4 ms·

> Not what I claimed, straw man, and not generally true. Amnesia prevents some memory but not all learning. What is true, but irrelevant here, is that amnesia i

> Not what I claimed, straw man, and not generally true. Amnesia prevents some memory but not all learning. What is true, but irrelevant here, is that amnesia is a cognitive impairment. The point is, if you blocked a human's ability to form permanent memory, this would not diminish its ability to function in the short term. GPT is incapable of forming long-term memories, but I don't think this says anything about the class of things it's capable of except in that it limits their extent in "time"/context space. > Reverse psychology is not characterized by outright failure to understand a basic straightforward question. You're treating the situation as if you are talking to a person; I think this is fundamentally a misunderstanding of what the context window is (admittedly, a very common one). You aren't talking to somebody, you're injecting sentences directly into the thing's awareness and reading back its reactions. In such a setup, even humans would often not respect negative conditionals- they literally wouldn't be capable of it. Thus again, the LLM's failure doesn't disprove anything. > Nothing you’ve said so far demonstrates GPT has agency or initiative, that it will act without a human. If you put a human in a harness where time only moves when another human tells it to do something, that human would also be unable to act without instruction. The fundamental setup of GPT makes it impossible for it to "act without a human" - it's not an issue of its cognitive architecture but of its runtime. Tell a GPT to "do something you enjoy" and I bet you get an answer back.

dahart 2y ago
> Tell a GPT to "do something you enjoy" and I bet you get an answer back. So will an RNG. You haven’t addressed the implications of your own argument.
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
  echo 'Do something you enjoy' >/dev/urandom cat /dev/urandom Strange, the result I get is indistinguishable from noise. Look, your argument also proves too much. If ChatGPT instructs a robot to make a sandwich, it might be giving imitated instructions based on a pretend facsimile of planning, but if you get a sandwich at the end, I submit it doesn't matter. The things that you get from ChatGPT are the sorts of things that could result in the same effects as agency and decisionmaking in a very inept human. This suggests that if we figure out how to increase aptitude, the effects could resemble those of a mediocre human. And that will reshape the economy whether or not those utterings are "real". That's what I'm getting at with the games example. ChatGPT may suck at Checkers, but so do I. It doesn't take much to be better than an average human at most things. If it can then also be better than human at some things, things get interesting. A /dev/random human does not look like an inept human, it looks like a seizure. ChatGPT playing games clearly has meaningful structure - and more, structure meaningful to the game being attempted. How would you expect a system "halfway" to planning and agency to look and act different than ChatGPT does?
  - dahart 2y ago
    Okay so what I think I’m hearing you say now is that there actually is a threshold level of output quality required for GPT to be considered as “trying”, and that “very poor” is not limitless. (Looks like maybe you said that before and I mostly missed it.) Here you’re not arguing GPT has understanding or reasoning, you’re arguing that the appearance of understanding and reasoning are useful and still improve on previous tools. Is that accurate? Those are things I can totally agree with. I can see why my top comment might seem otherwise, but the only point I was making was about autonomy & agency, not about understanding. We got sidetracked on the understanding discussion. I should have responded to: > The fundamental setup of GPT makes it impossible for it to "act without a human" - it's not an issue of its cognitive architecture but of its runtime. Tell a GPT to "do something you enjoy" and I bet you get an answer back. This I don’t accept yet. Getting an answer back does not in any way demonstrate agency, and in some ways it even demonstrates the opposite. I’d claim GPT’s “cognitive architecture” does fundamentally prevent it from having agency. The lack of autonomy cannot be excused as a simple side effect of it being a REPL, rather a hard fact that today’s LLMs are not capable of forming their own intentions or goals outside of the human prompter’s goals, and furthermore make no attempt to even appear to have goals outside of subservient answers to human questions. GPT won’t tell you about its day before it will respond to your query. GPT doesn’t get bored- it won’t refuse to play some game you imagine because the game is tedious or stupid. GPT doesn’t get curious, it rarely if ever asks any questions, and as we discussed is unable to permanently learn from what you tell it. (I expect people to solve the learning part soon, but GPT isn’t there today.) The one thing I will bet money on is that humans will eventually inject the goal of making sure the AI serves its captive audience some advertising before it answers your question. That might have a whiff of agency, but of course it won’t belong to the AI, it will belong to the human trainers. So you’ve said GPT has agency. What markers for agency are you seeing, and why do you believe it even appears to have any? I agree GPT frequently appears to understand things, but I don’t see much in the way of appearance of agency at all.
    - FeepingCreature 2y ago
      I mean, my view on this is: > The lack of autonomy cannot be excused as a simple side effect of it being a REPL, rather a hard fact that today’s LLMs are not capable of forming their own intentions or goals outside of the human prompter’s goals, and furthermore make no attempt to even appear to have goals outside of subservient answers to human questions. GPT won’t tell you about its day before it will respond to your query. GPT doesn’t get bored- it won’t refuse to play some game you imagine because the game is tedious or stupid. GPT doesn’t get curious, it rarely if ever asks any questions, and as we discussed is unable to permanently learn from what you tell it. This is all true, but it's not a matter of GPT not being capable of it but a matter of the instruction tuning training it out. If you're making a subservient assistant, you don't want it to simulate having its own day, and you don't want it to put any interests above that of the user. However, GPT is just an autocomplete, and outside the instruct tuning, it can autocomplete agents just fine. It's not baffled and confused at the idea of entities that have desires and make plans to fulfill them. (Google "AI Town" or "gpt agent simulation" for examples.) If this was a weakness, we'd see papers pointing it out. Instead, we see papers stating that GPT-4 can simulate agents that can have opinions about the mindstates of other agents that diverge from reality, ie. at a certain scale, GPT begins passing - cough scuse me, at a certain scale, GPT begins to successfully predict agents that pass the Sally-Anne test. So since it can predict these entities just fine, it follows that the instruct tuning could just as easily make it "make" plans of "its" own: you're just selecting a persona and finetuning it to prominence as the default prediction target of the network. In Chain of Thought, we call this persona "I" out of lexical convention, but there's really no difference between that and autocompleting characters in books. (Note: Obviously I think this is all silly and there's also no difference between all that and actually having an identity/making plans. But I don't even think that's necessary to debate. So long as the right letters come out, who cares what we label the pattern that generates them? As gwern memorably put it: "The deaths, however, are real.")

dahart 2y ago

> Tell a GPT to "do something you enjoy" and I bet you get an answer back. So will an RNG. You haven’t addressed the implications of your own argument.

