4 ms·

> 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 d

> 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
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      > smart people generally earn more. > there's been a widespread belief that being wealthy is the proof of superiority. Both of these are assumptions though, and working in the reverse order. Its one thing to expect that intelligence will lead to higher value outcomes and entirely different to expect that higher value outcomes prove intelligence. It seems reasonable that higher intelligence, combined with the incentives if a capitalist system, will lead to higher intelligence people getting more wealthy. They learn to play the game and find ways to "win." It seems unreasonable to assume that anyone or anything that "wins" in that system much be more intelligent. Said differently, intelligence may lead to wealth but wealth doesn't imply intelligence.
      - 2y ago

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
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > smart people generally earn more. > there's been a widespread belief that being wealthy is the proof of superiority. Both of these are assumptions though, and working in the reverse order. Its one thing to expect that intelligence will lead to higher value outcomes and entirely different to expect that higher value outcomes prove intelligence. It seems reasonable that higher intelligence, combined with the incentives if a capitalist system, will lead to higher intelligence people getting more wealthy. They learn to play the game and find ways to "win." It seems unreasonable to assume that anyone or anything that "wins" in that system much be more intelligent. Said differently, intelligence may lead to wealth but wealth doesn't imply intelligence.
    - 2y ago