4 ms·

Yes, for some arbitrary definition of 'understanding' since there is no rigorous, concrete, agreed definition. We're going to be on this merry go round for som

Yes, for some arbitrary definition of 'understanding' since there is no rigorous, concrete, agreed definition. We're going to be on this merry go round for some time while the A(G)I hype cycle plays out. Hopefully through it all some people will keep on working on great ideas that incrementally improve the field and produce useful stuff.

haolez 3y ago
Human-level performance is a great way to narrow down this ambiguity.
- tgv 3y ago
  No, it isn't. It's always bound by the operationalization of "understanding." Do you take it to mean something like: "number of correct answers on a multiple choice test given a news paper article"?
- observationist 3y ago
  Which human? Helen Keller's understanding of text is going to be radically different from your average Red Fish, Blue Fish reading precocious toddler, and they're going to be radically different from a medieval monk reading scriptio continua, and all in turn will be different from the average Japanese reader, used to Kanji in different orientations. What does performance mean? With regards to humans, its hard to quantify cognition and thinking. Even measuring neural activity is incredibly difficult, and depending on what type of brain from the above list of humans you are sampling from, the same level of consideration and understanding might be taking place, but with radically different levels of cortical activation in different areas of the brain. I don't do this to be pedantic, but to show that, much like the word love, or the experience of seeing white clouds on a blue sky, the words and ideas we use to communicate in the space of cognition and understanding are extremely broad, and not terribly useful in a technical or engineering context. There are demonstrations of synthetic hippocampus prosthetics in animals that provide memory of places and things that apparently are equivalent to a biological hippocampus - experiments with rats and other small animals have allowed pretty convincing evidence that what the brain is doing is substrate independent and neuronal functional equivalence is sufficient to repair and augment function. Things like NeuraLink and cochlear implants give brains the capacity to perform actions and accept normal input signals. Labs like Numenta have done great work identifying pieces and structures of algorithms that human brains are actually using in the course of human cognition. Once we have this, we'll have an objective measure of what human level AI means, for the algorithms that actually underpin human intelligence. Without those algorithms, or a rigorous way of approximating them, we are left with speculating about things like min and max range of processing power of a human brain, studies involving input and output measurements of human capabilities, and so on. The minimum FLOPS needed to emulate a hypothetical human level brain emulation AGI could have run on a desktop in the early aughts, and the maximum, with precise individual neuronal simulation, is a few orders of magnitude away - 4 or 5 petaflops should be able to emulate a brain at the cellular level, with reasonably precise electrochemical simulation. Until we have a better understanding of what cognition actually is we're left with rough measures of human performance, with tests that are inevitably cheated and gamed and goodharted. We're at superhuman levels of text output - you can specify things like {Joe Biden's last state of the union address} + "give me an article in the style of Hunter S. Thompson that lampoons Biden over his SOTU address" and in a single pass, get something that could plausibly have been written by Hunter S. Thompson. With multiple passes, a good editing process, and a few hours, you could arguably produce text that is all but indistinguishable from high quality human output, in much less time than it would take for any human to actually produce it. The same applies to art - your imagination is your limit. There are mode collapses, weird artifacts, and other issues, but by and large, any human on the planet can now use software to bring a visual idea or vivid imagination to life. Some of the most fun I've had with generative AI has been producing fantastic unicorns with my 4 year old niece. So baseline human level performance might mean one masterpiece painting in a lifetime - but give someone with the mind of a Monet or Da Vinci or Michelangelo the tools we have at hand, and what could they produce? I think it's unarguable that they would have found levels of nuance and excellence in the use of these tools that are going to be inaccessible to other people, and over the coming years we are going to see new levels of artistic excellence come about as people learn to use these new tools in new ways. As human tool use gets better, so does human capacity. If you look at an uncivilized human, without language, having survived in isolation, raised among animals, they may never be able to acquire a language. Feral humans have the same basic capacity, but their cognition is going to be wildly different than a modern Western human. LLMs have superior understanding to humans in that context, with the capacity to perform basic reasoning in the context of language that is structurally unavailable to a feral human. I think we're already basically at superhuman level for most simple tasks involving text, and at least some very hard tasks. We're not at general level AI yet, since there are higher level meta-cognition domains that seem unavailable to LLMs, and multimodal systems are more frankenstein mashups of discrete models than a unified incorporation of multiple modalities, but at some point in the seemingly near future, we're going to be faced with software that can basically do anything and everything any and every human has ever done. We might not be able to quantify exactly what "human level" means for now, but we can see the trajectory of where things are going, and the line tracking AI capabilities seems pretty clearly on course for overtaking humans. It's a good time to be alive.
pohl 3y ago
I don't think you want to use the term "arbitrary" here, since that would imply a stronger claim: that no matter how one defines "understanding" it applies. "Yes, for some specific, narrow definition of 'understanding'" is better. I understood what you meant, but my math reflexes had to say something.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  I don't have any math reflexes, but my intuition was similar with the idea that there are so many possible (narrow) views of understanding that it becomes arbitrary.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
LLMs might just be the first actual product. Hardware, data, algorithms are all getting better and I would imagine we’ll get competing production-ready architectures to LLMs next
BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
Read the article. They defined their version of understanding fairly rigorously, so you could directly agree or disagree with whether it counts to you.
- astrobe_ 3y ago
  I don't see where?
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  But without concrete understanding of human understanding to compare it to, their definition is arbitrary.
303uru 3y ago
>We're going to be on this merry go round for some time Let's be real, it's not getting "solved" in any meaningful way anytime soon if ever. People still think free will exists, we cannot even come up with a meaningful definition for human understanding.
ravenstine 3y ago
Most humans don't completely understand the things that they read or the words they utter. Why would we expect different from artificial intelligence? Understanding things is computationally expensive from both a biological and digital perspective.
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  This seems like changing the subject from whether LLMs understand to a comparison between LLMs and people.
- sgt101 3y ago
  I am astonished that I read so many people saying this. Why do you think this? When your mum or dad talks about their day or the show they are watching do you really think that they have no underlying theory of what is going on that they are expressing? What is the agenda behind casting other people as idiots & zombies? Is the idea that it makes it ok to kill them and then move to Mars? Or is there something less sinister that drives this?
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    I often wonder if this is just the logical extreme form of "fundamental attribution error". You know the sort of thing. Two people smash a glass on the floor. One of them is me. I am a decent person and I smashed the glass on the floor because I had a bad day. I am more likely to think the other person smashed the glass on the floor because they are a thoughtless person or have an anger management problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error What if the logical conclusion is metaphysical solipsism: I did XYZ because I am a thinking person. They did XYZ because they are unthinking products of their environment and training?
  - zopa 3y ago
    Can't speak for what the person you're replying to meant (lol), but no, of course it's not nearly that stark. There's a continuum. Concrete everyday topic that comes up frequently? Everyone's going to know what they mean by what they say there. But we've all been in business meetings where people were just putting words together in a plausible way; we've probably all been the people speaking at those meetings. The fact that it's possible to say things that make no sense, without knowing that they make no sense, proves the point. You or I can come up with a phrase like "the barber of Seville shaves all the people who do not shave themselves," and we can come up with paradoxical phrases without realizing that they are nonsensical. Neither of those would be possible if there were always a strict, one-to-one relationship between speech utterances and facts about the world. Sometimes we have a specific idea of what we mean by what we say, sometimes we're just putting words together, often it's somewhere in between.

