4 ms·

They did not learn anything. Their engines started outputting different statistically probable output based on changed input parameters.

• ben_w 2y ago
  If that precludes it being learning, all humans are failures too. There's other reasons to consider this particular model "not learning", but that ain't it, it's too generic and encompasses too much.
• ithkuil 2y ago
  On one extreme we anthropomorphize our current primitive generation of language models and concede them way more intelligence than they have likely because we're biased to do so since they speak "well". On the other extreme we tend to give our human-exceptionalism way too much weight and contrast its behaviour with "mere statistical parrot rumination" as if our brains deep down were not just a much (much) more sophisticated machine, but nevertheless a machine.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > as if our brains deep down were not just a much (much) more sophisticated machine, but nevertheless a machine. That is one position, but materialism is not universally taken as a foregone conclusion.
    • fshbbdssbbgdd 2y ago
      As a materialist, I have to give this one to the dualists. The argument that AI isn’t intelligent because it’s just a bunch of numbers makes more sense coming from that perspective.
      • ithkuil 2y ago
        Fair enough. That got me thinking: I guess the dualistic viewpoint can be graded on a spectrum. Some people may hold the "absolute dualist" position, where no matter how much advances we make in reproducing cognitive abilities, they will always move the goalpost and claim that what makes _us_ different is that little extra bit that hasn't been reached yet. This leads to accepting the p-zombies as a logical possibility. On the other side of the spectrum is the "Bayesian dualist" who could in principle change their minds but are not at all convinced that a naturalistic and mechanistic implementation of the brain can possibly explain the utter complexity and beauty of the human condition and thus are unmoved by the crude first steps in that field. This category would consider a p-zombie to not be logically coherent but they may just state that in practice we stand no chance in producing a mechanism that would truly behave not even close to a human being. Those people may contemplate a possibility that we may eventually explain how cognitive behaviour arises from nature but lean towards the necessity of discovering some brand new science or some quantum effects to account for the mysterious beauty of the human condition (e.g. Penrose) Does this categorization make sense? Are there some other points in that spectrum I'm missing?
        • fshbbdssbbgdd 2y ago
          I think I’m bad at categorizing different strains of dualism because I tend to dismiss the whole enterprise without giving a fair amount of consideration. I figure brains are amazing and we may never understand how they work very well. But nobody needed to understand intelligence for it to occur in humans. Evolution is a crude optimization mechanism that brute-forced the problem over millions of years with biology as a substrate. Computers are a worse substrate in some important ways. However, we have some incredibly fast optimization mechanisms available to us when we train models (and of course we aren’t limited to a single chip). I’m hand-waving at the inner workings of intelligence and don’t claim to understand it at all. Given my belief that meat computers can do it without any grand design, I don’t see any reason to think that silicon computers won’t be able to do the same. Now, if you believe that consciousness and/or intelligence requires some kind of intangible soul, and such souls are hard to come by, of course you won’t find one on the rack in an H100.
    • exe34 2y ago
      no, we're special in some unspecified nebulous fashion.
  • freehorse 2y ago
    > human-exceptionalism Rather living-systems-exceptionalism
    • exe34 2y ago
      carbon chauvinism. if you try to argue about simulating at lower and lower levels, they still refuse to accept that a brain could be computed. as if QED/QCD can tell if they're running on top of silicon or under carbon.
      • freehorse 2y ago
        Living organisms have certain features that simulations don't, and in particular it is good to remember that whatever simulations we currently can run they are actually but abstractions. Organisms are evolved to survive, reproduce their forms and structures in time, and be in a certain allostatic equilibrium state, and that gives them a certain purpose and that simulations lack. If we look at organisms only as information processors and disregard the coupling of their physiological states with their behaviour and with the environment we lose everything that makes life, life.
• esolyt 2y ago
  So, just like a human brain.
  • nkrisc 2y ago
    Just as a fruit fly’s brain is no different than a human brain.
  • smusamashah 2y ago
    No. One audio says it phoned back home and no one picked or something. But they never did any of that. Can't compare that gibberish to human brain.
    • tomjen3 2y ago
      Can you be sure? Humans lie all the time.
      • smusamashah 2y ago
        If I write a small game where a character (a 2D sprite or just a name in form of text) says that it knows its a game character and doesn't have real body. You won't even consider it a lie. For that you have to first consider that line coming from an actual being.
    • butterfly42069 2y ago
      Indeed and a US Vice Presidential candidate said all Haitians eat dogs.