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Defining intelligence as prediction leaves out a lot of other things that humans would see as intelligence in other humans (e.g., creating a novel), also quite

Defining intelligence as prediction leaves out a lot of other things that humans would see as intelligence in other humans (e.g., creating a novel), also quite simple organisms make predictions (e.g., a predator jumping at prey makes a prediction about positions).

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Maybe a better way to say it rather than "intelligence is prediction" is that prediction is what supports the behaviors we see as intelligent. For example, prediction is the basis of what-if planning (multi-step prediction), prediction (as LLMs have proved) is the basis of leaning and using language, prediction is the basis of modelling other people and their actions, etc. So, ultimately the ability to write a novel, is a result of prediction. Yes, an insect (a praying mantis, perhaps) catching another is exhibiting some degree of prediction, and per my definition I'd say is exhibiting some (smallish) degree of intelligence in doing so, regardless of this presumably being a hard-coded behavior. Prediction becomes more and more useful the better you are at it, from avoiding predators, to predicting where the food is, etc, so this would appear to be the selection pressure that has evolved our cortex to be a very powerful prediction machine.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  The ability to write a novel is different from actually writing a novel. If prediction forms the basis of (at least some forms of) intelligence, intelligence itself is more than prediction.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    That's why I say our vocabulary for talking about these things leaves something to be desired - the way we use the word "intelligence" combines both raw/potential ability to do something (prediction), and the experience we have that allows that ability to be utilized. The only way you are going to learn to actually write a novel is by a lot of reading and writing and learning how to write something that provides the experience you hope it to have.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      Kind of agree. I think, though, trying to shoe-horn intelligence into some evolutionary concepts is tricky because it is easy stack hypotheses there.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >The ability to write a novel is different from actually writing a novel In what way, except as in begging the question?
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      Which LLM will on its own go and write a novel? Also, even for humans, just because you technically know how to write a novel, you might fail at it.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        >Which LLM will on its own go and write a novel? Which human will? We get prompts all the time, it's called sensory input. Instead of "write a noval" it's more like information about literature, life experience, that partner who broke our heart and triggered our writing this personal novel, and so on.
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        Some people write novels, some don't. Why some people do so we sometimes know, sometimes we don't (maybe they flipped a coin to decide). Some start to write but fail to finish. You have to believe that humans have no free will in a certain way to have them be like an LLM, i.e, every action is externally driven and determined.
        coldtea 3y ago
        >You have to believe that humans have no free will in a certain way to have them be like an LLM, i.e, every action is externally driven and determined. Free will doesn't have much meaning. If I dont base my action at time t, on their development based on inputs on times before t, what would I base it on? It would be random? Or would there be a small thinking presense inside me that gets information about my current situation and decides "impartially", able to decide in whatever direction, because it wasn't itself entirely determined by my experiences thus far?
- spookie 3y ago
