6 ms·

Ok - where do AIs put the information that they "seek" from the internet?

by sgt101 1y ago

cess11 1y ago
I suspect there's a harsher argument to be made regarding "autonomous". Pull the power cord and see if it does what a mammal would do, or if it rather resembles a chaotic water wheel.
- bubblyworld 1y ago
  I think it would turn off, no shocker there. I'm not sure what you mean, can you elaborate? When I say autonomous I don't mean some high-falutin philosophical concept, I just mean it does stuff on it's own.
  - cess11 1y ago
    Right, but it doesn't. It stops once you stop forcing it to do stuff.
    - viraptor 1y ago
      Because that's what they're created to do. You can make a system which runs continuously. It's not a tech limitation, just how we preferred things to work so far.
      - cess11 1y ago
        Maybe, but that's not the case here so it is lost on me why you bring it up.
        viraptor 1y ago
        You're making claims about those systems not being autonomous. When we want to, we create them to be autonomous. It's got nothing to do with agency or survival instincts. Experiments like that have been done for years now - for example https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/10/researchers-populated-a-tiny-virtual-town-with-ai-and-it-was-very-wholesome/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/10/researchers-populated-a-ti...
        cess11 1y ago
        Yes, because they aren't. Against your fantasy that some might be brought into existence sometime in the future I present my own fantasy that there won't be.
        viraptor 1y ago
        I linked you an experiment with multiple autonomous agents operating continuously. It's already happened. It's really not clear what you're disagreeing with here.
        cess11 1y ago
        No, that was a simulation, akin to Conway's cellular automata. You seem to consider being fully under someone else's control to qualify as autonomy, at least in certain casees, which to me comes across as very bizarre.
        viraptor 1y ago
        You seem to be taking about some kind of free will and perfect independence, not autonomy as normally understood. Agents can have autonomy within the environment they have access to. We talk about autonomous vehicles for example, where we want them to still stay within some action boundaries. Otherwise we'd be discussing metaphysics. It's not like we can cross physical/body boundaries just because we've got autonomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_robot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_robot > An autonomous robot is a robot that acts without recourse to human control. Historic examples include space probes. Modern examples include self-driving vacuums and cars. The same idea is used for agents - they're autonomous because they independently choose actions with a specific or vague goal.
        cess11 1y ago
        I don't see the relevance of things that carry their own power supply either, and I still disagree that Conway automata and similar software exhibit autonomy. I did not mention "free will and perfect independence".
    - bubblyworld 1y ago
      I still don't understand your point, sorry. If it's a semantic nitpick about the meaning of "autonomous", I'm not interested - I've made my definition quite clear, and it has nothing to do with when agents stop doing things or what happens when they get turned off.
      - cess11 1y ago
        I think you should start caring about the meaning of words.
        bubblyworld 1y ago
        I do, when I think it's relevant. Words don't have an absolute meaning - I've presented mine.
        mystified5016 1y ago
        You're the one using words incorrectly. Everybody else agrees on what these words mean and you're insisting on your own made-up definitions. And then you throw a fit like a child when someone disagrees. You're wrong and you're behaving inappropriately.
        cess11 1y ago
        No, I did not. It appears I'm rather alone in this setting to make a difference between automatic and autonomous. If immediate, direct dependence and autonomy are compatible, I want none of it.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Pull the power cord and see if it does what a mammal would do Pulling the power cord on a mammal means shutting off its metabolism. That predictably kills us.
