5 ms·

Also, AGI is not just around the corner. We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works. Comprehension is th

Also, AGI is not just around the corner. We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works. Comprehension is the fusing of separate elements into new functional wholes, dynamically abstracting observations, evaluating them for plausibility, and reconstituting the whole - and all instantaneously, for security purposes, of every sense constantly. We have no technology that approaches that.

tenthirtyam 1y ago
You'd need to define "comprehension" - it's a bit like the Chinese room / Turing test. If an AI or AGI can look at a picture and see an apple, or (say) with an artificial nose smell an apple, or likewise feel or taste or hear* an apple, and at the same identify that it is an apple and maybe even suggest baking an apple pie, then what else is there to be comprehended? Maybe humans are just the same - far far ahead of the state of the tech, but still just the same really. *when someone bites into it :-) For me, what AI is missing is genuine out-of-the-box revolutionary thinking. They're trained on existing material, so perhaps it's fundamentally impossible for AIs to think up a breakthrough in any field - barring circumstances where all the component parts of a breakthrough already exist and the AI is the first to connect the dots ("standing on the shoulders of giants" etc).
- Touche 1y ago
  They might not be capable of ingenuity, but they can spot patterns humans can miss. And that accelerates AI research, where it might help invent the next AI that helps invent the next AI that finally can think outside the box.
- bsenftner 1y ago
  I do define it, right up there in my OP. It's subtle, you missed it. Everybody misses it, because comprehension is like air, we swim in it constantly, to the degree the majority cannot even see it.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  Was that the intention of the Chinese room concept, to ask "what else is there to be comprehended?" after producing a translation?
- RugnirViking 1y ago
  It's very very good at sounding like it understands stuff. Almost as good as actually understanding stuff in some fields, sure. But it's definitely not the same. It will confidently analyze and describe a chess position using advanced sounding book techniques, but its all fundamentally flawed, often missing things that are extremely obvious (like, an undefended queen free to take) while trying to sound like its a seasoned expert - that is if it doesn't completely hallucinate moves that are not allowed by the rules of the game. This is how it works in other fields I am able to analyse. It's very good at sounding like it knows what its doing, speaking at the level of a masters level student or higher, but its actual appraisal of problems is often wrong in a way very different to how humans make mistakes. Another great example is getting it to solve cryptic crosswords from back in the day. It often knows the answer already in its training set, but it hasn't seen anyone write out the reasoning for the answer, so if you ask it to explain, it makes nonsensical leaps (claiming birch rhymes with tyre level nonsense)
  - filleduchaos 1y ago
    If anyone wants to see the chess comprehension breakdown in action, the YouTuber GothamChess occasionally puts out videos where he plays against a new or recently-updated LLM. Hanging a queen is not evidence of a lack of intelligence - even the very best human grandmasters will occasionally do that. But in pretty much every single video, the LLM loses the plot entirely after barely a couple dozen moves and starts to resurrect already-captured pieces, move pieces to squares they can't get to, etc - all while keeping the same confident "expert" tone.
  - DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
    A sufficiently good simulation of understanding is functionally equivalent to understanding. At that point, the question of whether the model really does understand is pointless. We might as well argue about whether humans understand.