  I think you're confusing prediction with ratiocination. I'm sure you've deducted hypothesis' based solely on the assertion that "contradiction and being are incompatible". Note, there wasn't prediction involved on that process. I consider prediction as a subset of reason, but not the contrary. Therefore, I beg to differ on the whole assumption that "intelligence is prediction". It's more than that, prediction is but a subset of that. This is perhaps the biggest reason for the high computational costs of LLM's, because they aren't taking the shortcuts necessary to achieve true intelligence, whatever that is.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    > I think you're confusing prediction with ratiocination. No, exactly not! Prediction is probabalistic and liable to be wrong, with those probabilities needing updating/refining. Note that I'm primarily talking about prediction as the brain does it - not about LLMs, although LLMs have proved the power of prediction as a (the?) learning mechanism for language. Note though that the words predicted by LLMs are also just probabilities. These probabilities are sampled from (per a selected sampling "temperature" - degree of randomness) to pick which word to actually output. The way the brain learns, from a starting point of knowing nothing, is to observe and predict that the same will happen next time, which it often will, once you've learnt what observations are appropriate to include or exclude from that prediction. This is all highly probabalistic, which is appropriate given that the thing being predicted (what'll happen if I throw a rock at that tiger?) is often semi-random in nature. We can better rephrase "intelligence is ability to predict well", as "intelligence derives from ability to predict well". It does of course also depend on experience. One reason why LLMs are so expensive to train is because they learn in an extremely brute force fashion from the highly redundant and repetitive output of others. Humans don't do that - if we're trying to learn something, or curious about it, we'll do focused experiments such as "Let's see what happens if I do this, since I don't already know", or "If I'm understanding this right, then if I do X then Y should happen".
jimbokun 3y ago
LLMs have shown that writing a novel can be accomplished as an application of prediction, at least to a certain level of quality.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  I have yet to see an LLM write a novel on its volition.
coldtea 3y ago
>Defining intelligence as prediction leaves out a lot of other things that humans would see as intelligence in other humans (e.g., creating a novel) Would it? Why would "creating a novel" by a human not itself be text generation based on prediction on what are the next good choices (of themes, words, etc) based on a training data set of lived experience stream and reading other literature?
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  What is the human predicting there? Why would it need to be a prediction task at all? How about a dada-ist poem? Made-up words and syntax? If it is prediction but the criterion for "what is a good next choice" can totally be made up on the fly - what does the word "prediction" even mean?
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >What is the human predicting there? Their next action - word put on page, and so on. >Why would it need to be a prediction task at all? What else would it be? Note that prediction in LLM terminology doesn't mean "what is going to happen in the future" like Nostradamus. It means "what is a good next word given the input I was given and the words I've answered so far". >How about a dada-ist poem? Made-up words and syntax? How about it? People have their training (sensory input, stuff they're read, school, discussions) and sit to predict (come up with, based on what they know) a made-up word and then another.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      That is a meaningless definition of prediction if "what is a good next word" has an ever changing definition in humans (as everything would fulfill that definition).
      - coldtea 3y ago
        That's the very definition of production in an LLM. What does "has an ever changing definition" mean? And why "everything would fulfill that definition"? At any time whats the "good next word" is based on the state created by our inputs thus far (including chemical/physiological state, like decaying memories, and so on). And not only not "everything fullfil it", but it can be only a single specific word. (Same as if we include the random seed among an LLM output: we get the same results given the same training and same prompt).

