happening?
- worrycue 3y ago
  > It seems to me that the real question here is what is true human intelligence. IMHO the main weakness with LLMs is they can’t really reason. They can statistically guess their way to an answer - and they do so surprisingly well I will have to admit - but they can’t really “check” themselves to ensure what they are outputting makes any sense like humans do (most of the time) - hence the hallucinations.
  - NumberWangMan 3y ago
    Apparently GPT-4 is getting pretty good at knowing when it's wrong: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-26-fine-tuning-time#%C2%A7gpt-real-this-time https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-26-fine-tuning-time#%C2%A7g... (They asked GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 "are you sure" to see if it would change its answer, both when the original answer was right, and when it was wrong)
    - worrycue 3y ago
      Does it do that because it can check it’s own reasoning? Or is it just doing so because OpenAI programmed it to not show alternative answers if the probability of the current answer being right is significantly higher than the alternatives?
      - NumberWangMan 3y ago
        I don't know. I don't think anyone is directly programming GPT-4 to behave in any way, they're just training it to give the responses they want, and it learns. Something inside it seems to be figuring out some way of representing confidence in its own answers, and reacting in the appropriate way, or perhaps it is checking its own reasoning. I don't think anyone really knows at this point.
  - naasking 3y ago
    As the other poster said, they can check themselves but this requires an iterative process where the output is fed back in as input. Think of LLMs as the output of a human's stream of consciousness: it is intelligent, but has a high chance of being riddled with errors. That's why we iterate on our first thoughts to refine them.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      Why do we have to feed the input back? Why doesn’t it do it itself? Maybe it’s because it can’t tell when it’s wrong and needs to “try again”, and we have to do it for them.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I'm getting suspicious that there is a bit of a blind spot in understanding the world and the usefulness of what we call intelligence, as Noval Yuah Harari says, intelligence is overrated. Look at what we've done to the planet and our environment we have fucked it properly, yet we consider ourselves to be intelligent? Could it be that intelligence is overrated and discovery of new ideas / thing is underrated? Our egos tell us it's intelligence that makes us special and creative and awesome but maybe most of the special stuff is already there for us to find and we conflate discovery with extrapolation. Maybe knowledge and experience are the "important bits" of intellect. Example: Einstein didn't really invent anything, he discovered things about the world that blew our mind and changes our lives. Yes he was a great thinker and a courageous soul to go against the grain and he had the balls to be open minded enough to discover new things. We obviously believe Einstein to be intelligent but was he just a great explorer ? I have a similar attitude towards technological progress, yes we've done amazing things but fundamentally the air we breathe, the water we drink and the beauty we are subjected too when looking at a sunset are taken for granted while we stare at our phones.
  - NumberWangMan 3y ago
    What we've done to the planet is perhaps less a consequence intelligence, more a consequence of multi-polar traps. Though it's in our collective self-interest to protect the planet, it's in our individual self interest to ignore the problem / prepare so that our own children can "weather the storm". It kinda depends on how much you care about people across the world and future generations. But yeah, if humans were more intelligent, we probably would have sorted all this out by coming up with better coordination mechanisms, and by overcoming our tribal tendencies more effectively.
    - Teever 3y ago
      All of this can be boiled down to the simple maxim: "Stupid is as stupid does."
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      But, if we were more intelligent, we might have raped the earth much faster and much harder too? I see this too often, more intelligence = positive outcomes, but no, some of the smartest people ever put their intellect towards stupid causes, such as oil exploration and AI to capture peoples attention. I hope you're right though and I'm wrong ;)
- coldtea 3y ago
  >One salient question in this is: will we reach a level of intelligence where we become beings capable of actual collaboration that doesn’t waste so much effort in conflicts, or one that is capable of living in harmony within its environment? That's more about ethics and an wish for moral behavior and conflict aversion, than about intelligence. Intelligence (human and AI) could just as well opt for conflict and evil, if this helps it get the upper hand for its own private goals and interests. Simply put, the interests of the collective, are not necessarily the interests of the individual intelligence. (Even assuming there was a single, easy to agree upon, "interest of the collective" for most problems).
  - savolai 3y ago
    Not sure how being able to reason about good behaviour in an effective manner that's collectively beneficial isn't in the domain of intelligence. We have moral philosophy as an academic discipline, after all. Human brains develop in interrelation. Much, if not all of our intelligence gets developed in relation to other humans and beings.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >Not sure how being able to reason about good behaviour in an effective manner that's collectively beneficial isn't in the domain of intelligence. That's neither here nor there. Having the intelligence "to reason about good behaviour in an effective manner that's collectively beneficial" doesn't mean you're constrained to reason and act only on that, and not also able to reason and act on behavior which is beneficial to you to the detriment of others and the collective. And it's pefectly intelligent to follow the latter if you can get away with it, and if the benefit for you is more than your share of the collective benefit alternatives would be. >We have moral philosophy as an academic discipline, after all. And how has that been working out for us? (Not to mention, keyword: academic). >Human brains develop in interrelation. Much, if not all of our intelligence gets developed in relation to other humans and beings. Yes, and a lot of it is devoted to duping and getting the upper hand of those other humans and beings. So?
velvetz 3y ago
Off-topic and might sound strange but I find it intriguing that you wrote behavior and behaviour in these two different forms in the same sentence:)
- coldtea 3y ago
  Quite easy to happen if like many of us you were taugh British English, and then you remember that you're on a US forum, and everybody around you uses the US spelling for things (and you get to read the US variants all the time in other comments).
- beefield 3y ago
  I don't have any excuses but being non native in english having exposure to both British and US english seems to confuse my brain.
js8 3y ago
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from an LLM? Cute, but practically speaking, I would prefer the former.

