44 ms·
Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?
- atleastoptimal 3y agoI wonder when the rate of improvement of SOTA benchmarks will exceed the rate of improvement of irl early childhood cognitive development
- 082349872349872 3y agoJared Diamond mentions several attributes which make a species suitable for domestication. Humans fit all but one: we are almost too altricial to be suitable for economic exploitation. Imagine the contribution to GNP if we in practice, like Bokanovsky* (by Ford!) in fiction, could greatly reduce the 10-30 year lead time currently required to produce new employees... Edit: * cf https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/notes/notes47/notes47.html https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/notes/notes47/notes47.html
- carlossouza 3y agoGreat essay; impressive content. The fact that it's very unlikely for any of the current models to create something that even remotely resembles this article tells me we are very far away from AGI.
- atleastoptimal 3y agodon't underestimate exponentials
- breuleux 3y agoLet's not see exponentials everywhere either. It's not because things seem to be progressing very fast that exponentials are involved. More often than not they are logistic curves.
- dekhn 3y agoor the power of sigmoids to replace exponentials when the exponential peters out.
- mempko 3y agoExactly. Global Warming and species decline/extinction (we are in the 6th mass extinction) all appear to be exponential. The question is, will we have AGI before we destroy ourselves?
- pcthrowaway 3y agoDid you miss the disclaimer at the bottom that both visual artwork and prose were produced by a combination of generative AI tools and creative prompting? The entire seamless watercolor style piece was just a long outpainting
- carlossouza 3y agohahaha that's why I love HN :)
- iwanttocomment 3y agoI read the article, read your comment, went back to review the article, and there was no such disclaimer. If this is /s, whoosh.
- darkwater 3y agoWell, NOW they can
- LASR 3y agoOften the "stochastic parrot" line is used as a reduction on what an LLM truly is. I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even consciousness itself is a next-token predictor. Where the industry is headed - multi-modal models. This really I think is the remaining frontier of LLM <> Human parity. I also have a 15 month old son. It's totally obvious to me that he's definitely learning by repetition. But the sources of training data is much more high bandwidth than whatever we're training our LLMs on. It's been a couple of years since GPT-3. It's time to abandon this notion of "stochastic parrot" as a derogatory. Anyone stuck in this mindset really is going to be hindered from making significant progress in developing utility from AI.
- Probiotic6081 3y ago> I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even consciousness itself is a next-token predictor. Almost every time I'm on hackernews I end up baffled by software engineers feeling entitled to have an unfunded opinion on scientific disciplines outside of their own field of expertise. I've literally never encountered that level of hubris from anyone else. It's always the software people! Consciousness is far from being fully understood but having a body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment are already established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness. Margaret Wilsons paper from 2002 is a good read: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03196322.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03196322.pdf peace
- mirekrusin 3y agoAre you saying that ie. paralyzed people don't have consciousness?
- bena 3y agoFirst of all, paralyzed people do have bodies. And sensorimotor functions. Second of all, it wouldn't matter if individually they did or did not. The species does and now our species has developed consciousness. It's part of the package. If you wanted a counterexample, you should look to plant life. There is some discussion on whether or not plant systems have a form on consciousness. But, then again, plants have bodies at the very least.
- barbazoo 3y agoPeople are not gonna like that they have to scroll so much here :)
- ale42 3y agoUsually I don't, but this one I enjoyed it... also because, it's just pure scrolling, no strange animations that change while you scroll.
- Mattasher 3y agoHumans have a long history of comparing ourselves, and the universe, to our latest technological advancement. We used to be glorified clocks (as was the universe), then we were automatons, then computers, then NPC's, and now AI's (in particular LLM's). Which BTW I don't think is a completely absurd comparison, see https://mattasher.substack.com/p/ais-killer-app https://mattasher.substack.com/p/ais-killer-app
- ChuckMcM 3y agoI always enjoyed the stories of 'clock work' people (robots).
- MichaelZuo 3y agoEach successive comparison is likely getting closer and closer to the truth.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y agoOr each successive comparison is just compounding and reiterating the same underlying assumption (and potentially the same mistake) whether it's true or not.
