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> TFA literally and unironically includes such phrases as "AI is awesome". It characterizes AI as "useful", "impressive" and capable of "genuine technological m

> TFA literally and unironically includes such phrases as "AI is awesome". It characterizes AI as "useful", "impressive" and capable of "genuine technological marvels". This does not contradict what I said. > In what sense is the article dismissive? What, exactly, is it dismissive of? Consider the following direct quotes: > It’s like having the world’s most educated parrot: it has heard everything, and now it can mimic a convincing answer. or > they generate responses using the same principle: predicting likely answers from huge amounts of training text. They don’t understand the request like a human would; they just know statistically which words tend to follow which. The result can be very useful and surprisingly coherent, but it’s coming from calculation, not comprehension I believe these examples are self-evidently dismissive, but to further put it into words, the article - ironically - rides on the idea that there's more to understanding then just pattern recognition at a large scale, something mystical and magical, something beyond the frameworks of mathematics and computing, and thus these models are no true scotsmans. I wholeheartedly disagree with this idea; I find the sheer capability of higher level semantic information extraction and manipulation to be already a clear and undeniable evidence of an understanding. This is one thing the article is dismissive of (in my view). They even put it into words: > As impressive as the output is, there’s no mystical intelligence at play – just a lot of number crunching and clever programming. Implying that real intelligence is mystical, not even just in the epistemological but in the ontological sense, too. > But here at Zero Fluff, we don’t do magic – we do reality. Please. It also blatantly contradicts very easily accessible information on how a typical modern LLM works; no, they are not just spouting off a likely series of words (or tokens) in order, as if they were reciting from somewhere. This is also a common lie that this article just propagates further. If that's really how they worked, they'd be even less useful than they presently are. This is another thing the article is dismissive of (in my view).

JustinCS 1y ago
I agree, real intelligence may also potentially be explained as all "math and probability", whether it's neurons or atoms. A key difference between our brains and LLMs is that the underlying math behind LLMs is still substantially more comprehensible to us, for now. It's common to believe that we have a more mystical quality, a consciousness, due to a soul, or just being vastly more complex, but few can draw a line clearly. That said, this article certainly gives a more accurate understanding of LLMs compared to thinking of them as if they had human-like intelligence, but I think it goes too far in insinuating that they'll always be limited due to being "just math". On a side note, this article seems pretty obviously the product of AI generation, even if human edited, and I think it has lots of fluff, contrary to the name.
pxc 1y ago
Oh, so the issue isn't that the article is dismissive of AI as a technology, but that its author doesn't share your radical views in philosophy of mind (eliminative materialism/illusionism). Okay, I guess. But I wouldn't characterize that as "being dismissive of AI".
- perching_aix 1y ago
  Well I did. I do not recognize dismissiveness as something objective or formally defined (it's a natural language property after all), which leaves us with subjectivity or at best shared subjectivity. It's also plain context dependent, at that much I hope we do agree on, so indeed if you do not accept my philosophical view underpinning why I'd find it dismissive, clearly you won't appreciate it as dismissive. It's a lot like with Gödel's "proof of god". Only holds as long as you subscribe to the axioms being built upon. I'd imagine we do not share the same subjective perspective on this (e.g. I don't think my views are particularly radical), so you wouldn't characterize it that way, whereas I do. Makes sense to me. Didn't intend to mislead you into thinking this wasn't one of these cases, apologies if this is not what you expected. I wrote under the assumption that you did. I feel a lot of disagreements are just this, it's just that most often people need 30 comments to get here, if they even manage to without getting sidetracked, and without getting too emotionally invested / worked up.
  - pxc 1y ago
    Sometimes it's useful, imo, to pick apart the differences in intellectual temperament, intuition, foundational beliefs, etc., that drive disagreements. But I agree, sometimes it's a lot of clumsy fumbling. I'll say this against your perspective (or perhaps just use of language), though: it seems to leave little room for skepticism of the greatest general (not product-specific) claims made today in the AI industry. You either buy into the notion that the path we're on is contiguous with "AGI", or you're dismissive of AI! This is nearly as deflationary as your view of consciousness. ;) I would expect "dismissive" to describe more categorically dismissive views, and not to extend, e.g., to views which admit that AI is in principle possible, non-eliminativist materialism (e.g., functionalists who say we just don't have good reason to say LLMs or other neural networks have the requisite structure for consciousness), etc. Since you brought him up, Gödel himself seemed to have a much more "miraculous" notion of human cognition that came out in (IIRC) letters in which he explains why he doesn't think human mathematicians' work is hindered by his second incompleteness theorem. That, I would say is dismissive of AI. But if any view not grounded in illusionism is dismissive of AI, what can a non-dismissive person possibly identify as AI hype? Just particular marketing claims about the concrete capabilities of particular models? If that's true, than rather than characterizing extreme or marginal views, a view is "dismissive" just for refusing to buy into the highest degree of contemporary AI hype.