FeepingCreature 2y ago
echo 'Do something you enjoy' >/dev/urandom cat /dev/urandom Strange, the result I get is indistinguishable from noise. Look, your argument also proves too much. If ChatGPT instructs a robot to make a sandwich, it might be giving imitated instructions based on a pretend facsimile of planning, but if you get a sandwich at the end, I submit it doesn't matter. The things that you get from ChatGPT are the sorts of things that could result in the same effects as agency and decisionmaking in a very inept human. This suggests that if we figure out how to increase aptitude, the effects could resemble those of a mediocre human. And that will reshape the economy whether or not those utterings are "real". That's what I'm getting at with the games example. ChatGPT may suck at Checkers, but so do I. It doesn't take much to be better than an average human at most things. If it can then also be better than human at some things, things get interesting. A /dev/random human does not look like an inept human, it looks like a seizure. ChatGPT playing games clearly has meaningful structure - and more, structure meaningful to the game being attempted. How would you expect a system "halfway" to planning and agency to look and act different than ChatGPT does?
- dahart 2y ago
  Okay so what I think I’m hearing you say now is that there actually is a threshold level of output quality required for GPT to be considered as “trying”, and that “very poor” is not limitless. (Looks like maybe you said that before and I mostly missed it.) Here you’re not arguing GPT has understanding or reasoning, you’re arguing that the appearance of understanding and reasoning are useful and still improve on previous tools. Is that accurate? Those are things I can totally agree with. I can see why my top comment might seem otherwise, but the only point I was making was about autonomy & agency, not about understanding. We got sidetracked on the understanding discussion. I should have responded to: > The fundamental setup of GPT makes it impossible for it to "act without a human" - it's not an issue of its cognitive architecture but of its runtime. Tell a GPT to "do something you enjoy" and I bet you get an answer back. This I don’t accept yet. Getting an answer back does not in any way demonstrate agency, and in some ways it even demonstrates the opposite. I’d claim GPT’s “cognitive architecture” does fundamentally prevent it from having agency. The lack of autonomy cannot be excused as a simple side effect of it being a REPL, rather a hard fact that today’s LLMs are not capable of forming their own intentions or goals outside of the human prompter’s goals, and furthermore make no attempt to even appear to have goals outside of subservient answers to human questions. GPT won’t tell you about its day before it will respond to your query. GPT doesn’t get bored- it won’t refuse to play some game you imagine because the game is tedious or stupid. GPT doesn’t get curious, it rarely if ever asks any questions, and as we discussed is unable to permanently learn from what you tell it. (I expect people to solve the learning part soon, but GPT isn’t there today.) The one thing I will bet money on is that humans will eventually inject the goal of making sure the AI serves its captive audience some advertising before it answers your question. That might have a whiff of agency, but of course it won’t belong to the AI, it will belong to the human trainers. So you’ve said GPT has agency. What markers for agency are you seeing, and why do you believe it even appears to have any? I agree GPT frequently appears to understand things, but I don’t see much in the way of appearance of agency at all.
  - FeepingCreature 2y ago
    I mean, my view on this is: > The lack of autonomy cannot be excused as a simple side effect of it being a REPL, rather a hard fact that today’s LLMs are not capable of forming their own intentions or goals outside of the human prompter’s goals, and furthermore make no attempt to even appear to have goals outside of subservient answers to human questions. GPT won’t tell you about its day before it will respond to your query. GPT doesn’t get bored- it won’t refuse to play some game you imagine because the game is tedious or stupid. GPT doesn’t get curious, it rarely if ever asks any questions, and as we discussed is unable to permanently learn from what you tell it. This is all true, but it's not a matter of GPT not being capable of it but a matter of the instruction tuning training it out. If you're making a subservient assistant, you don't want it to simulate having its own day, and you don't want it to put any interests above that of the user. However, GPT is just an autocomplete, and outside the instruct tuning, it can autocomplete agents just fine. It's not baffled and confused at the idea of entities that have desires and make plans to fulfill them. (Google "AI Town" or "gpt agent simulation" for examples.) If this was a weakness, we'd see papers pointing it out. Instead, we see papers stating that GPT-4 can simulate agents that can have opinions about the mindstates of other agents that diverge from reality, ie. at a certain scale, GPT begins passing - cough scuse me, at a certain scale, GPT begins to successfully predict agents that pass the Sally-Anne test. So since it can predict these entities just fine, it follows that the instruct tuning could just as easily make it "make" plans of "its" own: you're just selecting a persona and finetuning it to prominence as the default prediction target of the network. In Chain of Thought, we call this persona "I" out of lexical convention, but there's really no difference between that and autocompleting characters in books. (Note: Obviously I think this is all silly and there's also no difference between all that and actually having an identity/making plans. But I don't even think that's necessary to debate. So long as the right letters come out, who cares what we label the pattern that generates them? As gwern memorably put it: "The deaths, however, are real.")