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>that sufficiently advanced mimicry is not only indistinguishable from the real thing, but at the limit in fact is the real thing. While sufficiently does a lo
by Lerc 2y ago
>that sufficiently advanced mimicry is not only indistinguishable from the real thing, but at the limit in fact is the real thing.
While sufficiently does a lot of the heavy lifting here, the indistinguishable criteria implicitly means there must be no-way to tell if it is not the real thing. The belief that it is the real thing comes from the intuition that anything that can be everything a person must be, but have that fundamental essence of being a person. I don't think people could really conceive an alternative without resorting to prejudice which they could equally apply to machines or people.
I take the arguments such as in this paper to be instead making the claim that because X cannot be Y you will never be able to make X indistinguishable from Y. It is more a prediction of future failure than a judgment on an existing thing.
I end up looking at some of these complaints from the point of view of my sometimes profession of Game Developer. When I show someone a game in development to playtest they will find a bunch of issues. The vast majority of those issues, not only am I already aware of, but I have a much more detailed perspective of what the problem is and how it might be fixed. I have been seeing the problem, over and over, every day as I work. The problem persists because there are other things to do before fixing the issue, some of which might render the issue redundant anyway.
I feel like a lot of the criticisms of AI are like this they are like the playtesters pointing out issues in the current state where those working on the problems are generally well aware of particular issues and have a variety of solutions in mind that might help.
Clear statements of deficiencies in ability are helpful as a guide to measure future success.
I'm also in the camp that LLM's cannot be an AGI on its own, on the other hand I do think the architecture might be extended to become one. There is an easy out for any criticism to say, "Well, it's not an LLM anymore".
In a way that ends up with a lot of people saying
.The current models cannot do the things we know the current models cannot do
.Future models will not be able to do those things if they are the same as the current ones
.Therefore the things that will be able to do those things will be different
That is true, but hardly enlightening.
- et1337 2y ago> Future models will not be able to do those things if they are the same as the current ones I think a lot of people disagree with this. People think if we just keep adding parameters and data, magic will happen. That’s kind of what happened with ChatGPT after all.
- Lerc 2y agoI'm not so sure that view is very widespread amongst people familiar with how LLMs work. Certainly they become more capable with parameters and data, but there are fundamental things that can't be overcome with a basic model and I don't think anyone is seriously arguing otherwise. For instance LLMs are pretty much stateless without their context window. If you treat the raw generated output as the first and final result then there is very little scope for any advanced consideration of anything. If you give it a nice long context, give it the ability to edit that context or even access to a key-value function interface, then treat everything it says as internal monologue except for anything in <aloud></aloud> tags which is what the user gets to see. There are plenty of people who see AGI somewhere along that path, but once you take a step down that path, it's no-longer "Just an LLM" the LLM is a component in a greater system.
- lucianbr 2y agoHas anyone done the <aloud> thing, and achieved some interesting results? Seems a pretty obvious thing to try, but I never heard of anything like it.
- thomashop 2y agoI've seen automated AI agents that can spend time reflecting on themselves in a feedback loop. The model alters its state over time and can call APIs. You could equate saying something "aloud" to calling an API.
- Lerc 2y agoI noticed some examples from anthropic's golden-gate-claude paper had responses starting with <scratchpad> for the inverse effect. Suppressing the output to the end of the paragraph would be an easy post processing operation. It's probably better to have implicitly closed tags rather than requiring a close tag. It would be quite easy for a LLM to miss a close tag and be off in a dreamland. Possibly addressing comments to the user or itself might allow for considering multiple streams of thought simultaneously. IRC logs would be decent training data for it to figure out many voice multi-conversations (maybe)
- skybrian 2y agoOne of the issues here is that future-focused discussions often lead to wild speculation because we don’t know the future. Also, there’s often too much confidence in people’s preferred predictions (skeptical or optimistic) and it would be less heated if we admitted that we don’t know how things will look even a couple of years out, and alternative scenarios are reasonable. So I think you’re right, it’s not enlightening. Criticism of overconfident predictions won’t be enlightening if you already believe that they’re overconfident and the future is uncertain. Conversations might be more interesting if not so focused on bad arguments of the other side. But perhaps such criticism is still useful. How else do you deflate excessive hype or skepticism?