JustinCS 1y ago

I agree, real intelligence may also potentially be explained as all "math and probability", whether it's neurons or atoms. A key difference between our brains and LLMs is that the underlying math behind LLMs is still substantially more comprehensible to us, for now. It's common to believe that we have a more mystical quality, a consciousness, due to a soul, or just being vastly more complex, but few can draw a line clearly. That said, this article certainly gives a more accurate understanding of LLMs compared to thinking of them as if they had human-like intelligence, but I think it goes too far in insinuating that they'll always be limited due to being "just math". On a side note, this article seems pretty obviously the product of AI generation, even if human edited, and I think it has lots of fluff, contrary to the name.

pxc 1y ago

Oh, so the issue isn't that the article is dismissive of AI as a technology, but that its author doesn't share your radical views in philosophy of mind (eliminative materialism/illusionism). Okay, I guess. But I wouldn't characterize that as "being dismissive of AI".

perching_aix 1y ago
Well I did. I do not recognize dismissiveness as something objective or formally defined (it's a natural language property after all), which leaves us with subjectivity or at best shared subjectivity. It's also plain context dependent, at that much I hope we do agree on, so indeed if you do not accept my philosophical view underpinning why I'd find it dismissive, clearly you won't appreciate it as dismissive. It's a lot like with Gödel's "proof of god". Only holds as long as you subscribe to the axioms being built upon. I'd imagine we do not share the same subjective perspective on this (e.g. I don't think my views are particularly radical), so you wouldn't characterize it that way, whereas I do. Makes sense to me. Didn't intend to mislead you into thinking this wasn't one of these cases, apologies if this is not what you expected. I wrote under the assumption that you did. I feel a lot of disagreements are just this, it's just that most often people need 30 comments to get here, if they even manage to without getting sidetracked, and without getting too emotionally invested / worked up.
- pxc 1y ago
  Sometimes it's useful, imo, to pick apart the differences in intellectual temperament, intuition, foundational beliefs, etc., that drive disagreements. But I agree, sometimes it's a lot of clumsy fumbling. I'll say this against your perspective (or perhaps just use of language), though: it seems to leave little room for skepticism of the greatest general (not product-specific) claims made today in the AI industry. You either buy into the notion that the path we're on is contiguous with "AGI", or you're dismissive of AI! This is nearly as deflationary as your view of consciousness. ;) I would expect "dismissive" to describe more categorically dismissive views, and not to extend, e.g., to views which admit that AI is in principle possible, non-eliminativist materialism (e.g., functionalists who say we just don't have good reason to say LLMs or other neural networks have the requisite structure for consciousness), etc. Since you brought him up, Gödel himself seemed to have a much more "miraculous" notion of human cognition that came out in (IIRC) letters in which he explains why he doesn't think human mathematicians' work is hindered by his second incompleteness theorem. That, I would say is dismissive of AI. But if any view not grounded in illusionism is dismissive of AI, what can a non-dismissive person possibly identify as AI hype? Just particular marketing claims about the concrete capabilities of particular models? If that's true, than rather than characterizing extreme or marginal views, a view is "dismissive" just for refusing to buy into the highest degree of contemporary AI hype.