savolai 3y ago

It seems to me that the real question here is what is true human intelligence. Ai has made it plain to see, by being able to replicate it so convincingly, that much of what we have considered intelligence has been pattern matching or acting as complex parrots. There is much more to the abilities of human body-mind-emotional-experiential being, but it is only slowly becoming mainstream. (Edit: Of course there are also many analytical skills that AI cannot match at this point. My point is that we shouldn’t overlook any area of human capacity.) One salient question in this is: will we reach a level of intelligence where we become beings capable of actual collaboration that doesn’t waste so much effort in conflicts, or one that is capable of living in harmony within its environment? What capabilities of awareness, trauma work, emotional maturity and self reflection does this require? What resources hidden inside humanity that we have forgotten do we need to wield? Does AI have something to contribute to this process happening?

worrycue 3y ago
> It seems to me that the real question here is what is true human intelligence. IMHO the main weakness with LLMs is they can’t really reason. They can statistically guess their way to an answer - and they do so surprisingly well I will have to admit - but they can’t really “check” themselves to ensure what they are outputting makes any sense like humans do (most of the time) - hence the hallucinations.
- NumberWangMan 3y ago
  Apparently GPT-4 is getting pretty good at knowing when it's wrong: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-26-fine-tuning-time#%C2%A7gpt-real-this-time https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-26-fine-tuning-time#%C2%A7g... (They asked GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 "are you sure" to see if it would change its answer, both when the original answer was right, and when it was wrong)
  - worrycue 3y ago
    Does it do that because it can check it’s own reasoning? Or is it just doing so because OpenAI programmed it to not show alternative answers if the probability of the current answer being right is significantly higher than the alternatives?
    - NumberWangMan 3y ago
      I don't know. I don't think anyone is directly programming GPT-4 to behave in any way, they're just training it to give the responses they want, and it learns. Something inside it seems to be figuring out some way of representing confidence in its own answers, and reacting in the appropriate way, or perhaps it is checking its own reasoning. I don't think anyone really knows at this point.
- naasking 3y ago
  As the other poster said, they can check themselves but this requires an iterative process where the output is fed back in as input. Think of LLMs as the output of a human's stream of consciousness: it is intelligent, but has a high chance of being riddled with errors. That's why we iterate on our first thoughts to refine them.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    Why do we have to feed the input back? Why doesn’t it do it itself? Maybe it’s because it can’t tell when it’s wrong and needs to “try again”, and we have to do it for them.
ChatGTP 3y ago
I'm getting suspicious that there is a bit of a blind spot in understanding the world and the usefulness of what we call intelligence, as Noval Yuah Harari says, intelligence is overrated. Look at what we've done to the planet and our environment we have fucked it properly, yet we consider ourselves to be intelligent? Could it be that intelligence is overrated and discovery of new ideas / thing is underrated? Our egos tell us it's intelligence that makes us special and creative and awesome but maybe most of the special stuff is already there for us to find and we conflate discovery with extrapolation. Maybe knowledge and experience are the "important bits" of intellect. Example: Einstein didn't really invent anything, he discovered things about the world that blew our mind and changes our lives. Yes he was a great thinker and a courageous soul to go against the grain and he had the balls to be open minded enough to discover new things. We obviously believe Einstein to be intelligent but was he just a great explorer ? I have a similar attitude towards technological progress, yes we've done amazing things but fundamentally the air we breathe, the water we drink and the beauty we are subjected too when looking at a sunset are taken for granted while we stare at our phones.
