5 ms·

I think you severely underestimate how sophisticated life is. Boston dynamics is trying to make a robot "go towards some stuff you can sense" for more than a d

I think you severely underestimate how sophisticated life is. Boston dynamics is trying to make a robot "go towards some stuff you can sense" for more than a decade, and what these robots can do after all this time doesn't even compare to what a rat can do. It is still several orders of magnitude off. Textual AIs can do text really well. But text is not biology, it is a simple, linear system that _humans_ invented. Identifying food, planning to get it, mapping a habitat, etc... these are very different tasks.

chongli 3y ago
Textual AIs can do text really well. I would argue that even that they can’t do well at all. Look at the training set for a human. Humans learn speech, reading, and writing with a training set so small it’d be a rounding error from zero compared to what they feed into LLMs. Chomsky called this the “poverty of the stimulus” in his argument against behaviourism. Yet LLMs are fundamentally the product of Skinner-style reinforcement learning. And it shows. They have succeeded to a wonderful degree at producing a facsimile of language understanding. But possession of language? Absolutely not!
- alganet 3y ago
  Using AI behavior in an argument about psychology seems like a slippery slope though.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Chomsky didn't talk about AI at all in his argument about human language acquisition. Poverty of the stimulus refers to the very limited language exposure children are given when learning to speak. It's an extremely powerful argument in favour of an innate capacity for language, and more specifically an innate knowledge of grammar, in the human brain.
    - alganet 3y ago
      I see now, thanks!
- cameronh90 3y ago
  Humans have a huge base model trained over billions of years of evolution. It’s impressive how quickly we learn, but it’s arguably comparable to fine tuning an existing model rather than starting from scratch. Conversely, I find it insanely impressive how human-like LLMs have become by doing little more than feeding a vast quantity of reading material into a very basic neural architecture. I wouldn’t have ever believed how successful that approach would be.
  - chongli 3y ago
    The human model isn’t just trained in language though, it’s trained on the world. There’s such a huge amount of tacit knowledge we have about how the world works and how other people work. We have models for recognizing faces and reading body language, emotions, and intent. We can tell when a person is looking at us from across the room and tell that apart from someone looking just over our shoulder at someone else. I think most of what we ascribe to intelligence in LLMs is a kind of textual pareidolia. We infer a mind behind the text because our brains are built to recognize minds. That’s how our theory of mind works. But these LLMs know nothing about the world. They might capture some features of the world as patterns that help them better predict what text to generate for us. But that is not the same as knowledge of the world. They have no sensory contact with the world so they are unable to synthesize true knowledge about it. This is why they are so prone to hallucination.
    - jamiek88 3y ago
      > I think most of what we ascribe to intelligence in LLMs is a kind of textual pareidolia This is a great way of expressing a thought I’ve been unable to fully articulate.
    - kordlessagain 3y ago
      So we are model ensembles, probably capable of real-time training of short term memory. LLMs are maybe a type of mind. They may carry and operate on basic thoughts, ideas, books, pages, sentences, words, letters…. They can probably problem solve and write code that runs sometimes. What they know about the world was told to them through stories, so whatever way we see it, they will too, maybe. I don’t have to imagine anything in mind to process thoughts. All I need is an attention loop.
Mistletoe 3y ago
I often think about how something as simple as a cockroach is miles ahead of any robot that exists with regard to self-sufficiency. It can explore, find food, avoid predators, mate, never get stuck on stuff and tons of other behaviors with a brain and nervous system of only about 1,000,000 neurons. A fruit fly does it with 250k neurons.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I suspect that a neuron is far more complex than a perceptron.
- ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
  Why does a cockroach have 4 times more neurons than a fruitfly? What tasks do the cockroach need to achieve that require more "intelligence" than that of a fruitfly?
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    That’s not how evolution works. A cockroach might have 4x neurons because it just does.
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    This question makes me wonder if larger bodies have more complex physical/mechanical dynamics to solve for. Do physical laws become harder to get along with as your body plan expands? I wonder if that’s a factor.
  - GlickWick 3y ago
    Cockroaches are pretty impressive and live a long time, at least as far as insects go. Fruit flies measure life in the order of hours, but roaches can live for a year or more. I suspect you need a more complex nervous system to assess and survive in an environment as a prey animal for long periods of time, whereas fruit flies can likely just brute force it.
    - Chaosvex 3y ago

