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I mean, this is why philosophical skepticism is a thing. There's hundreds of books written on epistemology. But I think almost none of them would ascribe "know

by lukev 3y ago

I mean, this is why philosophical skepticism is a thing. There's hundreds of books written on epistemology. But I think almost none of them would ascribe "knowledge" to a statistical engine that output propositions of random truth values weighted by how many examples of that proposition it's seen in it's training data. You can view the logprobs in the API and literally watch it choose to say different things based on it's internal dice rolls.

williamcotton 3y ago
What we have that an LLM doesn’t have is a mobile body and other sensory inputs so we can verify knowledge through practice. Knowledge without a feedback mechanism for verification is prone to veer off course. Right now the feedback mechanism is based on human reinforcement. What if we put an LLM in an android’s body and let the machine interact with the world through the same senses that we do?
- lukev 3y ago
  A body may be a necessary condition for epistemological knowledge, but it's certainly not sufficient... most animals are embodied but do not possess propositional knowledge (IMO anyway.) Ultimately though this is all about the definition of words. Humans find the distinction between "true" and "false" to be important and meaningful; animals don't care. AIs don't care (being incapable of caring), but humans care very much about the propositional veracity of statements that AI makes. The important thing is that we're on the same page about what's actually happening with these systems and how they work and don't slip into magical thinking or assume that just because a system is facile with language it automatically has a sense of truth or right or wrong. This is only going to get more complicated as models get more sophisticated.
  - ganzuul 3y ago
    > most animals are embodied but do not possess propositional knowledge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhfl7kasjZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhfl7kasjZc There are a quite a few videos with the same reaction. There does seem to be something going on.

by lukev 3y ago

williamcotton 3y ago

What we have that an LLM doesn’t have is a mobile body and other sensory inputs so we can verify knowledge through practice. Knowledge without a feedback mechanism for verification is prone to veer off course. Right now the feedback mechanism is based on human reinforcement. What if we put an LLM in an android’s body and let the machine interact with the world through the same senses that we do?

lukev 3y ago
A body may be a necessary condition for epistemological knowledge, but it's certainly not sufficient... most animals are embodied but do not possess propositional knowledge (IMO anyway.) Ultimately though this is all about the definition of words. Humans find the distinction between "true" and "false" to be important and meaningful; animals don't care. AIs don't care (being incapable of caring), but humans care very much about the propositional veracity of statements that AI makes. The important thing is that we're on the same page about what's actually happening with these systems and how they work and don't slip into magical thinking or assume that just because a system is facile with language it automatically has a sense of truth or right or wrong. This is only going to get more complicated as models get more sophisticated.
- ganzuul 3y ago
  > most animals are embodied but do not possess propositional knowledge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhfl7kasjZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhfl7kasjZc There are a quite a few videos with the same reaction. There does seem to be something going on.