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I was having a drunken discussion with the philosophy lecturer a few weeks back. He was making a very similar point. I kept saying it does it really matter? Lac

I was having a drunken discussion with the philosophy lecturer a few weeks back. He was making a very similar point. I kept saying it does it really matter? Lacking a theory of mind and deep insights describes 90% of all perfectly normal people. And perhaps training will be able to "fake it" (he went off on bold tangents about the definitions of this and that), or the language model will be an adjunct to some other model which does have these insights encoded or deducible, much like the human mind does. He wasn't convinced and I was too drunk. But it was basically feeling like: You can't feed carrots to a car like you can a horse, therefore cars are worthless.

bloppe 3y ago
To get into this analogy: this doesn't mean cars are worthless; it just means they're a poor approximation of a horse. Maybe you don't want to approximate a horse. But, if you do want to approximate a horse, don't try to do it with a car. Similarly, if you want to approximate a human, an LLM may be the best we can do right now, but it's hardly a good approximation.
- verytrivial 3y ago
  Well the analogy was more at the introduction of the automobile the people who were familiar with horses were able to point out all the ways that horses were better than cars by some measure. Cars ended up being used in entirely different and arguably more powerful ways. You didn't even need to contradict the people who held the horses in higher reguard. Horses just became irrelevant. It's an incremental value proposition. AI will keep hitting various plateaus, but it's already pretty fucking amazing. It's not going to get worse. And pointing out specifically how it differs from the human mind to me honestly feels like clinging to the wreckage.
dweinus 3y ago
Of course they don't! But I think the most fascinating and exciting part about LLMs is: a sufficiently large model can produce things that look a lot like cognition, without having it at all. That is shocking and suggests maybe AGI is not even goal worth hitting.
- verytrivial 3y ago
  Exactlyyyy-ish. I'm firmly in the camp that believes that there is no magic central kernel to consciousness or intelligence, that it's an emergent property. We are seeing partial emergence now and it's only going to get more complex. Edit: this is may turning to a search for truth and definitions of reality question. When the last person alive is no longer able to tell whether they're speaking to an AI, does it actually matter whether it's true generalized intelligence or just an emergent approximation?

bloppe 3y ago

To get into this analogy: this doesn't mean cars are worthless; it just means they're a poor approximation of a horse. Maybe you don't want to approximate a horse. But, if you do want to approximate a horse, don't try to do it with a car. Similarly, if you want to approximate a human, an LLM may be the best we can do right now, but it's hardly a good approximation.

verytrivial 3y ago
Well the analogy was more at the introduction of the automobile the people who were familiar with horses were able to point out all the ways that horses were better than cars by some measure. Cars ended up being used in entirely different and arguably more powerful ways. You didn't even need to contradict the people who held the horses in higher reguard. Horses just became irrelevant. It's an incremental value proposition. AI will keep hitting various plateaus, but it's already pretty fucking amazing. It's not going to get worse. And pointing out specifically how it differs from the human mind to me honestly feels like clinging to the wreckage.

dweinus 3y ago

Of course they don't! But I think the most fascinating and exciting part about LLMs is: a sufficiently large model can produce things that look a lot like cognition, without having it at all. That is shocking and suggests maybe AGI is not even goal worth hitting.

verytrivial 3y ago
Exactlyyyy-ish. I'm firmly in the camp that believes that there is no magic central kernel to consciousness or intelligence, that it's an emergent property. We are seeing partial emergence now and it's only going to get more complex. Edit: this is may turning to a search for truth and definitions of reality question. When the last person alive is no longer able to tell whether they're speaking to an AI, does it actually matter whether it's true generalized intelligence or just an emergent approximation?