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

Maybe a better way to say it rather than "intelligence is prediction" is that prediction is what supports the behaviors we see as intelligent. For example, prediction is the basis of what-if planning (multi-step prediction), prediction (as LLMs have proved) is the basis of leaning and using language, prediction is the basis of modelling other people and their actions, etc. So, ultimately the ability to write a novel, is a result of prediction. Yes, an insect (a praying mantis, perhaps) catching another is exhibiting some degree of prediction, and per my definition I'd say is exhibiting some (smallish) degree of intelligence in doing so, regardless of this presumably being a hard-coded behavior. Prediction becomes more and more useful the better you are at it, from avoiding predators, to predicting where the food is, etc, so this would appear to be the selection pressure that has evolved our cortex to be a very powerful prediction machine.

RandomLensman 3y ago
The ability to write a novel is different from actually writing a novel. If prediction forms the basis of (at least some forms of) intelligence, intelligence itself is more than prediction.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  That's why I say our vocabulary for talking about these things leaves something to be desired - the way we use the word "intelligence" combines both raw/potential ability to do something (prediction), and the experience we have that allows that ability to be utilized. The only way you are going to learn to actually write a novel is by a lot of reading and writing and learning how to write something that provides the experience you hope it to have.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Kind of agree. I think, though, trying to shoe-horn intelligence into some evolutionary concepts is tricky because it is easy stack hypotheses there.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >The ability to write a novel is different from actually writing a novel In what way, except as in begging the question?
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Which LLM will on its own go and write a novel? Also, even for humans, just because you technically know how to write a novel, you might fail at it.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >Which LLM will on its own go and write a novel? Which human will? We get prompts all the time, it's called sensory input. Instead of "write a noval" it's more like information about literature, life experience, that partner who broke our heart and triggered our writing this personal novel, and so on.
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        Some people write novels, some don't. Why some people do so we sometimes know, sometimes we don't (maybe they flipped a coin to decide). Some start to write but fail to finish. You have to believe that humans have no free will in a certain way to have them be like an LLM, i.e, every action is externally driven and determined.
        coldtea 3y ago
        >You have to believe that humans have no free will in a certain way to have them be like an LLM, i.e, every action is externally driven and determined. Free will doesn't have much meaning. If I dont base my action at time t, on their development based on inputs on times before t, what would I base it on? It would be random? Or would there be a small thinking presense inside me that gets information about my current situation and decides "impartially", able to decide in whatever direction, because it wasn't itself entirely determined by my experiences thus far?
spookie 3y ago
I think you're confusing prediction with ratiocination. I'm sure you've deducted hypothesis' based solely on the assertion that "contradiction and being are incompatible". Note, there wasn't prediction involved on that process. I consider prediction as a subset of reason, but not the contrary. Therefore, I beg to differ on the whole assumption that "intelligence is prediction". It's more than that, prediction is but a subset of that. This is perhaps the biggest reason for the high computational costs of LLM's, because they aren't taking the shortcuts necessary to achieve true intelligence, whatever that is.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  > I think you're confusing prediction with ratiocination. No, exactly not! Prediction is probabalistic and liable to be wrong, with those probabilities needing updating/refining. Note that I'm primarily talking about prediction as the brain does it - not about LLMs, although LLMs have proved the power of prediction as a (the?) learning mechanism for language. Note though that the words predicted by LLMs are also just probabilities. These probabilities are sampled from (per a selected sampling "temperature" - degree of randomness) to pick which word to actually output. The way the brain learns, from a starting point of knowing nothing, is to observe and predict that the same will happen next time, which it often will, once you've learnt what observations are appropriate to include or exclude from that prediction. This is all highly probabalistic, which is appropriate given that the thing being predicted (what'll happen if I throw a rock at that tiger?) is often semi-random in nature. We can better rephrase "intelligence is ability to predict well", as "intelligence derives from ability to predict well". It does of course also depend on experience. One reason why LLMs are so expensive to train is because they learn in an extremely brute force fashion from the highly redundant and repetitive output of others. Humans don't do that - if we're trying to learn something, or curious about it, we'll do focused experiments such as "Let's see what happens if I do this, since I don't already know", or "If I'm understanding this right, then if I do X then Y should happen".

jimbokun 3y ago

LLMs have shown that writing a novel can be accomplished as an application of prediction, at least to a certain level of quality.

RandomLensman 3y ago
I have yet to see an LLM write a novel on its volition.

coldtea 3y ago

>Defining intelligence as prediction leaves out a lot of other things that humans would see as intelligence in other humans (e.g., creating a novel) Would it? Why would "creating a novel" by a human not itself be text generation based on prediction on what are the next good choices (of themes, words, etc) based on a training data set of lived experience stream and reading other literature?

RandomLensman 3y ago
What is the human predicting there? Why would it need to be a prediction task at all? How about a dada-ist poem? Made-up words and syntax? If it is prediction but the criterion for "what is a good next choice" can totally be made up on the fly - what does the word "prediction" even mean?
- coldtea 3y ago
  >What is the human predicting there? Their next action - word put on page, and so on. >Why would it need to be a prediction task at all? What else would it be? Note that prediction in LLM terminology doesn't mean "what is going to happen in the future" like Nostradamus. It means "what is a good next word given the input I was given and the words I've answered so far". >How about a dada-ist poem? Made-up words and syntax? How about it? People have their training (sensory input, stuff they're read, school, discussions) and sit to predict (come up with, based on what they know) a made-up word and then another.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    That is a meaningless definition of prediction if "what is a good next word" has an ever changing definition in humans (as everything would fulfill that definition).
    - coldtea 3y ago
      That's the very definition of production in an LLM. What does "has an ever changing definition" mean? And why "everything would fulfill that definition"? At any time whats the "good next word" is based on the state created by our inputs thus far (including chemical/physiological state, like decaying memories, and so on). And not only not "everything fullfil it", but it can be only a single specific word. (Same as if we include the random seed among an LLM output: we get the same results given the same training and same prompt).