- finefrenchbrit 3y ago[dead]
- bigDinosaur 3y agoThe jump to 'information processing machines' seems far more correct than anything that came before, I'm curious how you would argue against that? Yes, there are more modern and other interesting theories (e.g. predictive coding) but they seem much closer to cognitive psychology than say, the human brain working like a clock.
- jtr1 3y agoI think the argument is that you need to ask how you are measuring when you say it seems more correct than anything that came before. You may just be describing the experience of swimming in the dominant paradigm
- oh_sigh 3y agoStochastic parrot was coined by bender, gebru, et al, but it was probably "borrowed" from Regina Rini's "statistical parrot", coined 6 months before stochastic parrots hit the scene. https://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#rini https://dailynous.com/2020/07/30/philosophers-gpt-3/#rini
- BD103 3y agoIgnoring the topic of the article, the artwork and design was fantastically done! Props to whoever designed it :)
- readams 3y agoI suspect people will argue about whether AIs are truly conscious or just stochastic parrots even as all human-dominated tasks are replaced by AIs. The AIs will be creating masterwork art and literature personalized for each person better than anything Shakespeare ever wrote or Michaelangelo ever sculpted, but we'll console ourselves that at least we're _really_ conscious and they're just stochastic parrots.
- 101008 3y agoMasterwork is not independent of its time, context, etc. It's hard to say AI will be creating masterwork, especially when focused for each person.
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- lancesells 3y ago> The AIs will be creating masterwork art and literature personalized for each person better than anything Shakespeare ever wrote or Michaelangelo ever sculpted I don't think it will. Art is truth and AI is a golem replicating humanity.
- esafak 3y agoIt depends on what you value in art. Some value the only artifact per se; others the story around it. Unfortunately, I don't see too many complaints that image generators have no human artist behind them.
- lancesells 3y agoI've yet to see too much art from image generators. For sure content, but not art.
- cperciva 3y agoWhen my toddler was first learning to talk, we had some pictures of felines hanging on the walls; some were cats and others were kittens. She quickly generalized; henceforth, both of them were "catten".
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoGood toddler
- djmips 3y agoMy toddler understood that places to buy things were called stores and understood eating - so restaurants were deemed 'eating stores'. And we just went with that for a long time and now they are grown we still call them eating stores for fun sometimes. :)
- liminalsunset 3y agoInterestingly, in Chinese, the actual word for a "restaurant" is often quite literally translated, "meal/food store", or 饭店, and a 店 is just a store.
- jddj 3y agoVery nice. I don't personally follow her all the way to some of those conclusions but the delivery was awesome
- xianshou 3y agoPour one out for the decline of human exceptionalism! Once you get material-reductionist enough and accept yourself as a pure function of genetics, environment, past experience, and chance, this conclusion becomes inevitable. I also expect it to be the standard within a decade, with AI-human parity of capabilities as the key driver.
- dekhn 3y agoWe'll see! I came to this conclusion a long time ago but at the same time I do subjectively experience consciousness, which in itself is something a mystery in the material-reductionist philosophy.
- idle_zealot 3y agoI hear this a lot, but is it really a mystery/incompatible with materialism? Is there a reason consciousness couldn't be what it feels like to be a certain type of computation? I don't see why we would need something immaterial or some undiscovered material component to explain it.
- kaibee 3y agoWell the undiscovered part is why it should feel like anything at all. And this is definitely relevant because consciousness clearly exists enough that we exert physical force about it, so its gotta be somewhere in physics. But where?
