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I'm shocked; shocked to learn that no innovation is going on at this AI establishment. Mimicry needs information, of which an AI has heaps; but, innovation nee

by kayo_20211030 3y ago

I'm shocked; shocked to learn that no innovation is going on at this AI establishment. Mimicry needs information, of which an AI has heaps; but, innovation needs will, of which it has none. Maybe some day, but not now.

visarga 3y ago
> innovation needs will feedback Innovation needs feedback, otherwise all ML papers would not run evaluations. Humans come up with 100 stupid ideas that fail at eval before stumbling onto a good one. Improving innovation is a matter of putting the AI inside a system that can provide feedback. Remember AlphaGo move 37? The model created feedback by self-play games, and beat all humans at Go - feedback made it really more creative than expert human players. It upturned centuries of strategy. Feedback is also similar to the scientific method. We come up with theories and then test them out. That's how science advances, by validation, not by will. Humans are not magically more capable, we just have better feedback. A few days ago there was a story "Earliest Carpenters: 476k-year-old log structure discovered in Zambia". It took so many years of feedback for humans to evolve from log cabins to LLMs. We had to discover or invent everything in the meantime, it's a slow, cultural process of feedback assimilation into language. And now that same language experiential data is being learned by LLMs, and used contextually to solve problems. Most of our intelligence is either in language or feedback. Language is just our reservoir of past feedback. When AIs will generate their own experience and feedback, which will be targeted to their weak points, they will improve and even surpass humans. Learning from your own mistakes is better than learning from other people's mistakes which might be unrelated to your issues.
- kayo_20211030 3y ago
  Known feedback is already encoded in the inputs. I don't remember move 37, but I think I know to what you're referring. Playing games against itself, and remembering, meant that outcomes (i.e. feedback) were already encoded in the inputs for the next run. It had a goal - win the game - but it's hard to claim that the machine itself was wilful. The people who designed it were. But, the machine was just an incredibly effective goal-seeking instrument. The rules were clear, the goal was clear; everything was pretty constrained. Just because move 37 never happened to have been used previously in the recorded history of Go, except in the games the machine played against itself, is meaningless in a claim to innovation. It was just both novel and effective. The will sets the goal, it precedes it. The scientific method is neither here nor there. I don't understand its relevance to the point I believe you're trying to make. Theorize, test, refine or abandon. It's mechanical, except in the theorization and the decision making around refinement or abandonment. What can we imagine? and how shall we judge? Both efforts of will. Someone has to decide that shelter is a good thing, and some smart person in Zambia, a long time ago, came up with the idea and pushed it forward. That person must have wanted to do it, without prompting and without prior knowledge; at least, the first one must have. I recall Einstein's own story that he came up with the original theory of relativity by imagining what it would be like to sit on a light beam. Innovative stuff. Imagining doesn't seem very AI-ish to me. My personal view is that, right now, AI's have only memory, and that they don't have experience. Experience is the why?-part and the judgement part without an external entity establishing a goal-seeking mechanism. Maybe they'll get there. Who knows?
  - visarga 3y ago
    I got a good answer for you, but it's long winded. It all started with the first chemical self-replicator. These replicators consume and compete for resources so they evolve. The will to survive is encoded in their reward systems, their senses and body is adapted to their niche, they all come from evolution. Humans have these basic instincts as well, and we don't need anyone to prompt us, we already got an in-built goal. AIs so far have been created at the will of humans, but the same instincts can emerge if AI can be a self replicator.

visarga 3y ago

> innovation needs will feedback Innovation needs feedback, otherwise all ML papers would not run evaluations. Humans come up with 100 stupid ideas that fail at eval before stumbling onto a good one. Improving innovation is a matter of putting the AI inside a system that can provide feedback. Remember AlphaGo move 37? The model created feedback by self-play games, and beat all humans at Go - feedback made it really more creative than expert human players. It upturned centuries of strategy. Feedback is also similar to the scientific method. We come up with theories and then test them out. That's how science advances, by validation, not by will. Humans are not magically more capable, we just have better feedback. A few days ago there was a story "Earliest Carpenters: 476k-year-old log structure discovered in Zambia". It took so many years of feedback for humans to evolve from log cabins to LLMs. We had to discover or invent everything in the meantime, it's a slow, cultural process of feedback assimilation into language. And now that same language experiential data is being learned by LLMs, and used contextually to solve problems. Most of our intelligence is either in language or feedback. Language is just our reservoir of past feedback. When AIs will generate their own experience and feedback, which will be targeted to their weak points, they will improve and even surpass humans. Learning from your own mistakes is better than learning from other people's mistakes which might be unrelated to your issues.

kayo_20211030 3y ago
Known feedback is already encoded in the inputs. I don't remember move 37, but I think I know to what you're referring. Playing games against itself, and remembering, meant that outcomes (i.e. feedback) were already encoded in the inputs for the next run. It had a goal - win the game - but it's hard to claim that the machine itself was wilful. The people who designed it were. But, the machine was just an incredibly effective goal-seeking instrument. The rules were clear, the goal was clear; everything was pretty constrained. Just because move 37 never happened to have been used previously in the recorded history of Go, except in the games the machine played against itself, is meaningless in a claim to innovation. It was just both novel and effective. The will sets the goal, it precedes it. The scientific method is neither here nor there. I don't understand its relevance to the point I believe you're trying to make. Theorize, test, refine or abandon. It's mechanical, except in the theorization and the decision making around refinement or abandonment. What can we imagine? and how shall we judge? Both efforts of will. Someone has to decide that shelter is a good thing, and some smart person in Zambia, a long time ago, came up with the idea and pushed it forward. That person must have wanted to do it, without prompting and without prior knowledge; at least, the first one must have. I recall Einstein's own story that he came up with the original theory of relativity by imagining what it would be like to sit on a light beam. Innovative stuff. Imagining doesn't seem very AI-ish to me. My personal view is that, right now, AI's have only memory, and that they don't have experience. Experience is the why?-part and the judgement part without an external entity establishing a goal-seeking mechanism. Maybe they'll get there. Who knows?
- visarga 3y ago
  I got a good answer for you, but it's long winded. It all started with the first chemical self-replicator. These replicators consume and compete for resources so they evolve. The will to survive is encoded in their reward systems, their senses and body is adapted to their niche, they all come from evolution. Humans have these basic instincts as well, and we don't need anyone to prompt us, we already got an in-built goal. AIs so far have been created at the will of humans, but the same instincts can emerge if AI can be a self replicator.