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This is amazing. I uploaded the instruction manual for a Scholander pressure chamber (a piece of equipment for measuring plant moisture stress) and made a podca

This is amazing. I uploaded the instruction manual for a Scholander pressure chamber (a piece of equipment for measuring plant moisture stress) and made a podcast from it. The information in the podcast was accurate, it included some light banter and jokes, while still getting across the important topics in the instructions. I don't know what I would use a podcast like this for, but the fact that something like this can be created without human intervention in just a few minutes is jaw dropping, and maybe also just a teeny bit scary.

bbor 2y ago
Yeah I totally get people’s criticisms that the podcasts aren’t quite human-expert-level in terms of symbolic reasoning, but this still blows my mind. The intuitive skill these show, not to mention the ability to accurately (again, if shallowly) parse and transform huge bodies of content in seconds is absolutely scary, IMO. I’d feed it the Singularity paper, but I’m not sure I need that extra boost of anxiety these days… https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
- andrepd 2y ago
  This isn't "quite expert-level in terms of symbolic reasoning" in the same way as a soapbox isn't "quite a formula 1"
  - aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
    The symbolic reasoning is flawed but okay - the problem comes about because 99% of human reasoning is not symbolic.
  - bbor 2y ago
    We accidentally invented general models that can coherently muse about the philosophical beliefs of Gilles Deleuze at length, and accurately, based on two full books that they summarized. You can be cynical until your dying day, that’s your right — but I highly recommend letting that fact be a little bit impressive, someday. There’s no way you live through any event that’s more historically significant, other than perhaps an apocalypse or two. In other words: soapbox is presumably some sort of toy car that goes 15mph, and formula 1 goes up above 150mph at least (as you can tell, I’m not a car guy). If you have any actual scientific argument as to why a model that can score 90-100 on a typical IQ test has only 1/10th the symbolic reasoning skills of a human, I’d love to eat my words! Maybe on some special highly iterative, deliberation-based task?
    - globnomulous 2y ago
      These aren't "general" models. They're statistical models. They're autocorrect or autocomplete on steroids -- and autocorrect/autocomplete don't require symbolic reasoning. It's also not at all clear to me what "symbolic" could mean in this context. If it means the software has concepts, my response would be that they aren't concepts of a kind that we can clearly recognize or label as such (edit: and that's to say nothing of the fact that the ability to hold concepts/symbols and understand them as concepts/symbols presupposes internal life and awareness). The best analogy I've heard for these models is this: you take a completely, perfectly naive, ignorant man, who knows nothing, and you place him in a room, sealed off from everything. He has no knowledge of the outside world, of you, or of what your might want from him. But you slip under the door of his cell pieces of paper containing mathematical or linguistic expressions, and he learns or is somehow induced to do something with them and pass them back. When what he does with them pleases you, you reward him. Each time you do this, you reinforce a behavior. You repeat this process, over and over. As a result, he develops habits. Training continues, and those habits become more and more precisely fitted to your expectations and intentions. After enough time and enough training, his habits are so well formed that he seems to know what a sonnet is, how to perform derivatives and integrals, and seems to understand (and be able to explain!) concepts like positive and negative, and friend and foe. He can even write you a rap-battle libretto about nineteenth-century English historiography in the style of Thomas Paine imitating Ikkyu. Fundamentally, though, he doesn't know what any of these tokens mean. He still doesn't know that there's an outside world. He may have ideas that are guiding his behavior, but you have no way of knowing that -- or of knowing whether they bear any resemblance to concepts or ideas you would recognize. These models deal with tokens similarly. They don't know what a token is or represents -- or we have no reason to think they do. They're just networks of weights, relationships, and tendencies that, from a given seed and given input, generate an output, just like any program, just like your phone keyboard generates predictions about the next word you'll want to type. Given billions and billions and billions and billions of parameters, why shouldn't such a program score highly on an IQ test or on the LSAT? Once the number of parameters available to the program reaches a certain threshold (edit: and we've programmed a way for it to connect the dots), shouldn't we be able to design it in such a way that it can compute correct answers to questions that seem to require complex, abstract reasoning, regardless of whether it has the capacity to reason? Or shouldn't we be able to give it enough data that it's able to find the relationships that enable it to simulate/generate patterns indistinguishable from real, actual reasoning? I don't think one needs to be cynical to be unimpressed. I'm unimpressed simply because these models aren't clearly doing anything new in kind. What they're doing seems to be new, and novel, only because of the scale at which they do what they do. Edit: Moreover, I'm hostile to the economic forces that produced these models, as everybody should be. They're the purest example of what Jaron Lanier has been warning us about -- namely that, when information is free, the wealthiest are going to be the ones who profit from it and dominate, because they'll be the ones able to pay for the technology that can exploit it. I have no doubt Altman is aware of this. And I have no doubt that he's little better than Elizabeth Holmes, making ethical compromises and cutting legal corners, secure in the smug knowledge that he'll surely pay his moral debts (and avoid looking at the painting in the attic) and obviously make the world a better place once he has total market dominance. And none of the other major players are any better.
cainxinth 2y ago
> I don't know what I would use a podcast like this for… Say you need to read those instructions, but it’s also really nice out and you want to go for a jog: two birds, one stone.