- idle_zealot 3y agoWhy does it need to be in physics? What would that look like, a Qualia Boson? It could be an emergent property like life itself. Physics doesn't "explain" life, it explains the physical mechanisms behind the chemical interactions that ultimately produce life by virtue of self-replicating patterns spreading and mutating. There is no Life is physics, and yet we see it all around it because it emerges as a complex result of fundamental rules. My expectation is that experience is emergent from computation that controls an agent and models the world around that agent, and that experience isn't a binary. A tree is more aware than a rock, an ant more than a tree, a squirrel more than an ant, and so on until you reach humans, but there may not be any real change in kind as the conditions for experience become more developed. I guess my real point is that I don't view experience or consciousness as something special or exceptional. My guess is that over time we come to understand how the brain works better and better but never find anything that definitively explains consciousness because it's totally subjective and immeasurable. We eventually produce computers complex enough to behave totally convincingly human, and they will claim to be conscious, maybe even be granted personhood, but we'll never actually know for sure if they experience the world, just like we don't know that other humans do.
- throw0101a 3y ago> But he could understand so much more than he could say. If you asked him to point to the vacuum cleaner, he would. Perhaps worth noting that it is possible to teach infants (often starting at around 9 months) sign language so that they can more easily signal their desires. Some priority recommended words would probably be: * hungry/more * enough/all done (for when they're full) * drink (perhaps both milk/formula and water† gestures) See: * https://babysignlanguage.com/chart/ https://babysignlanguage.com/chart/ * https://www.thebump.com/a/how-to-teach-baby-sign-language https://www.thebump.com/a/how-to-teach-baby-sign-language These are not (AFAICT) 'special' symbols for babies, but the regular ASL gestures for the work in question. If you're not native English-speaking you'd look up the gestures in your specific region/language's sign language: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sign_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sign_languages * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language † Another handy trick I've run across: have different coloured containers for milk and water, and consistently put the same contents in each one. That way the infant learns to grab a particular colour depending on what they're feeling like.
- yojo 3y agoFWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/ I have friends who had much more success with it, but the value will largely depend on your child’s relative developmental strengths. A friend’s son with autism got literally years’ benefit out of the gestures before verbal speech caught up.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoMy kids both picked it up, but my younger was similar. Being able to sign "please" and "all done" helps anyway because "eeess" and "a ya" are what she actually says.
- throw0101a 3y ago> FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/ Could still useful: instead of shouting across the playground on whether they have to go potty you can simply make the gesture with minimal embarrassment. :)
- karmakurtisaani 3y agoNice article, great presentation. However, it's a bit annoying that the focus of the AI anxiety is how AI is replacing us and the resolution is that we embrace our humanity. Fair enough, but at least to me the main focus in my AI anxiety is that it will take my job - honestly don't really care about it doing my shitty art.
- nsfmc 3y agohere's another piece in the issue that addresses your concern https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-consid...
- ryandrake 3y agoMore specifically, I think we're worried about AI taking our incomes, not our jobs. I would love it if an AI could do my entire job for me, and I just sat there collecting the income while the AI did all the "job" part, but we know from history (robotics) that this is not what happens. The owners of the robots (soon, AI) keep all the income and the job goes away. An enlightened Humanity could solve this by separating the income from the job, but we live in a Malthusian Darwinian world where growth is paramount, "enough" does not exist, and we all have to justify and earn our living.
- ketzo 3y agoI mean, I definitely hear (and feel) a lot of worry about AI taking away work that we find meaningful and interesting to do, outside of the pure money question. I really like programming to fix things. Even if I weren’t paid for it, even if I were to win the lottery, I would want to write software that solved problems for people. It is a nice way to spend my days, and I love feeling useful when it works. I would be very bummed - perhaps existentially so - if there were no practical reason ever to write software again. And I know the same is true for many artists, writers, lawyers, and so on.
- sushisource 3y ago
- armchairhacker 3y agoToddlers can learn, LLM "learning" is very limited (fixed-size context and expensive fine-tuning)
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- xigency 3y agoRegarding dismissals of LLM’s on ‘technical’ grounds: Consciousness is first a word and second a concept. And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better than billions of humans worldwide. The software folks have made even more progress than sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists to be able to create an artificial language cortex before we understand our biological mind comprehensively. If you wait until conscious sentient AI is here to make your opinions known about the implications and correct policy decisions, you will already be too late to have an input. ChatGPT can already tell you a lot about itself (showing awareness) and will gladly walk you through its “thinking” if you ask politely. Given that it contains a huge amount of data about Homo sapiens and its ability to emulate intelligent conversation, you could even call it Sapient. Having any kind of semantic argument over this is futile because a character AI that is hypnotized to think it is conscious, self-aware and sentient in its emulation of feelings and emotion would destroy most people in a semantics debate. The field of philosophy is already ripe with ideas from hundreds of years ago that an artificial intelligence can use against people in debates of free will, self-determination and the nature of existence. This isn’t the battle to pick.