    - andrei_says_ 1y ago
      In the Catch me if you Can movie, Leo diCaprio’s character wears a surgeon’s gown and confidently says “I concur”. What I’m hearing here is that you are willing to get your surgery done by him and not by one of the real doctors - if he is capable of pronouncing enough doctor-sounding phrases.
andy99 1y ago
Another way to put it is we need Artificial Intelligence. Right now the term has been co-opted to mean prediction (and more commonly transcript generation). The stuff you're describing are what's commonly thought of as intelligence, it's too bad we need a new word for it.
- bsenftner 1y ago
  No, we have the intelligence part, we know what to do when we have the answers. What we don't know is how to derive the answers without human intervention at all, not even our written knowledge. Artificial comprehension will not require anything beyond senses, observations through time, which builds a functional world model from observation and interaction, capable of navigating the world as a communicating participant. Note I'm not talking about agency, also called "will", which is separate from both intelligence and comprehension. Where intelligence is "knowing", comprehension is the derivation of knowing from observation and interaction alone, and agency is the entirely other ability to choose action over in action, to employ comprehension to affect the world, and for what purpose?
Workaccount2 1y ago
We only have two computational tools to work with - deterministic and random behavior. So whatever comprehension/understanding/original thought/consciousness is, it's some algorithmic combination of deterministic and random inputs/outputs. I know that sounds broad or obvious, but people seem to easily and unknowingly wander into "Human intelligence is magically transcendent".
- omnicognate 1y ago
  What you state is called the Physical Church-Turing Thesis, and it's neither obvious nor necessarily true. I don't know if you're making it, but the simplest mistake would be to think that you can prove that a computer can evaluate any mathematical function. If that were the case then "it's got to be doable with algorithms" would have a fairly strong basis. Anything the mind does that an algorithm can't would have to be so "magically transcendent" that it's beyond the scope of the mathematical concept of "function". However, this isn't the case. There are many mathematical functions that are proven to be impossible for any algorithm to implement. Look up uncomputable functions you're unfamiliar with this. The second mistake would be to think that we have some proof that all physically realisable functions are computable by an algorithm. That's the Physical Church-Turing Thesis mentioned above, and as the name indicates it's a thesis, not a theorem. It is a statement about physical reality, so it could only ever be empirically supported, not some absolute mathematical truth. It's a fascinating rabbit hole if you're interested - what we actually do and do not know for sure about the generality of algorithms.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    What I am stating is a step above church-turing, that the constituents of any physical process is either deterministic or random, computability aside. From a purely practical standpoint, we don't know of any non-computable physical systems and it's just so painfully god-of-the-gaps to say "The brain could contain new physics that transcends everything we know even though this has never proved true with any other complex system we ever gained knowledge about. It's all proved computable".
- RaftPeople 1y ago
zxcb1 1y ago
Translation Between Modalities is All You Need ~2028
ekianjo 1y ago
> We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works. Not sure we need it. The counter example is the LLM itself. We had absolutely zero idea that the attention heads would bring such benefits down the road.