bbor 2y ago

Yeah I totally get people’s criticisms that the podcasts aren’t quite human-expert-level in terms of symbolic reasoning, but this still blows my mind. The intuitive skill these show, not to mention the ability to accurately (again, if shallowly) parse and transform huge bodies of content in seconds is absolutely scary, IMO. I’d feed it the Singularity paper, but I’m not sure I need that extra boost of anxiety these days… https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

andrepd 2y ago
This isn't "quite expert-level in terms of symbolic reasoning" in the same way as a soapbox isn't "quite a formula 1"
- aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
  The symbolic reasoning is flawed but okay - the problem comes about because 99% of human reasoning is not symbolic.
- bbor 2y ago
  We accidentally invented general models that can coherently muse about the philosophical beliefs of Gilles Deleuze at length, and accurately, based on two full books that they summarized. You can be cynical until your dying day, that’s your right — but I highly recommend letting that fact be a little bit impressive, someday. There’s no way you live through any event that’s more historically significant, other than perhaps an apocalypse or two. In other words: soapbox is presumably some sort of toy car that goes 15mph, and formula 1 goes up above 150mph at least (as you can tell, I’m not a car guy). If you have any actual scientific argument as to why a model that can score 90-100 on a typical IQ test has only 1/10th the symbolic reasoning skills of a human, I’d love to eat my words! Maybe on some special highly iterative, deliberation-based task?
  - globnomulous 2y ago
    These aren't "general" models. They're statistical models. They're autocorrect or autocomplete on steroids -- and autocorrect/autocomplete don't require symbolic reasoning. It's also not at all clear to me what "symbolic" could mean in this context. If it means the software has concepts, my response would be that they aren't concepts of a kind that we can clearly recognize or label as such (edit: and that's to say nothing of the fact that the ability to hold concepts/symbols and understand them as concepts/symbols presupposes internal life and awareness). The best analogy I've heard for these models is this: you take a completely, perfectly naive, ignorant man, who knows nothing, and you place him in a room, sealed off from everything. He has no knowledge of the outside world, of you, or of what your might want from him. But you slip under the door of his cell pieces of paper containing mathematical or linguistic expressions, and he learns or is somehow induced to do something with them and pass them back. When what he does with them pleases you, you reward him. Each time you do this, you reinforce a behavior. You repeat this process, over and over. As a result, he develops habits. Training continues, and those habits become more and more precisely fitted to your expectations and intentions. After enough time and enough training, his habits are so well formed that he seems to know what a sonnet is, how to perform derivatives and integrals, and seems to understand (and be able to explain!) concepts like positive and negative, and friend and foe. He can even write you a rap-battle libretto about nineteenth-century English historiography in the style of Thomas Paine imitating Ikkyu. Fundamentally, though, he doesn't know what any of these tokens mean. He still doesn't know that there's an outside world. He may have ideas that are guiding his behavior, but you have no way of knowing that -- or of knowing whether they bear any resemblance to concepts or ideas you would recognize. These models deal with tokens similarly. They don't know what a token is or represents -- or we have no reason to think they do. They're just networks of weights, relationships, and tendencies that, from a given seed and given input, generate an output, just like any program, just like your phone keyboard generates predictions about the next word you'll want to type. Given billions and billions and billions and billions of parameters, why shouldn't such a program score highly on an IQ test or on the LSAT? Once the number of parameters available to the program reaches a certain threshold (edit: and we've programmed a way for it to connect the dots), shouldn't we be able to design it in such a way that it can compute correct answers to questions that seem to require complex, abstract reasoning, regardless of whether it has the capacity to reason? Or shouldn't we be able to give it enough data that it's able to find the relationships that enable it to simulate/generate patterns indistinguishable from real, actual reasoning? I don't think one needs to be cynical to be unimpressed. I'm unimpressed simply because these models aren't clearly doing anything new in kind. What they're doing seems to be new, and novel, only because of the scale at which they do what they do. Edit: Moreover, I'm hostile to the economic forces that produced these models, as everybody should be. They're the purest example of what Jaron Lanier has been warning us about -- namely that, when information is free, the wealthiest are going to be the ones who profit from it and dominate, because they'll be the ones able to pay for the technology that can exploit it. I have no doubt Altman is aware of this. And I have no doubt that he's little better than Elizabeth Holmes, making ethical compromises and cutting legal corners, secure in the smug knowledge that he'll surely pay his moral debts (and avoid looking at the painting in the attic) and obviously make the world a better place once he has total market dominance. And none of the other major players are any better.

cainxinth 2y ago

> I don't know what I would use a podcast like this for… Say you need to read those instructions, but it’s also really nice out and you want to go for a jog: two birds, one stone.