- dsign 3y agoExactly. To that I’m going to add that the blood of our civilization is culture (sciences, technology, arts, traditions). The moment there is something better at it than humans, it’s our “horse-moment”.
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- jtr1 3y agoSimplifying greatly, but 1. LLMs “create” these cultural artifacts by recombining their inputs (text, images, etc), all of which are cultural artifacts created by humans 2. Humans also create cultural artifacts by recombining other cultural artifacts. The difference is that they combine another input which we can’t really prove AI has: qualia, the individual experience of being in the world, the synthesis of touch and sound and feeling and perspective. I’m not saying computers can’t have something like it, but it would be so fundamentally different as to be completely alien and unrelatable to humans, and thus (IMO) non-contiguous with human culture.
- Retr0id 3y agoThis is a really beautiful article, and while there are certainly fundamental differences between how a toddler thinks and learns, and how an LLM "thinks", I don't think we should get too comfortable with those differences. Every time I say to myself "AI is no big deal because it can't do X", some time later someone comes along and makes an AI that does X.
- alexwebb2 3y agoThere's a well-documented concept called "God of the gaps" where any phenomenon humans don't understand at the time is attributed to a divine entity. Over time, as the gaps in human knowledge get filled, the god "shrinks" - it becomes less expansive, less powerful, less directly involved in human affairs. The definition changes. It's fascinating to watch the same thing happen with human exceptionalism – so many cries of "but AI can't do <thing that's rapidly approaching>". It's "human of the gaps", and those gaps are rapidly closing.
- allemagne 3y ago"God is dead" is beyond passé in the 2020s, but in the 19th century nobody really needed a "god of the gaps." If a Friedrich Nietzsche equivalent was active today, and let's just say was convinced that AGI was possible, I kind of wonder what generally accepted grand narrative he'd declare dead beyond just human exceptionalism. Philosophy itself?
- NoGravitas 3y agoPhilosophy is already a self-destroying enterprise (it lets you think out to the limits of thought). Eugene Thacker's "The Horror of Philosophy" series is probably the best thorough explanation of this.
- Barrin92 3y agoI honestly don't know where this is supposed to be happening. I have observed the opposite for decades. When Gary Kasparov was beaten by Stockfish, people proclaimed the end of chess and went on AI hyperboles. Same with Watson winning Jeopardy, Alexa, etc. Every time computers outperform humans in some domain this is conflated with deep general progress, panicked projections of replacement and job losses, the end times and so on. People are way faster to engage in reductionism of human capacity and Terminator-esque fantasies than the opposite. Despite the fact that it never happens. It's even reflected in our popular culture. I can barely recall a single work of science fiction in the last 30 years that would qualify as portraying human exceptionalism. AI doomerism, overestimation and fear of machines is the norm.
- sickcodebruh 3y agoOne of my favorite experiences from my daughter’s earliest years was the realization that she was able to think about, describe, and deliberately do things much earlier than I realized. More plainly: once I recognized she was doing something deliberately, I often went back and realized she had been doing that same thing for days or weeks prior. We encountered this a lot with words but also physical abilities, like figuring out how to make her BabyBjorn bouncer move. We had a policy of talking to her like she understood on the off-chance that she could and just couldn’t communicate it. She just turned 5 and continues to surprise us with the complexity of her inner world.
- marktangotango 3y agoWe did this, and I'd add that repeating what they say back to them so they get that feedback is important too. It's startling to see the difference between our kids and their class mates, who's parents don't talk them (I know this from observing at the countless birthday parties, school events, and sports events). Talking to kids is like watering flower, they bloom into beautiful beings.
