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> There's a difference between coherence and novelty Extant genAI systems' complete and utter inability to produce anything truly novel (in style, content, wha
by caconym_ 2y ago
> There's a difference between coherence and novelty
Extant genAI systems' complete and utter inability to produce anything truly novel (in style, content, whatever) is the main reason I'm becoming more and more convinced that this technology is, at best, only a small part of real general intelligence as in the human brain.
- dingnuts 2y agotheir inability to invent and innovate is completely inherent to their design, and without the capacity for novelty it's been my opinion for a long time that calling generative models "intelligence" is fundamentally a misnomer I really think capacity for invention is a key characteristic of any kind of intelligence
- vundercind 2y agoYep, they’re guessing at patterns in language they’ve “seen” with weights and some randomness thrown in. They’d pick out patterns just as well if fed structured nonsense. They wouldn’t be stumped by the absence of meaning, confounded by it—they’d power right on, generating text, because understanding isn’t part of what they do. Plays zero role in it. They don’t “understand” anything whatsoever. At best, they’re a subsystem of system that could have something like intelligence. They’re still useful and cool tools but they simply aren’t “thinking” or “understanding” things, because we know what they do and it’s not that.
- stickfigure 2y ago> I really think capacity for invention is a key characteristic of any kind of intelligence I think you just categorized about 2/3 of the human population as unintelligent.
- dwattttt 2y agoInvention isn't some incredible rare gift; putting two things together that you've never personally seen done before is novel, even if it's food.
- stickfigure 2y agoThat's a low bar that LLMs have already surpassed. LLMs are perfectly capable of generating novel recipes. If I'm going to be brutally honest, they're probably better at it than my wife, and they don't even have taste buds.
- golergka 2y ago2/3 is an understatement.
- hatthew 2y agoCan you clarify what you mean by "truly novel"? Novelty exists on a spectrum, and I'm curious where you're drawing the line between "not novel" and "truly novel".
- caconym_ 2y agoI mean, has a genAI system ever shown you anything you thought was legitimately interesting, for reasons other than the (admittedly novel) fact that it came out of a computer program, that wasn't a straightforward recapitulation of its training data? As far as I can tell, genAI hasn't produced any worthwhile literature or works of art notable for any reason other than the (perhaps controversial) involvement of genAI. I am also not aware of any independent discoveries in math or science by genAI systems, nor contributions to any other academic fields, nor any noteworthy inventions. That's what I mean by 'true' novelty—it might string together words in an order that has technically never been seen before, but it evidently has no capacity to extend/extrapolate/whatever outside the bounds of its training data.