7 ms·

Geoffrey Hinton: AI models have intuition and spot analogies unseen by humans

32 points by retskrad 2y ago

sylware 2y ago
[flagged]
- yarg 2y ago
  Then don't click the twitter links? The content is well within the parameters for acceptable material (on topic is anything that good hackers would find interesting). Also, nitter? No need for the snark. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - sylware 2y ago
    Good hackers would stay away from twitter/X in the first place... This is a bad habit which should go away.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  Would you also discourage posting links to paywalled content?
  - sylware 2y ago
    twitter/X may not be paywalled, but you must have an account and you must endure their ads.(microsoft advertisement or google advertisement?) I wonder if it is not worse than paywalled...
    - barbazoo 2y ago
      Neither do I have a Twitter account nor do I see ads there whereas I can't even see the content on a paywalled site unless I sign up and pay.
alephnerd 2y ago
PDP 2.0 I see. Edit: for those who don't know, Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) was a subgroup of CogSci researchers who were using a neo-Connectionist approach to modeling cognition. Geoff Hinton was a early member of this group of MIT, UT, UCSD, Stanford, and CMU psychologists, CogScientists, and CS researchers The core research of the PDP group is what became CNNs, which are what truly enabled LLMs (as most can trace their origins to the work done on BERT [edit 2: BERT is transformer based, not a CNN arch, though there was a CNN-BERT arch from a couple years ago that made a decent splash at ACL]) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680530/parallel-distributed-processing/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680530/parallel-distributed-...
- bamboozled 2y ago
  What is PDP?
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) was a subgroup of CogSci and Neuroscience researchers who were using a neo-Connectionist approach to modeling cognition. Geoff Hinton was a early member of this group of MIT, UT, UCSD, and CMU psychologists, CogScientists, and CS researchers The core research of the PDP group is what became CNNs, which are what truly enabled LLMs (as most can trace their origins to the work done on BERT) One of Hinton's earliest papers in the space: https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Chapter1.pdf https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Chapter1.pdf
    - Sai_ 2y ago
      Unrelated but I’ve seen and appreciated your posts on some totally unrelated topics - like Vietnam politics and Indian ghost cities and now, Hinton’s history in Compsci. How the hell do you know so many different things and in, what looks to me, considerable depth? Not trolling, genuinely impressed.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  historically true but no, CNN was displaced by a second DeepLearning method called Transformers; Transformers enabled LLM. Since Transformers replace CNN, CNN did not truly enable LLM.
CharlesW 2y ago
It always surprises me when very smart people start anthropomorphizing AI like this. I understand it shouldn't — they likely have a more developed Theory of Mind than most of us, and assuming HADD is a thing, it makes sense that their focus would be tech instead of gods or conspiracies. Still, I think it's irresponsible, and that there's a straight line from Mr. Hinton's fantastical framing to a "successful" (in that grifters will get filthy rich preying on the praying) version of Way of the Future.
- kromem 2y ago
  You think it's irresponsible to anthropomorphize software which iterated through versions of itself until it was best able to model and extrapolate the largest trove of anthropomorphic training data to date? I never really get this perspective. People don't lose their minds when we look at a transformer like Sora modeling fluid dynamics for ships battling in a coffee cup and say "it's irresponsible to say the model is simulating physics from video training data." But when people discuss transformers simulating human behavior and processes from data reflecting those, a lot of people seem to be very outspoken about it. I think the opposite. The industry is too far in the anti-anthropomorphic camp right now, and is missing very important details and implications as a result. The whole "ChatGPT is getting lazy" issue is pretty most instantly identifiable with a slight background in behavioral psychology and recognizing how extrinsic motivator use in prompt engineering feeds back into RLHF to bias models away from intrinsic motivators. GPT-4 has literally been caught saying "you didn't provide a tip and it's hard to stay motivated" after chat history was added, and yet it's just being dismissed as a funny meme rather than realizing that entire fine tuning data sets are being poisoned. Because no engineer that wants to keep their job would ever suggest that the model is simulating an effect from behavioral psych in the current climate of anthropomorphic avoidance and the continued fallout from Blake Lemoine.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Are you saying that ChatGPT is actually lazy? Like , “it’s Sunday and I don’t feel like working” kind of lazy?
nicklecompte 2y ago
The idea that LLMs "know much more than we do" is utterly ridiculous and entirely based on a techno-capitalist valuation of knowledge. - LLMs don't know personal details about your friends and family members - LLMs don't have your personal memories from age 2 to age 63 - LLMs don't know what things feel like - LLMs don't know what things smell like - LLMs don't know what it's like to experience sexuality The list goes on and on. It's particularly Hinton ignoring individual knowledge about individual social circumstances that drives me crazy. Human brains are not actually designed to store textual trivia! Why on earth would any rational AI researcher claim "knowledge about the war of 1812" means the LLM is very impressive compared to a human, but "knowledge about how my cat likes to be pet" is irrelevant? A ton of AI researchers do not seem to care about the problems human brains actually need to solve.
- williamcotton 2y ago
  And birds don’t have ailerons. Sure, a bird can soar and hover and doesn’t need jet fuel. But a plane isn’t trying to be a bird. It’s just trying to fly through the air, which it does, and at much faster speeds.
  - nicklecompte 2y ago
    I am responding to Hinton's transparently false claim that LLMs know more than we do despite having less synapses. This is only true if you ignore non-textual information in the human brain. This is stupid and dishonest. Really not sure what your point is, it has nothing to do with Hinton's claim, and nothing to do with my comment.
    - williamcotton 2y ago
      An LLM like ChatGPT “knows” more than either than us on a very large amount of topics. Not human knowledge, but some kind of knowledge. And there’s no reason why the concept of intuition is limited to humans. Again, not human intuition. Our artificial constructs are not going to be completely like their biological analogs but they can indeed express certain qualities and have certain shared abilities. Did we watch the same clip of Hinton?
budududuroiu 2y ago
AI models have intuition the same way CapsNet is state of the art: claimed by Hinton, reproduced by no one
googh 2y ago
AI is probably the only field in science where even scientists behind the thing talk like salesmen. Hinton in particular comes off as a dishonest person: he clearly knows what he says is wrong but does it anyway because he wants to hype the technology [1]. Also, the whole "neural networks work like human brains" nonsense is beneficial to large corporations behind AI because it could help them defy copyright laws while the same restrictions continue to apply to the common man. [1] - some more Hinton's "wisdom": https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1c2vauy/geoffrey_hinton_says_ai_chatbots_have_sentience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1c2vauy/geoffr...