chongli 3y ago

Textual AIs can do text really well. I would argue that even that they can’t do well at all. Look at the training set for a human. Humans learn speech, reading, and writing with a training set so small it’d be a rounding error from zero compared to what they feed into LLMs. Chomsky called this the “poverty of the stimulus” in his argument against behaviourism. Yet LLMs are fundamentally the product of Skinner-style reinforcement learning. And it shows. They have succeeded to a wonderful degree at producing a facsimile of language understanding. But possession of language? Absolutely not!

alganet 3y ago
Using AI behavior in an argument about psychology seems like a slippery slope though.
- chongli 3y ago
  Chomsky didn't talk about AI at all in his argument about human language acquisition. Poverty of the stimulus refers to the very limited language exposure children are given when learning to speak. It's an extremely powerful argument in favour of an innate capacity for language, and more specifically an innate knowledge of grammar, in the human brain.
  - alganet 3y ago
    I see now, thanks!
cameronh90 3y ago
Humans have a huge base model trained over billions of years of evolution. It’s impressive how quickly we learn, but it’s arguably comparable to fine tuning an existing model rather than starting from scratch. Conversely, I find it insanely impressive how human-like LLMs have become by doing little more than feeding a vast quantity of reading material into a very basic neural architecture. I wouldn’t have ever believed how successful that approach would be.
- chongli 3y ago
  The human model isn’t just trained in language though, it’s trained on the world. There’s such a huge amount of tacit knowledge we have about how the world works and how other people work. We have models for recognizing faces and reading body language, emotions, and intent. We can tell when a person is looking at us from across the room and tell that apart from someone looking just over our shoulder at someone else. I think most of what we ascribe to intelligence in LLMs is a kind of textual pareidolia. We infer a mind behind the text because our brains are built to recognize minds. That’s how our theory of mind works. But these LLMs know nothing about the world. They might capture some features of the world as patterns that help them better predict what text to generate for us. But that is not the same as knowledge of the world. They have no sensory contact with the world so they are unable to synthesize true knowledge about it. This is why they are so prone to hallucination.
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    > I think most of what we ascribe to intelligence in LLMs is a kind of textual pareidolia This is a great way of expressing a thought I’ve been unable to fully articulate.
  - kordlessagain 3y ago
    So we are model ensembles, probably capable of real-time training of short term memory. LLMs are maybe a type of mind. They may carry and operate on basic thoughts, ideas, books, pages, sentences, words, letters…. They can probably problem solve and write code that runs sometimes. What they know about the world was told to them through stories, so whatever way we see it, they will too, maybe. I don’t have to imagine anything in mind to process thoughts. All I need is an attention loop.

Mistletoe 3y ago

I often think about how something as simple as a cockroach is miles ahead of any robot that exists with regard to self-sufficiency. It can explore, find food, avoid predators, mate, never get stuck on stuff and tons of other behaviors with a brain and nervous system of only about 1,000,000 neurons. A fruit fly does it with 250k neurons.

WalterBright 3y ago
I suspect that a neuron is far more complex than a perceptron.
ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
Why does a cockroach have 4 times more neurons than a fruitfly? What tasks do the cockroach need to achieve that require more "intelligence" than that of a fruitfly?
- ethanbond 3y ago
  That’s not how evolution works. A cockroach might have 4x neurons because it just does.
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  This question makes me wonder if larger bodies have more complex physical/mechanical dynamics to solve for. Do physical laws become harder to get along with as your body plan expands? I wonder if that’s a factor.
- GlickWick 3y ago
  Cockroaches are pretty impressive and live a long time, at least as far as insects go. Fruit flies measure life in the order of hours, but roaches can live for a year or more. I suspect you need a more complex nervous system to assess and survive in an environment as a prey animal for long periods of time, whereas fruit flies can likely just brute force it.
  - Chaosvex 3y ago