7 ms·

One experiment I would love to see, although not really feasible in practice, is to train a model on all digitized data from before the year 1905 (journals, let

• newjersey 2y ago
  There is a reason why they won't do it. They are selling a narrative. There is a lot of money to be made here with this narrative and proving that artificial intelligence is NOT intelligent won't help sell that narrative.
  • ben_w 2y ago
    The goal is to make it intelligent, by which OpenAI in particular explicitly mean "economically useful", not simply to be shiny. Passing tests is well known to be much easier than having deep understanding, even in humans. They openly ask for tests like this, not that they could possibly prevent them if they wanted to. There's scammers trying what you say of course, and I'm sure we've all seen some management initiatives or job advertisements for some like that, but I don't get that impression from OpenAI or Anthropic, definitely not from Apple or Facebook (LeCun in particular seems to deny models will ever do what they actually do a few months later). Overstated claims from Microsoft perhaps (I'm unimpressed with the Phi models I can run locally, GitHub's copilot has a reputation problem but I've not tried it myself), and Musk definitely (I have yet to see someone who takes Musk at face value about Optimus).
    • _heimdall 2y ago
      > The goal is to make it intelligent, by which OpenAI in particular explicitly mean "economically useful", not simply to be shiny I never understood why this definition isn't a huge red flag for most people. The idea of boiling what intelligence is down to economic value is terrible, and inaccurate, in my opinion.
      • ben_w 2y ago
        Everyone has a very different idea of what the word "intelligence" means; this definition has got the advantage that, unlike when various different AI became superhuman at arithmetic, symbolic logic, chess, jeopardy, go, poker, number of languages it could communicate in fluently, etc., it's tied to tasks people will continuously pay literally tens of trillions of dollars each year for because they want those tasks done.
        • zaroth 2y ago
          Maybe by the time it’s doing a trillion dollars a year of useful work (less than 10 years out) people will call it intelligent… but still probably not.
        • _heimdall 2y ago
          This definition alone might be fine enough if the word "intelligence" wasn't already widely used outside of AI research. It is though, and the idea that intelligence is measured solely through economic value is a very, very strange approach. Try applying that definition to humans and you pretty quickly run into issues, both moral and practical. It also invalidates basically anything we've done over centuries considering what intelligence is and how to measure it. I don't see any problem at all using economic value as a metric for LLMs or possible AIs, it just needs a different term than intelligence. It pretty clearly feels like for-profit businesses shoehorning potentially valuable ML tools into science fiction AI.
          • ben_w 2y ago
            > This definition alone might be fine enough if the word "intelligence" wasn't already widely used outside of AI research. It is though, and the idea that intelligence is measured solely through economic value is a very, very strange approach. The response from @s1mplicissimus' on my previous comment is asking about "common usage" definitions of intelligence, and this is (IMO unfortunately) one of the many "common usage" definitions: smart people generally earn more. I don't like "commmon sense" anything (or even similar phrases), because I keep seeing the phrase used as a thought-terminating cliché — but one thing it does do, is make it not "a very, very strange approach". Wrong, that happens a lot for common language, but it can't really be strange. > Try applying that definition to humans and you pretty quickly run into issues, both moral and practical. Yes. But one also runs into issues with all definitions of it that I've encountered. > It also invalidates basically anything we've done over centuries considering what intelligence is and how to measure it. Sadly, not so. Even before we had IQ tests (for all their flaws), there's been a widespread belief that being wealthy is the proof of superiority. In theory, in a meritocracy, it might have been, but in practice not only to we not live in a meritocracy (to claim we do would deny both inheritance and luck), but also the measures of intelligence that society has are… well, I was thinking about Paul Merton and Boris Johnson the other day, so I'll link to the blog post: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-12.47.14.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-12.47.14.html
    • s1mplicissimus 2y ago
      I haven't seen "intelligent" used as "economically useful" anywhere outside the AI hype bubble. The most charitable interpretation I can think of is lack of understanding of the common usage of the word, the most realistic one is intentionally muddying terminology so one cannot be called a liar. Are LLMs helpful tools for some tasks like rough translations, voice2text etc? Sure. Does it resemble what humans call intelligence? I'd yet have to see an example of that. The suggested experiment is a great idea and would sway my opinion drastically (given all the training data, model config, prompts & answers are public and reproducible of course, we don't want any chance of marketing BS to taint the results, do we). I'll be honest though, I'm not going to hold my breath for that experiment to succeed with the LLM technology... edit: lol downvoted for calling out shilling i guess
  • numpad0 2y ago
    They don't have to do it themselves. The super-GPU cluster used to train GPT-6 will eventually shrink down to a garage size and eventually some YouTuber will.