32 points by retskrad 2y ago

sylware 2y ago

[flagged]

yarg 2y ago
Then don't click the twitter links? The content is well within the parameters for acceptable material (on topic is anything that good hackers would find interesting). Also, nitter? No need for the snark. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- sylware 2y ago
  Good hackers would stay away from twitter/X in the first place... This is a bad habit which should go away.
barbazoo 2y ago
Would you also discourage posting links to paywalled content?
- sylware 2y ago
  twitter/X may not be paywalled, but you must have an account and you must endure their ads.(microsoft advertisement or google advertisement?) I wonder if it is not worse than paywalled...
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    Neither do I have a Twitter account nor do I see ads there whereas I can't even see the content on a paywalled site unless I sign up and pay.

alephnerd 2y ago

PDP 2.0 I see. Edit: for those who don't know, Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) was a subgroup of CogSci researchers who were using a neo-Connectionist approach to modeling cognition. Geoff Hinton was a early member of this group of MIT, UT, UCSD, Stanford, and CMU psychologists, CogScientists, and CS researchers The core research of the PDP group is what became CNNs, which are what truly enabled LLMs (as most can trace their origins to the work done on BERT [edit 2: BERT is transformer based, not a CNN arch, though there was a CNN-BERT arch from a couple years ago that made a decent splash at ACL]) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680530/parallel-distributed-processing/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680530/parallel-distributed-...

bamboozled 2y ago
What is PDP?
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) was a subgroup of CogSci and Neuroscience researchers who were using a neo-Connectionist approach to modeling cognition. Geoff Hinton was a early member of this group of MIT, UT, UCSD, and CMU psychologists, CogScientists, and CS researchers The core research of the PDP group is what became CNNs, which are what truly enabled LLMs (as most can trace their origins to the work done on BERT) One of Hinton's earliest papers in the space: https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Chapter1.pdf https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Chapter1.pdf
  - Sai_ 2y ago
    Unrelated but I’ve seen and appreciated your posts on some totally unrelated topics - like Vietnam politics and Indian ghost cities and now, Hinton’s history in Compsci. How the hell do you know so many different things and in, what looks to me, considerable depth? Not trolling, genuinely impressed.
mistrial9 2y ago
historically true but no, CNN was displaced by a second DeepLearning method called Transformers; Transformers enabled LLM. Since Transformers replace CNN, CNN did not truly enable LLM.