- NumberWangMan 3y ago
  What we've done to the planet is perhaps less a consequence intelligence, more a consequence of multi-polar traps. Though it's in our collective self-interest to protect the planet, it's in our individual self interest to ignore the problem / prepare so that our own children can "weather the storm". It kinda depends on how much you care about people across the world and future generations. But yeah, if humans were more intelligent, we probably would have sorted all this out by coming up with better coordination mechanisms, and by overcoming our tribal tendencies more effectively.
  - Teever 3y ago
    All of this can be boiled down to the simple maxim: "Stupid is as stupid does."
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    But, if we were more intelligent, we might have raped the earth much faster and much harder too? I see this too often, more intelligence = positive outcomes, but no, some of the smartest people ever put their intellect towards stupid causes, such as oil exploration and AI to capture peoples attention. I hope you're right though and I'm wrong ;)
coldtea 3y ago
>One salient question in this is: will we reach a level of intelligence where we become beings capable of actual collaboration that doesn’t waste so much effort in conflicts, or one that is capable of living in harmony within its environment? That's more about ethics and an wish for moral behavior and conflict aversion, than about intelligence. Intelligence (human and AI) could just as well opt for conflict and evil, if this helps it get the upper hand for its own private goals and interests. Simply put, the interests of the collective, are not necessarily the interests of the individual intelligence. (Even assuming there was a single, easy to agree upon, "interest of the collective" for most problems).
- savolai 3y ago
  Not sure how being able to reason about good behaviour in an effective manner that's collectively beneficial isn't in the domain of intelligence. We have moral philosophy as an academic discipline, after all. Human brains develop in interrelation. Much, if not all of our intelligence gets developed in relation to other humans and beings.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >Not sure how being able to reason about good behaviour in an effective manner that's collectively beneficial isn't in the domain of intelligence. That's neither here nor there. Having the intelligence "to reason about good behaviour in an effective manner that's collectively beneficial" doesn't mean you're constrained to reason and act only on that, and not also able to reason and act on behavior which is beneficial to you to the detriment of others and the collective. And it's pefectly intelligent to follow the latter if you can get away with it, and if the benefit for you is more than your share of the collective benefit alternatives would be. >We have moral philosophy as an academic discipline, after all. And how has that been working out for us? (Not to mention, keyword: academic). >Human brains develop in interrelation. Much, if not all of our intelligence gets developed in relation to other humans and beings. Yes, and a lot of it is devoted to duping and getting the upper hand of those other humans and beings. So?

velvetz 3y ago

Off-topic and might sound strange but I find it intriguing that you wrote behavior and behaviour in these two different forms in the same sentence:)

coldtea 3y ago
Quite easy to happen if like many of us you were taugh British English, and then you remember that you're on a US forum, and everybody around you uses the US spelling for things (and you get to read the US variants all the time in other comments).
beefield 3y ago
I don't have any excuses but being non native in english having exposure to both British and US english seems to confuse my brain.

js8 3y ago

Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from an LLM? Cute, but practically speaking, I would prefer the former.