• deleted 2y ago
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• amelius 2y ago
  This is how patent disputes should be decided. If an LLM can figure it out, then it is not novel.
  • bushbaba 2y ago
    And what prompt would you give that does have novel input.
    • neom 2y ago
      If I was me, I would start by giving a collection of LLMs the patent, ask half "why is this patent novel" and half "why is this patent not novel" and see what happens. I use this method of "debugging" my thinking (not code), might be a starting point here? Not sure.
      • amelius 2y ago
        Every patent application contains a section of claims. You can just ask the LLM to come up with ways to satisfy those claims. But I'm sure there are lots of ways to go about it.
      • dahart 2y ago
        LLMs are already good at summarizing the claims - patents all explain why they’re novel - so it would be a waste to ask them, especially if you reserve half the LLMs in your set for this question. Asking why a patent is not novel is a great question, but the problem with asking why they are not novel is it has to know all other patents (including very recently filed patents) and it has to be correct, which LLMs are not at all good at yet (plus they still tend to hallucinate confidently). This is a great test for LLM accuracy if you know the right answer already, and not a good test for patent validity.
  • bdowling 2y ago
    Novelty (is it new) is the easy question because it’s just checking a database. Patentable inventions also have to be non-obvious, which is a more subtle question.
• pixelsort 2y ago
  This reminds me of a similar idea I recently heard in podcast with Adam Brown. I'm unsure whether it is his original notion. The idea being, that if we can create AI that can derive special relativity (1905) from pre-Einstein books and papers then we have reached the next game-changing milestone in the advancement of artificial reasoning.
  • FergusArgyll 2y ago
    Great podcast, especially the part about hitchhiking :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhB3qH_TFds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhB3qH_TFds Or RSS https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/69345.rss https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/69345.rss
  • wim 2y ago
    Right, hadn't listened to that one, thanks for the tip!
• saagarjha 2y ago
  Finally, a true application of E=mc^2+AI
• fny 2y ago
  But is there even enough pre-1905 data to create models that say hello world reliably? The terabytes of training data required for decent LLMs does not exist. I’d guess there may only be gigabytes worth.
  • neom 2y ago
    My wife is an 18th century American history professor. LLMs have very very clearly not been trained on 18th century English, they cannot really read it well, and they don't understand much from that period outside of very textbook stuff, anything nuanced or niche is totally missing. I've tried for over a year now, regularly, to help her use LLMs in her research, but as she very amusingly often says "your computers are useless at my work!!!!"
    • whimsicalism 2y ago
      my wish for new years is that every time people make a comment like this they would share an example task
      • neom 2y ago
        https://s.h4x.club/bLuNed45 https://s.h4x.club/bLuNed45 - it's more crazy to me that my wife CAN in fact read this stuff easily, vs the fact that an LLM can't. (for anyone who doesn't feel like downloading the zip, here is a single image from the zip: https://s.h4x.club/nOu485qx https://s.h4x.club/nOu485qx)
        • whimsicalism 2y ago
          have you been trying to provide it as an image directly? if so, doesn’t surprise me at all. really thanks for sharing!
          • neom 2y ago
            My wifes particular area of research is using the capitalist system to "re build" broken slave family trees, she flys around the US going to archives and getting contracts and receipts for slaves, figures out how they got traded, and then figures out where they ended up, and then "re links" them to their their family to best of her ability. Although her area of research isn't particularly overflowing with researchers, there are still a lot of people like her who just have this very tacit knowledge among each other, they email around a lot and stuff, knowledge like who was running a region during a period, ofc they publish, but it's a small field and it's all extremely poorly documented. Was watching the Adam Brown interview with Dwarkesh Patel the other day and he said for his work LLMs are better than bothering an expert in an area of his field with a question, I'm not sure people in her field are able to do this as readily. Franky, I've yet to find a novel/or good use for an LLM in her work. I often joke that her and "her people" are going to be the last ones with jobs if they don't transfer their knowledge into LLMs, ha! :)
• lupire 2y ago
  The best human performance on that task required many many hours of private work given that input. How much would ChatGPT charge for that much reasoning? Isn't cost quadratic in sort term working memory? It would be more interesting to prompt it with X% of a new paper's logical argument, and see if it can predict the rest.