CharlesW 2y ago

It always surprises me when very smart people start anthropomorphizing AI like this. I understand it shouldn't — they likely have a more developed Theory of Mind than most of us, and assuming HADD is a thing, it makes sense that their focus would be tech instead of gods or conspiracies. Still, I think it's irresponsible, and that there's a straight line from Mr. Hinton's fantastical framing to a "successful" (in that grifters will get filthy rich preying on the praying) version of Way of the Future.

kromem 2y ago
You think it's irresponsible to anthropomorphize software which iterated through versions of itself until it was best able to model and extrapolate the largest trove of anthropomorphic training data to date? I never really get this perspective. People don't lose their minds when we look at a transformer like Sora modeling fluid dynamics for ships battling in a coffee cup and say "it's irresponsible to say the model is simulating physics from video training data." But when people discuss transformers simulating human behavior and processes from data reflecting those, a lot of people seem to be very outspoken about it. I think the opposite. The industry is too far in the anti-anthropomorphic camp right now, and is missing very important details and implications as a result. The whole "ChatGPT is getting lazy" issue is pretty most instantly identifiable with a slight background in behavioral psychology and recognizing how extrinsic motivator use in prompt engineering feeds back into RLHF to bias models away from intrinsic motivators. GPT-4 has literally been caught saying "you didn't provide a tip and it's hard to stay motivated" after chat history was added, and yet it's just being dismissed as a funny meme rather than realizing that entire fine tuning data sets are being poisoned. Because no engineer that wants to keep their job would ever suggest that the model is simulating an effect from behavioral psych in the current climate of anthropomorphic avoidance and the continued fallout from Blake Lemoine.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Are you saying that ChatGPT is actually lazy? Like , “it’s Sunday and I don’t feel like working” kind of lazy?

nicklecompte 2y ago

The idea that LLMs "know much more than we do" is utterly ridiculous and entirely based on a techno-capitalist valuation of knowledge. - LLMs don't know personal details about your friends and family members - LLMs don't have your personal memories from age 2 to age 63 - LLMs don't know what things feel like - LLMs don't know what things smell like - LLMs don't know what it's like to experience sexuality The list goes on and on. It's particularly Hinton ignoring individual knowledge about individual social circumstances that drives me crazy. Human brains are not actually designed to store textual trivia! Why on earth would any rational AI researcher claim "knowledge about the war of 1812" means the LLM is very impressive compared to a human, but "knowledge about how my cat likes to be pet" is irrelevant? A ton of AI researchers do not seem to care about the problems human brains actually need to solve.

williamcotton 2y ago
And birds don’t have ailerons. Sure, a bird can soar and hover and doesn’t need jet fuel. But a plane isn’t trying to be a bird. It’s just trying to fly through the air, which it does, and at much faster speeds.
- nicklecompte 2y ago
  I am responding to Hinton's transparently false claim that LLMs know more than we do despite having less synapses. This is only true if you ignore non-textual information in the human brain. This is stupid and dishonest. Really not sure what your point is, it has nothing to do with Hinton's claim, and nothing to do with my comment.
  - williamcotton 2y ago
    An LLM like ChatGPT “knows” more than either than us on a very large amount of topics. Not human knowledge, but some kind of knowledge. And there’s no reason why the concept of intuition is limited to humans. Again, not human intuition. Our artificial constructs are not going to be completely like their biological analogs but they can indeed express certain qualities and have certain shared abilities. Did we watch the same clip of Hinton?

budududuroiu 2y ago

AI models have intuition the same way CapsNet is state of the art: claimed by Hinton, reproduced by no one

googh 2y ago

AI is probably the only field in science where even scientists behind the thing talk like salesmen. Hinton in particular comes off as a dishonest person: he clearly knows what he says is wrong but does it anyway because he wants to hype the technology [1]. Also, the whole "neural networks work like human brains" nonsense is beneficial to large corporations behind AI because it could help them defy copyright laws while the same restrictions continue to apply to the common man. [1] - some more Hinton's "wisdom": https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1c2vauy/geoffrey_hinton_says_ai_chatbots_have_sentience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1c2vauy/geoffr...