  - cess11 1y ago
    No. If the analogy had been about frying the chips and internal wires, then maybe that might have been a reasonable comparison, but it was not. Now it's about cutting the supply of food.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      "Food" is only analogous to "mains power" for devices which also have a battery. But regarding hunger: while they are a weird and pathological example, breatharians are in fact mammals, and the result of the absence of food is sometimes "starves to death" and not always "changes mind about this whole breatharian thing" or "pathological dishonesty about calorie content of digestive biscuits dunked in tea".
      - cess11 1y ago
        Right, so you agree that there is a clear difference between a mammal and the device we're discussing. I'm not sure why introducing a certain type of rare scam artist into the modeling of this thought experiment would make things clearer or more interesting.
        ben_w 1y ago
        > Right, so you agree that there is a clear difference between a mammal and the device we're discussing. A difference that you have not demonstrated the relevance of. If I run an AI on my laptop and unplug the charger, this runs until the battery dies. If I have a mammal that does not eat, it lives until it starves. If I run an AI on a desktop and unplug the mains, it ceases function in milliseconds (or however long the biggest capacitor in the PSU lasts). If I (for the sake of argument) had a device that could instantly remove all the ATP from a mammal's body, they'd also be dead pretty quick. If I have an android, purely electric motors and no hydraulics, and the battery connector comes loose, it ragdolls. Same for a human who has a heart attack. An AI that is trained with rewards for collecting energy to recharge itself, does so. One that has no such feedback, doesn't. Most mammals have such a mechanism from evolution, but there are exceptions where that signal is missing (not just weird humans), and they starve. None of these things say anything about intelligence. > I'm not sure why introducing a certain type of rare scam artist into the modeling of this thought experiment would make things clearer or more interesting. Because you're talking about the effect of mammals ceasing the consumption of food, and they're an example of mammals ceasing the consumption of food.
davedx 1y ago
Into their short term memory (context). Some information is also stored in long term memory (user store)
bubblyworld 1y ago
I can see what you are getting at but consider: I had an experience the other day where claude code wrote a script that shelled out to other LLM providers to obtain some information (unprompted by me). More often it requests information from me directly. My point is that the environment itself for these things is becoming at least as computationally complex or irreducible (as the OP would say) as the model's algorithm, so there's no point trying to analyse these things in isolation.
DANmode 1y ago
Truthfully, few people know that right now! They're backfeeding what it's "learning" along the way - whether it's in a smart fashion, we don't know yet.
- JyB 1y ago
  It’s the whole “MCP” moto right? Basically keep re-feeding in each subsequent prompts the additional requested context?
  - DANmode 1y ago
    Nah, that's still considered an ephemeral user session. We're talking about what the service does with what it learns from the failures (and successes) marked by user feedback into the chat, or the app's buttons.
  - kreetx 1y ago
    (I've a recently acquired strong opinion on MCP, beware) MCP seems to be the idea to expose literally any data source to AI agents as context. E.g, in work/business context: a database, source code, a kanban board; in private context: your photo library, notes, etc. This is good and makes sense. As a technical "standard" or "protocol" (as it claims to be), it's a total mess, read more here: https://modelcontextprotocol.io https://modelcontextprotocol.io. Though I guess they are inventing it as they go.