- raytopia 3y agoReally sweet story.
- dekhn 3y agoI think the position of Gebru, et al, can best be expressed as a form of "human exceptionalism". As a teenager, my english teacher shared this writing by Faulkner, which he delivered as his Nobel Prize speech. I complained because the writing completely ignores the laws of thermodynamics about the end of the universe. """I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking! ...not simply because man alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance."""
- PeterisP 3y agoI don't think that the position of Gebru et al (or even more specifically the stochastic parrot paper) can be dismissed as solely relying on "human exceptionalism". While some of that sentiment arguably is there, the paper does make very valid points about the limitations of what can be learned solely from surface forms without any grounding in reality. This is partially reflected by later observations from training LLMs where we see that the performance of LLMs increases even on purely language tasks when adding extra modalities such as computer code or images, which, in a sense, bring the model closer to different aspects of reality; and we observe that adding tiny quantities of "experimental interaction" through RLHF can bring features that additional humongous amounts of pure surface form training data can't, and it certainly seems plausible that making a qualitative leap further would require some data from actual causal interaction with the real world (i.e. not replay of data based on "someone else's" actions but feedback from whatever action the model currently feels is the most "interesting" i.e. the outcome is uncertain to the model but with potential for surprise data), where relatively tiny amounts of such data can enable learning what large amounts of pure observations can't - just as the hypothetical octopus from the stochastic parrot paper thought experiment.
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- dekhn 3y agoIf you wonder about toddlers, wait til you have teenagers. In fact I've observed (after working with a number of world-class ML researchers) that having children is the one thing that convinces ML people that learning is both much easier and much harder than what they do in computers.
- calf 3y agoI think it's reductivism to assume that neural networks cannot emergently support/implement a non-stochastic computational model capable of explicit logical reasoning. We already have an instance of emergent logic. Animals engage in logical reasoning. Corollary, humans and toddlers are not merely super-autocompletes or stochastic parrots. It has nothing to do with "sensory embodiment" and/or "personal agency" arguments like in the article. Nor the clever solipsism and reductivism of "my mind is just random statistics of neural firing". It's about finding out what the models of computation actually are.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoImagine that for some reason and by some unknown agency, somebody in 1068 could build something that was functionally equivalent to one of the contemporary LLMs of today (it would likely be mechanical and thus slower, but let's just ignore speed because that's mostly a substrate artifact). OK, time to train up our LLM. Oops. Printing not yet invented. Books are scarce, and frequently not copied. We have almost no input data to give to our analog LLM. Will it be of any use whatsoever? I think we can say with a high degree of confidence that it will not. However, contrast a somewhat typical human from the same era. Will they suffer from any fundamental limitation compared to someone alive today? Will there be skills they cannot acquire? Languages they cannot learn? It's not quite so easy to be completely confident about the answer to this, but I think there's a strong case for "no". The data dependence of LLMs compared to human (or ravens) makes a compelling argument that they are not operating in the same way (or, if they are, they have somehow reduced the data dependency in an incredibly dramatic way, such that it may still be reasonable to differentiate the mechanisms).
- gnaritas99 3y agoHumans come on pre-trained hardware. An LLM embodied with senses would have all the data it ever needs starting from a similar pre-training.
- intelkishan 3y agoA common counterargument is that organisms already have information stored in their DNA, which in turn has a noticeable impact on their behaviour. Plus the fact that they receive a large amount of sensory data which is often discounted in such debates.
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- birdman3131 3y agoInteresting article. However it becomes very close to unreadable just after the cliffhanger. Given that they use the word vertigo around the same point it all straightens back up I assume it is an explicit choice but it feels like a very bad choice for anybody with any sort of reading disorder. Very wavy lines of text along with side by side paragraphs with little to differentiate them from each other.
