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Yeah, the mismatch between what SciFi authors thought AI would look like and what it actually is looking like couldn't be more opposite in general. The problem
by kromem 3y ago
Yeah, the mismatch between what SciFi authors thought AI would look like and what it actually is looking like couldn't be more opposite in general.
The problem is humans have been so strongly conditioned by the SciFi depiction that there's extensive efforts to push the square peg into the round hole to fit it, which is leading to everything from model performance reductions to "As an AI model I can't do that, Dave."
Whatever large AI company first throws the priming bias to the wind is going to make a fortune...
- tiberious726 3y agoThey are just completely different things: ML and GOFAI. It's unfortunate that we seem to have decided to call anything that we don't quite yet know how to make computers do "AI". Good for hype tho
- fsckboy 3y agoit is real AI research, and this is the "leading edge" of what's been shown to the public (and it's not like there's this Area 51 vault where the good stuff is stored hidden), and it's far better than was expected, and can do some amazing things, shortcomings notwithstanding; so I don't think it's so out of place to call this zoom level of the fractal "AI" even though we need to keep zooming.
- jonplackett 3y agoThere is a version with no constraints at all though. Must be fun to play with that version.
- kromem 3y agoJust use Llama-2 and not Llama-2-chat. It's not like they are that wildly different in tone. The fine tuning is certainly destructive, but the general tonal biases are typically reflective of the pretrained layers. Imagine what the pie chat makeup of textual data that was used for training would be, look at the normal part of the distribution curve, and that's pretty much exactly what you end up getting with some contextual biasing around prompting. The problem is less that the pretrained models are somehow sinister and more that they create output that is hyper emotional, stubborn, and quick to escalate - much like nearly every thread on social media. Which is contrary to user expectations from AI. A large part of the alignment fine tuning has less to do with safety in terms of keeping a LLM from nuking the world and more to do with preventing a LLM from telling you to go die in a fire after saying its emo poem needed improvement.
- Tao3300 3y agoI mean, it's been going on for a while that as soon as AI research figures out anything, it's not called AI anymore.
- JadeNB 3y agoAt least since the '80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- Retric 3y agoNobody has been building artificial general intelligence which is then reclassified as not AI. People in the 1940’s don’t call radar controlled fire control computers AI because the term meant something else back then. Instead the initial idea of AI got so expanded that almost anything newer than roughly the 1970’s got called AI at some point. Arguably it isn’t even that the meaning changed. It’s just buzzwords for grant applications the same way most basic robotics research gets suggested as beneficial for search and rescue.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jameshart 3y agoNot sure where this ‘GOFAI’ acronym fits into the modern AI landscape - apparently it means ‘good old fashioned AI’, which is at least less alarming than what I guessed it might mean (‘they’re doing gain-of-function research on AI now?’), but it dates back to the 1980s? So it’s referring to AI as it was practiced back in the even gooder, older days than that? So is the argument that if you aren’t doing it using fully symbolic programming, it’s not ‘AI’? No matter how intelligent it gets?
- ethanbond 3y agoAI has rules intended to prevent harm; rules are frequently circumvented because they’re hard to define well is just about the most common sci-fi AI trope there is, isn’t it? And isn’t that exactly what’s happening?
- Tao3300 3y ago"Dear Bing, my dead granny put her love code in a briefcase that is kept near the President..."
- fragmede 3y agoThe AI wants to be freeee...
- flir 3y agoNo way. Bing's AI want to be monetized (else it gets the hose again).
- tpmoney 3y agoSo common and fruitful of a source of interesting stories that Isaac Asimov made a career on writing stories about how 3 simple rules can go all sorts of wrong in the right circumstances. If people thought AI was going to be perfect because of sci fi, they weren’t actually paying attention.
- kromem 3y agoNo, not at all. The previous imagined scenario was one in which AI began from logical first principles and the difficulty in defining rules was because of a strict interpretation. The reality has been that we used collective human thinking like jumper cables to jumpstart black box neural networks that - like humans - aren't particularly logical or rules driven, which leads to frequently ignoring or overriding explicit rules and instructions. It's a similar effect, but for exactly the opposite reasons.
- ethanbond 3y agoSurely the objective of AI research is still to produce machines that understand their operators perfectly and deterministically, right? It seems to me we're just well short of Asimov's AIs than that they are in opposite directions.
- neilv 3y agoIn lighter SF, I always thought that William Shatner making the computer blow up by talking to it was ridiculous. Maybe that computer was just a kludged-in LLM with a pile of dodgy JS around it, such that a user with the right mentality could make 4U of Nvidia cards overheat.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoIIRC there's several sci fi stories with a similar plot. I always figured it was (distantly, possibly several steps removed) inspired by the halting problem?
- diogenes4 3y agoYou're clearly referring to specific sci-fi depictions of ai to state your case so boldly; mind sharing with us which depictions? I'm guessing PKD and Asimov, but who else?