Ok - where do AIs put the information that they "seek" from the internet?

by sgt101 1y ago

Ok - where do AIs put the information that they "seek" from the internet?

I suspect there's a harsher argument to be made regarding "autonomous". Pull the power cord and see if it does what a mammal would do, or if it rather resembles a chaotic water wheel.

bubblyworld 1y ago
I think it would turn off, no shocker there. I'm not sure what you mean, can you elaborate? When I say autonomous I don't mean some high-falutin philosophical concept, I just mean it does stuff on it's own.
- cess11 1y ago
  Right, but it doesn't. It stops once you stop forcing it to do stuff.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    Because that's what they're created to do. You can make a system which runs continuously. It's not a tech limitation, just how we preferred things to work so far.
    - cess11 1y ago
      Maybe, but that's not the case here so it is lost on me why you bring it up.
      - viraptor 1y ago
        You're making claims about those systems not being autonomous. When we want to, we create them to be autonomous. It's got nothing to do with agency or survival instincts. Experiments like that have been done for years now - for example https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/10/researchers-populated-a-tiny-virtual-town-with-ai-and-it-was-very-wholesome/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/10/researchers-populated-a-ti...
        cess11 1y ago
        Yes, because they aren't. Against your fantasy that some might be brought into existence sometime in the future I present my own fantasy that there won't be.
        viraptor 1y ago
        I linked you an experiment with multiple autonomous agents operating continuously. It's already happened. It's really not clear what you're disagreeing with here.
        cess11 1y ago
        No, that was a simulation, akin to Conway's cellular automata. You seem to consider being fully under someone else's control to qualify as autonomy, at least in certain casees, which to me comes across as very bizarre.
        viraptor 1y ago
        You seem to be taking about some kind of free will and perfect independence, not autonomy as normally understood. Agents can have autonomy within the environment they have access to. We talk about autonomous vehicles for example, where we want them to still stay within some action boundaries. Otherwise we'd be discussing metaphysics. It's not like we can cross physical/body boundaries just because we've got autonomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_robot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_robot > An autonomous robot is a robot that acts without recourse to human control. Historic examples include space probes. Modern examples include self-driving vacuums and cars. The same idea is used for agents - they're autonomous because they independently choose actions with a specific or vague goal.
        cess11 1y ago
        I don't see the relevance of things that carry their own power supply either, and I still disagree that Conway automata and similar software exhibit autonomy. I did not mention "free will and perfect independence".
  - bubblyworld 1y ago
    I still don't understand your point, sorry. If it's a semantic nitpick about the meaning of "autonomous", I'm not interested - I've made my definition quite clear, and it has nothing to do with when agents stop doing things or what happens when they get turned off.
    - cess11 1y ago
      I think you should start caring about the meaning of words.
      - bubblyworld 1y ago
        I do, when I think it's relevant. Words don't have an absolute meaning - I've presented mine.
      - mystified5016 1y ago
        You're the one using words incorrectly. Everybody else agrees on what these words mean and you're insisting on your own made-up definitions. And then you throw a fit like a child when someone disagrees. You're wrong and you're behaving inappropriately.
        cess11 1y ago
        No, I did not. It appears I'm rather alone in this setting to make a difference between automatic and autonomous. If immediate, direct dependence and autonomy are compatible, I want none of it.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Pull the power cord and see if it does what a mammal would do Pulling the power cord on a mammal means shutting off its metabolism. That predictably kills us.
- cess11 1y ago
  No. If the analogy had been about frying the chips and internal wires, then maybe that might have been a reasonable comparison, but it was not. Now it's about cutting the supply of food.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    "Food" is only analogous to "mains power" for devices which also have a battery. But regarding hunger: while they are a weird and pathological example, breatharians are in fact mammals, and the result of the absence of food is sometimes "starves to death" and not always "changes mind about this whole breatharian thing" or "pathological dishonesty about calorie content of digestive biscuits dunked in tea".
    - cess11 1y ago
      Right, so you agree that there is a clear difference between a mammal and the device we're discussing. I'm not sure why introducing a certain type of rare scam artist into the modeling of this thought experiment would make things clearer or more interesting.
      - ben_w 1y ago
        > Right, so you agree that there is a clear difference between a mammal and the device we're discussing. A difference that you have not demonstrated the relevance of. If I run an AI on my laptop and unplug the charger, this runs until the battery dies. If I have a mammal that does not eat, it lives until it starves. If I run an AI on a desktop and unplug the mains, it ceases function in milliseconds (or however long the biggest capacitor in the PSU lasts). If I (for the sake of argument) had a device that could instantly remove all the ATP from a mammal's body, they'd also be dead pretty quick. If I have an android, purely electric motors and no hydraulics, and the battery connector comes loose, it ragdolls. Same for a human who has a heart attack. An AI that is trained with rewards for collecting energy to recharge itself, does so. One that has no such feedback, doesn't. Most mammals have such a mechanism from evolution, but there are exceptions where that signal is missing (not just weird humans), and they starve. None of these things say anything about intelligence. > I'm not sure why introducing a certain type of rare scam artist into the modeling of this thought experiment would make things clearer or more interesting. Because you're talking about the effect of mammals ceasing the consumption of food, and they're an example of mammals ceasing the consumption of food.

davedx 1y ago

Into their short term memory (context). Some information is also stored in long term memory (user store)

bubblyworld 1y ago

I can see what you are getting at but consider: I had an experience the other day where claude code wrote a script that shelled out to other LLM providers to obtain some information (unprompted by me). More often it requests information from me directly. My point is that the environment itself for these things is becoming at least as computationally complex or irreducible (as the OP would say) as the model's algorithm, so there's no point trying to analyse these things in isolation.

DANmode 1y ago

Truthfully, few people know that right now! They're backfeeding what it's "learning" along the way - whether it's in a smart fashion, we don't know yet.

JyB 1y ago
It’s the whole “MCP” moto right? Basically keep re-feeding in each subsequent prompts the additional requested context?
- DANmode 1y ago
  Nah, that's still considered an ephemeral user session. We're talking about what the service does with what it learns from the failures (and successes) marked by user feedback into the chat, or the app's buttons.
- kreetx 1y ago
  (I've a recently acquired strong opinion on MCP, beware) MCP seems to be the idea to expose literally any data source to AI agents as context. E.g, in work/business context: a database, source code, a kanban board; in private context: your photo library, notes, etc. This is good and makes sense. As a technical "standard" or "protocol" (as it claims to be), it's a total mess, read more here: https://modelcontextprotocol.io https://modelcontextprotocol.io. Though I guess they are inventing it as they go.