• ZooCow 2y ago
  I had a similar thought but about asking the LLM to predict “future” major historical events. How much prompting would it take to predict wars, etc.?
  • djeastm 2y ago
    You mean train on pre-1939 data and predict how WWII would go?
    • ZooCow 2y ago
      Right. If it were trained through August 1939, how much prompting would be necessary to get it to predict aspects of WWII.
      • MoreMoore 2y ago
        Man, that would be a fascinating experiment. Would it be able to predict who wins and when? Would it be able to predict the Cold War?
      • sitkack 2y ago
        But we know Hitler has a Time Machine that goes forward, he doesn’t need to return to use that knowledge as he already has a timeline here to use. Definitely risks involved here.
        • sitkack 2y ago
          If you build an oracle that tells you who wins the war that far in the future, you build a simulator that allows anyone to win any war. Everything is dual use.
  • david-gpu 2y ago
    That will never work on any complex system that behaves chaotically, such as the weather or complex human endeavors. Tiny uncertainties in the initial conditions rapidly turn into large uncertainties in the outcomes.
• redman25 2y ago
  Why does AI have to be smarter than the collective of hummanity in order to be considered intelligent? It seems like we keep raising the bar on what intelligence means ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • willis936 2y ago
    A machine that synthesizes all human knowledge really ought to know more than an individual in terms of intellect. An entity with all of human intellect prior to 1905 does not need to be as intelligent as a human to make discoveries that mere humans with limited intellect made. Why lower the bar?
    • ninetyninenine 2y ago
      The heightening of the bar is an attempt to deny that milestones were surpassed and to claim that LLMs are not intelligent. We had a threshold for intelligence. An LLM blew past it and people refuse to believe that we passed a critical milestone in creating AI. Everyone still thinks all an LLM does is regurgitate things. But a technical threshold for intelligence cannot have any leeway for what people want to believe. They don’t want to define an LLM as intelligent even if it meets the Turing test technical definition of intelligence so they change the technical definition. And then they keep doing this without realizing and trivializing it. I believe humanity will develop an entity smarter than humans but it will not be an agi because people keep unconsciously moving the goal posts and changing definitions without realizing it.
      • ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
        Since we know an LLM does indeed simply regurgitate data, having it pass a "test for intelligence" simply means that either the test didn't actually test intelligence, or that intelligence can be defined as simply regurgitating data.
        • greentxt 2y ago
          Intelligence is debateble without even bringing ai into it. Nobody agrees on whether humans have intelligence. Well, smart people agree but those people also agree we have or will soon have agi or something negligibly different from it.
• amluto 2y ago
  > ask it for a formula for mass-energy equivalence Way too easy. If you think that mass and energy might be equivalent, then dimensional analysis doesn’t give you too much choice in the formula. Really, the interesting thing about E=mc^2 isn’t the formula but the assertion that mass is a form of energy and all the surrounding observations about the universe. Also, the actual insight in 1905 was more about asking the right questions and imagining that the equivalence principle could really hold, etc. A bunch of the math predates 1905 and would be there in an AI’s training set: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lorentz_transformations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lorentz_transform...
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    but e=mc^2 is just an approximation e: nice, downvoted for knowing special relativity
    • amluto 2y ago
      Can you elaborate? How is E=mc^2 an approximation, in special relativity or otherwise? What is it an approximation of?
      • whimsicalism 2y ago
        E^2 = m^2 + p^2 where p is momentum and i’ve dropped unit adjustment factors like c this allows light to have energy even if its massless
      • ac29 2y ago
        e=mc^2 is only correct for objects at rest. The full equation takes into account velocity, but for "low" speeds where v<<c, the term is close enough to zero than E=mc^2 is still a good approximation.
      • ijustlovemath 2y ago
        E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2, where p is momentum. When an object is traveling at relativistic speeds, the momentum forms a more significant portion of its energy
• wslh 2y ago
  Why do we need this when current models already handle questions and answers about new discoveries: ones that are happening every week and are often easier to grasp than Einstein’s equations? I think it is clear that they will fail on most of them. That doesn't mean that LLMs are not useful but there are more walls in the road.
• layer8 2y ago
  Instead of asking for a formula, a better test may be to point out all the seeming contradictions in physics at that time (constancy of the speed of light, wave vs. particle nature of light, ultraviolet catastrophe), and ask it how they could be resolved.
• mik09 2y ago
  what if someone invented it before 1905