- bibanez 3y agoWhen there's a lot of text that represents distress/anxiety, I just skip it. Call me a bad reader, but I get the gist of it and I think that's more important that the exact details of what's it saying
- famouswaffles 3y agoParaphrasing and summarizing parts of this article, https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/language-machinery https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/artic... Some ~72 years ago in 1951, Claude Shannon released his "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English", an extremely fascinating read now. The paper begins with a game. Claude pulls a book down from the shelf, concealing the title in the process. After selecting a passage at random, he challenges his wife, Mary to guess its contents letter by letter. The space between words will count as a twenty-seventh symbol in the set. If Mary fails to guess a letter correctly, Claude promises to supply the right one so that the game can continue. In some cases, a corrected mistake allows her to fill in the remainder of the word; elsewhere a few letters unlock a phrase. All in all, she guesses 89 of 129 possible letters correctly—69 percent accuracy. Discovery 1: It illustrated, in the first place, that a proficient speaker of a language possesses an “enormous” but implicit knowledge of the statistics of that language. Shannon would have us see that we make similar calculations regularly in everyday life—such as when we “fill in missing or incorrect letters in proof-reading” or “complete an unfinished phrase in conversation.” As we speak, read, and write, we are regularly engaged in predication games. Discovery 2: Perhaps the most striking of all, Claude argues that that a complete text and the subsequent “reduced text” consisting of letters and dashes “actually…contain the same information” under certain conditions. How?? (Surely, the first line contains more information!).The answer depends on the peculiar notion about information that Shannon had hatched in his 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (hereafter “MTC”), the founding charter of information theory. He argues that transfer of a message's components, rather than its "meaning", should be the focus for the engineer. You ought to be agnostic about a message’s “meaning” (or “semantic aspects”). The message could be nonsense, and the engineer’s problem—to transfer its components faithfully—would be the same. a highly predictable message contains less information than an unpredictable one. More information is at stake in (“villapleach, vollapluck”) than in (“Twinkle, twinkle”). Does "Flinkle, fli- - - -" really contain less information than "Flinkle, flinkle" ? Shannon concludes then that the complete text and the "reduced text" are equivalent in information content under certain conditions because predictable letters become redundant in information transfer. Fueled by this, Claude then proposes an illuminating thought experiment: Imagine that Mary has a truly identical twin (call her “Martha”). If we supply Martha with the “reduced text,” she should be able to recreate the entirety of Chandler’s passage, since she possesses the same statistical knowledge of English as Mary. Martha would make Mary’s guesses in reverse. Of course, Shannon admitted, there are no “mathematically identical twins” to be found, but and here's the reveal, “we do have mathematically identical computing machines.” Those machines could be given a model for making informed predictions about letters, words, maybe larger phrases and messages. In one fell swoop, Shannon had demonstrated that language use has a statistical side, that languages are, in turn, predictable, and that computers too can play the prediction game.
- westurner 3y agoLanguage acquisition > See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition Phonological development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_development Imitation > Child development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitation#Child_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitation#Child_development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33800104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33800104 : > "The Everyday Parenting Toolkit: The Kazdin Method for Easy, Step-by-Step, Lasting Change for You and Your Child" https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/g/11h7dr5mm6&hl=en-US&q=The+Everyday+Parenting+Toolkit:+The+Kazdin+Method+for+Easy,+Step-By-Step,+Lasting+Change+for+You+and+Your+Child&kgs=4b6cd4b0fdf5bc04&shndl=17&source=sh/x/kp/osrp/2&entrypoint=sh/x/kp/osrp https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/g/11h7dr5mm6&hl=en-US&q... > "Everyday Parenting: The ABCs of Child Rearing" (Kazdin, Yale,) https://www.coursera.org/learn/everyday-parenting https://www.coursera.org/learn/everyday-parenting > Re: Effective praise and Validating parenting [and parroting]
- gumballindie 3y agoProbably, if they suffer from developmental issues. People are anything but, no matter how much deities of the gullible want to make you think they are.
- johnea 3y agoWow, it really seems a trend that people are unable to understand/contemplate reality outside of an internet meme. Beleive it or not, reality exists outside of anything you ever read in a whitepaper...
- dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv 3y agohttps://archive.is/AUOPt https://archive.is/AUOPt
- throwaway789394 3y ago[dead]
- csours 3y agoSo what are GPTs missing? I've got: - Falsifiability - am I saying something false? Some products have an output checker, but it's a bolt on at this time for unacceptable output, which is not the same thing as falsifying. - Agency - much ink already spilled - Context Window size (too small, or need to summarize parts of the context to fit in context window, and know where to go back to for full context) - Directed Self-Learning (I'm sure there are things like this that people may point out, but some kernel of self-learning isn't there yet)
- chewxy 3y agoThe GPTs are good at interpolative and extrapolative generalization, owing to the manifold of the training data. They can't do abstractive, inductive, abductive generalizations. And those are the more common forms of generalizations that humans can do.
- ganzuul 3y agoYou are an evolutionary being, part of a much greater process than the process in your head. Your mind extends beyond your body and even if your mind was frozen in time like an LLM it would still be alive because it remains in a living environment. Like so the Earth is alive and the universe would not be complete without you. Rest easy, little bird. One day you will spread the wings of your soul and the wind will do the rest.
- Vecr 3y ago> Like so the Earth is alive and the universe would not be complete without you. That's a definitional argument, there is very little actual meaning there. The argument can't discriminate between a baby and a nuclear explosion destroying Manhattan.
- ganzuul 3y agoThe part about your mind being frozen in time is a lot to take in. It is reflected in concept by spreading your wings and letting the wind alone do the work of flight. This defines a transcendence of mortal concerns and ascending to eternity so it doesn't need to treat a baby and a bomb in a city differently. When we attempt to find peace with AI this is qn appropriate universe of discourse.
- Vecr 3y agoI don't have a problem with the "frozen in time" thing, as I have a reasonably good understanding of context windows, the feed-forward nature of the next token predictor, and information erasing computation. I agree that you would still be alive, but I'm not sure being in a "living environment" has any bearing on that.
- ganzuul 3y agoFor a personality construct it could be comforting.
- uoaei 3y agoNo because your toddler has vision, audio, and touch sensors attached in order to correlate language use with 3D physical phenomena. Additionally, it has the ability to connect causal explanations of those phenomena with experiments it can perform to test or reject those explanations. And a brain composed of neurons that is exceptionally good at associative learning. LLMs have none of these features.
- andersrs 3y agoWith AI devaluing human creativity and thought I wonder what is left to be proud of? One's body? It seems like humans will be valued more based on their looks than anything else. Apps like Tinder, Instagram, OnlyFans have already been pushing in this direction but AI will take it further and devalue the one valuable trait that the less attractive people could compete on. AI will also compete with porn but the tech for replacing physical human bodies is nowhere near as advanced. The winners will be attractive women and maybe plumbers. The losers will be everyone else but especially men.
- phist_mcgee 3y agoHairdressers and telephone sanitisers will eventually get the last laugh.
- m3kw9 3y agoIs like a stochastic parrot but it’s so much more than a LLM is that’s what he’s asking
- m3kw9 3y agoArtificial intelligence disrupting human intelligence, who would have thought?
- fallingfrog 3y agoThis is not, not, not good. How am I going to convince my 8 year old that it’s worthwhile to learn to draw if an ai can do it for her? Or how to code or play a musical instrument? These skills take decades to perfect. And that means to maintain them they need to be useful and necessary for society. Look: when a factory is outsourced to a different country, the people who worked there have no way to pass on their skills. In one generation the community knowledge is gone and if you move the factory back, you’re starting from scratch. Technology can be lost. It’s an emergent thing that comes from clusters of people doing the same thing and learning from each other. If we stay on the path we are on: only hobbyists will be able to do these things, human effort will be unnecessary, and our minds will degrade and cease to be any use. Despite decades of Hollywood warning us of terminators and Hal 2000, the ai’s don’t need to attack us or try to kill us off to defeat us. They can destroy us just by trying to help.