haolez 3y ago

Human-level performance is a great way to narrow down this ambiguity.

tgv 3y ago
No, it isn't. It's always bound by the operationalization of "understanding." Do you take it to mean something like: "number of correct answers on a multiple choice test given a news paper article"?
observationist 3y ago
Which human? Helen Keller's understanding of text is going to be radically different from your average Red Fish, Blue Fish reading precocious toddler, and they're going to be radically different from a medieval monk reading scriptio continua, and all in turn will be different from the average Japanese reader, used to Kanji in different orientations. What does performance mean? With regards to humans, its hard to quantify cognition and thinking. Even measuring neural activity is incredibly difficult, and depending on what type of brain from the above list of humans you are sampling from, the same level of consideration and understanding might be taking place, but with radically different levels of cortical activation in different areas of the brain. I don't do this to be pedantic, but to show that, much like the word love, or the experience of seeing white clouds on a blue sky, the words and ideas we use to communicate in the space of cognition and understanding are extremely broad, and not terribly useful in a technical or engineering context. There are demonstrations of synthetic hippocampus prosthetics in animals that provide memory of places and things that apparently are equivalent to a biological hippocampus - experiments with rats and other small animals have allowed pretty convincing evidence that what the brain is doing is substrate independent and neuronal functional equivalence is sufficient to repair and augment function. Things like NeuraLink and cochlear implants give brains the capacity to perform actions and accept normal input signals. Labs like Numenta have done great work identifying pieces and structures of algorithms that human brains are actually using in the course of human cognition. Once we have this, we'll have an objective measure of what human level AI means, for the algorithms that actually underpin human intelligence. Without those algorithms, or a rigorous way of approximating them, we are left with speculating about things like min and max range of processing power of a human brain, studies involving input and output measurements of human capabilities, and so on. The minimum FLOPS needed to emulate a hypothetical human level brain emulation AGI could have run on a desktop in the early aughts, and the maximum, with precise individual neuronal simulation, is a few orders of magnitude away - 4 or 5 petaflops should be able to emulate a brain at the cellular level, with reasonably precise electrochemical simulation. Until we have a better understanding of what cognition actually is we're left with rough measures of human performance, with tests that are inevitably cheated and gamed and goodharted. We're at superhuman levels of text output - you can specify things like {Joe Biden's last state of the union address} + "give me an article in the style of Hunter S. Thompson that lampoons Biden over his SOTU address" and in a single pass, get something that could plausibly have been written by Hunter S. Thompson. With multiple passes, a good editing process, and a few hours, you could arguably produce text that is all but indistinguishable from high quality human output, in much less time than it would take for any human to actually produce it. The same applies to art - your imagination is your limit. There are mode collapses, weird artifacts, and other issues, but by and large, any human on the planet can now use software to bring a visual idea or vivid imagination to life. Some of the most fun I've had with generative AI has been producing fantastic unicorns with my 4 year old niece. So baseline human level performance might mean one masterpiece painting in a lifetime - but give someone with the mind of a Monet or Da Vinci or Michelangelo the tools we have at hand, and what could they produce? I think it's unarguable that they would have found levels of nuance and excellence in the use of these tools that are going to be inaccessible to other people, and over the coming years we are going to see new levels of artistic excellence come about as people learn to use these new tools in new ways. As human tool use gets better, so does human capacity. If you look at an uncivilized human, without language, having survived in isolation, raised among animals, they may never be able to acquire a language. Feral humans have the same basic capacity, but their cognition is going to be wildly different than a modern Western human. LLMs have superior understanding to humans in that context, with the capacity to perform basic reasoning in the context of language that is structurally unavailable to a feral human. I think we're already basically at superhuman level for most simple tasks involving text, and at least some very hard tasks. We're not at general level AI yet, since there are higher level meta-cognition domains that seem unavailable to LLMs, and multimodal systems are more frankenstein mashups of discrete models than a unified incorporation of multiple modalities, but at some point in the seemingly near future, we're going to be faced with software that can basically do anything and everything any and every human has ever done. We might not be able to quantify exactly what "human level" means for now, but we can see the trajectory of where things are going, and the line tracking AI capabilities seems pretty clearly on course for overtaking humans. It's a good time to be alive.