tenthirtyam 1y ago

You'd need to define "comprehension" - it's a bit like the Chinese room / Turing test. If an AI or AGI can look at a picture and see an apple, or (say) with an artificial nose smell an apple, or likewise feel or taste or hear* an apple, and at the same identify that it is an apple and maybe even suggest baking an apple pie, then what else is there to be comprehended? Maybe humans are just the same - far far ahead of the state of the tech, but still just the same really. *when someone bites into it :-) For me, what AI is missing is genuine out-of-the-box revolutionary thinking. They're trained on existing material, so perhaps it's fundamentally impossible for AIs to think up a breakthrough in any field - barring circumstances where all the component parts of a breakthrough already exist and the AI is the first to connect the dots ("standing on the shoulders of giants" etc).

Touche 1y ago
They might not be capable of ingenuity, but they can spot patterns humans can miss. And that accelerates AI research, where it might help invent the next AI that helps invent the next AI that finally can think outside the box.
bsenftner 1y ago
I do define it, right up there in my OP. It's subtle, you missed it. Everybody misses it, because comprehension is like air, we swim in it constantly, to the degree the majority cannot even see it.
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
Was that the intention of the Chinese room concept, to ask "what else is there to be comprehended?" after producing a translation?
RugnirViking 1y ago
It's very very good at sounding like it understands stuff. Almost as good as actually understanding stuff in some fields, sure. But it's definitely not the same. It will confidently analyze and describe a chess position using advanced sounding book techniques, but its all fundamentally flawed, often missing things that are extremely obvious (like, an undefended queen free to take) while trying to sound like its a seasoned expert - that is if it doesn't completely hallucinate moves that are not allowed by the rules of the game. This is how it works in other fields I am able to analyse. It's very good at sounding like it knows what its doing, speaking at the level of a masters level student or higher, but its actual appraisal of problems is often wrong in a way very different to how humans make mistakes. Another great example is getting it to solve cryptic crosswords from back in the day. It often knows the answer already in its training set, but it hasn't seen anyone write out the reasoning for the answer, so if you ask it to explain, it makes nonsensical leaps (claiming birch rhymes with tyre level nonsense)
- filleduchaos 1y ago
  If anyone wants to see the chess comprehension breakdown in action, the YouTuber GothamChess occasionally puts out videos where he plays against a new or recently-updated LLM. Hanging a queen is not evidence of a lack of intelligence - even the very best human grandmasters will occasionally do that. But in pretty much every single video, the LLM loses the plot entirely after barely a couple dozen moves and starts to resurrect already-captured pieces, move pieces to squares they can't get to, etc - all while keeping the same confident "expert" tone.
- DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
  A sufficiently good simulation of understanding is functionally equivalent to understanding. At that point, the question of whether the model really does understand is pointless. We might as well argue about whether humans understand.
  - andrei_says_ 1y ago
    In the Catch me if you Can movie, Leo diCaprio’s character wears a surgeon’s gown and confidently says “I concur”. What I’m hearing here is that you are willing to get your surgery done by him and not by one of the real doctors - if he is capable of pronouncing enough doctor-sounding phrases.

andy99 1y ago

Another way to put it is we need Artificial Intelligence. Right now the term has been co-opted to mean prediction (and more commonly transcript generation). The stuff you're describing are what's commonly thought of as intelligence, it's too bad we need a new word for it.

bsenftner 1y ago
No, we have the intelligence part, we know what to do when we have the answers. What we don't know is how to derive the answers without human intervention at all, not even our written knowledge. Artificial comprehension will not require anything beyond senses, observations through time, which builds a functional world model from observation and interaction, capable of navigating the world as a communicating participant. Note I'm not talking about agency, also called "will", which is separate from both intelligence and comprehension. Where intelligence is "knowing", comprehension is the derivation of knowing from observation and interaction alone, and agency is the entirely other ability to choose action over in action, to employ comprehension to affect the world, and for what purpose?

Workaccount2 1y ago

We only have two computational tools to work with - deterministic and random behavior. So whatever comprehension/understanding/original thought/consciousness is, it's some algorithmic combination of deterministic and random inputs/outputs. I know that sounds broad or obvious, but people seem to easily and unknowingly wander into "Human intelligence is magically transcendent".

omnicognate 1y ago
What you state is called the Physical Church-Turing Thesis, and it's neither obvious nor necessarily true. I don't know if you're making it, but the simplest mistake would be to think that you can prove that a computer can evaluate any mathematical function. If that were the case then "it's got to be doable with algorithms" would have a fairly strong basis. Anything the mind does that an algorithm can't would have to be so "magically transcendent" that it's beyond the scope of the mathematical concept of "function". However, this isn't the case. There are many mathematical functions that are proven to be impossible for any algorithm to implement. Look up uncomputable functions you're unfamiliar with this. The second mistake would be to think that we have some proof that all physically realisable functions are computable by an algorithm. That's the Physical Church-Turing Thesis mentioned above, and as the name indicates it's a thesis, not a theorem. It is a statement about physical reality, so it could only ever be empirically supported, not some absolute mathematical truth. It's a fascinating rabbit hole if you're interested - what we actually do and do not know for sure about the generality of algorithms.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  What I am stating is a step above church-turing, that the constituents of any physical process is either deterministic or random, computability aside. From a purely practical standpoint, we don't know of any non-computable physical systems and it's just so painfully god-of-the-gaps to say "The brain could contain new physics that transcends everything we know even though this has never proved true with any other complex system we ever gained knowledge about. It's all proved computable".
RaftPeople 1y ago

zxcb1 1y ago

Translation Between Modalities is All You Need ~2028

ekianjo 1y ago

> We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works. Not sure we need it. The counter example is the LLM itself. We had absolutely zero idea that the attention heads would bring such benefits down the road.