- telepathy 3y agoNo, your toddler has qualia
- sublinear 3y agono
- burrish 3y agoreal
- mempko 3y agoLLMs are like human minds the same way airplanes are like birds. Both birds and airplanes can fly, but very differently. Birds can land on a dime, airplanes can't. Airplanes can carry a lot more weight and go faster. Similarly LLMs can do things humans can't. No human has as much knowledge about the world as a typical LLM model. However, an LLM model can't generalize outside it's training set well (recent Deep Mind research). LLM doesn't have a memory outside it's input. LLM isn't Turing complete (has fixed amount of steps and always terminates). We are building airplanes, not birds. That much is obvious.
- omoide 3y ago> We are building airplanes, not birds. That much is obvious. It does to me as well, but reading the comments here, it doesn't seem that obvious to many people.
- jeswin 3y ago> A stochastic parrot, as described in a seminal paper [1] .... A bit of an exaggeration. The paper reads like a long blog post to me. [1]: https://s10251.pcdn.co/pdf/2021-bender-parrots.pdf https://s10251.pcdn.co/pdf/2021-bender-parrots.pdf
- mattigames 3y agoMonkeys with anxiety find a way to make rocks and lighting do what only they could do before, the monkeys are severely shocked by this development, they fear how soon until they can make it can do everything only they can do as of now, as usual with every new anxiety source these monkeys like to project mysticism and philosophical ramifications into it.
- gniv 3y ago> A toddler has a life, and learns language to describe it. An L.L.M. learns language but has no life of its own to describe. That's an interesting insight that seems true for now. Are there attempts to create LLMs that "have a life"?
- _nalply 3y agoI am a father and this story touches me a lot. I have two boys not toddlers anymore. Both go to school. The older one told me laughingly: "That's funny, there's no Father Nature, but Mother Nature!". The younger one learnt yesterday not to touch a cake even if I didn't lock it away. I said: "Tomorrow this cake is for you and for your brother. If you eat it today, you won't have cake tomorrow." This said, there's an important difference between LLMs and humans: Humans have instincts. The most important ones seem to be the set of instincts concerning an immaterial will for life and a readiness to overcome deadly obstacles. In other words: LLMs don't have the primitive experience of what is life. This might change in future. A startup might put neural networks into soft robots and then in a survival situation. Robots that don't emerge functioning are wiped, repaired and put back. In other words, they establish an evolutional situation. After careful enough iterations of curation they have things that "understand" life or at least better than current LLM instantiations. EDIT: typo
- misja111 3y agoI see instincts as something like a pre-installed ROM. It shouldn't be too hard to add something like that to LLM. In fact, I think this is being done already, for instance by hardwiring LLM to not have racist or sexual conversations. To make LLM's more similar to humans, we'd need to hardwire them with a concept of 'self', and, importantly, the hardwired idea that their self was unique, special, and should survive. But I think the result would be terrible. Imagine a LLM that would be begging not to be switched off, or worse, trying to subtly manipulate its creators.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NoGravitas 3y agoHumans and other animals have not only instincts, but also the experience of interaction with the material world. As a result, human language isn't free-floating. The relationships between things in the world we often observe both inside and outside of language, and there's a tie between language as humans use it, and the world. That's not true for LLMs, because they only have language. For a better explanation and responses to objections, consider the National Library of Thailand thought experiment: https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-the-national-library-of-thailand-f2bf761a8a83 https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-t...
- Anotheroneagain 3y ago[flagged]
- burrish 3y agook ?
- throw4847285 3y agoI'm shocked (Ok, not that shocked) that nobody has commented on how beautiful the art is in this piece. The cartooning is very abstract, which makes the gut punch of those final few panels so much more powerful. The little bits of animation are very evocative. The piece reminds me a lot about Scott McCloud's Infinite Canvas, and how refreshing it still feels when the internet gives us legitimately radical sequential art.
- MattyRad 3y agoAgreed. This was evocative and emotional, beautifully capturing the existential despair and FUD of the LLM apparatus. It makes me happy to have near certainty that a human wrote this piece- even if were to be AI assisted!