pohl 3y ago

I don't think you want to use the term "arbitrary" here, since that would imply a stronger claim: that no matter how one defines "understanding" it applies. "Yes, for some specific, narrow definition of 'understanding'" is better. I understood what you meant, but my math reflexes had to say something.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
I don't have any math reflexes, but my intuition was similar with the idea that there are so many possible (narrow) views of understanding that it becomes arbitrary.

coffeebeqn 3y ago

LLMs might just be the first actual product. Hardware, data, algorithms are all getting better and I would imagine we’ll get competing production-ready architectures to LLMs next

BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago

Read the article. They defined their version of understanding fairly rigorously, so you could directly agree or disagree with whether it counts to you.

astrobe_ 3y ago
I don't see where?
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
But without concrete understanding of human understanding to compare it to, their definition is arbitrary.

303uru 3y ago

>We're going to be on this merry go round for some time Let's be real, it's not getting "solved" in any meaningful way anytime soon if ever. People still think free will exists, we cannot even come up with a meaningful definition for human understanding.

ravenstine 3y ago

Most humans don't completely understand the things that they read or the words they utter. Why would we expect different from artificial intelligence? Understanding things is computationally expensive from both a biological and digital perspective.

droopyEyelids 3y ago
This seems like changing the subject from whether LLMs understand to a comparison between LLMs and people.
sgt101 3y ago
I am astonished that I read so many people saying this. Why do you think this? When your mum or dad talks about their day or the show they are watching do you really think that they have no underlying theory of what is going on that they are expressing? What is the agenda behind casting other people as idiots & zombies? Is the idea that it makes it ok to kill them and then move to Mars? Or is there something less sinister that drives this?
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  I often wonder if this is just the logical extreme form of "fundamental attribution error". You know the sort of thing. Two people smash a glass on the floor. One of them is me. I am a decent person and I smashed the glass on the floor because I had a bad day. I am more likely to think the other person smashed the glass on the floor because they are a thoughtless person or have an anger management problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error What if the logical conclusion is metaphysical solipsism: I did XYZ because I am a thinking person. They did XYZ because they are unthinking products of their environment and training?
- zopa 3y ago
  Can't speak for what the person you're replying to meant (lol), but no, of course it's not nearly that stark. There's a continuum. Concrete everyday topic that comes up frequently? Everyone's going to know what they mean by what they say there. But we've all been in business meetings where people were just putting words together in a plausible way; we've probably all been the people speaking at those meetings. The fact that it's possible to say things that make no sense, without knowing that they make no sense, proves the point. You or I can come up with a phrase like "the barber of Seville shaves all the people who do not shave themselves," and we can come up with paradoxical phrases without realizing that they are nonsensical. Neither of those would be possible if there were always a strict, one-to-one relationship between speech utterances and facts about the world. Sometimes we have a specific idea of what we mean by what we say, sometimes we're just putting words together, often it's somewhere in between.