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Do you have a suggestion for a better name? I care more about the utility of a thing, rather than playing endless word games with AI, AGI, ASI, whatever. Call i
by 1c2adbc4 1y ago
Do you have a suggestion for a better name? I care more about the utility of a thing, rather than playing endless word games with AI, AGI, ASI, whatever. Call it what you will, it is what it is.
- marginalia_nu 1y agoI don't particularly mind the term, it's a useful shibboleth separating the marketing and sci-fi from the takes grounded in reality.
- el_nahual 1y agoWe have a name: Large Language Models, or "Generative" AI. It doesn't think, it doesn't reason, and it doesn't listen to instructions, but it does generate pretty good text!
- chpatrick 1y ago[citation needed] People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, when we don't even have any idea how that works.
- d3ckard 1y agoWhat can be asserted without proof, can be dismissed without proof. The proof burden is on AI proponents.
- chpatrick 1y agoIt's more that "thinking" is a vague term that we don't even understand in humans, so for me it's pretty meaningless to claim LLMs think or don't think. There's this very cliched comment to any AI HN headline which is this: "LLM's don't REALLY have <vague human behavior we don't really understand>. I know this for sure because I know both how humans work and how gigabytes of LLM weights work." or its cousin: "LLMs CAN'T possibly do <vague human behavior we don't really understand> BECAUSE they generate text one character at a time UNLIKE humans who generate text one character a time by typing with their fleshy fingers"
- barnacs 1y agoTo me, it's about motivation. Intelligent living beings have natural, evolutionary inputs as motivation underlying every rational thought. A biological reward system in the brain, a desire to avoid pain, hunger, boredom and sadness, seek to satisfy physiological needs, socialize, self-actualize, etc. These are the fundamental forces that drive us, even if the rational processes are capable of suppressing or delaying them to some degree. In contrast, machine learning models have a loss function or reward system purely constructed by humans to achieve a specific goal. They have no intrinsic motivations, feelings or goals. They are statistical models that approximate some mathematical function provided by humans.
- chpatrick 1y agoAre any of those required for thinking?
- barnacs 1y agoIn my view, absolutely yes. Thinking is a means to an end. It's about acting upon these motivations by abstracting, recollecting past experiences, planning, exploring, innovating. Without any motivation, there is nothing novel about the process. It really is just statistical approximation, "learning" at best, but definitely not "thinking".
- chpatrick 1y agoAgain the problem is that what "thinking" is totally vague. To me if I can ask a computer a difficult question it hasn't seen before and it can give a correct answer, it's thinking. I don't need it to have a full and colorful human life to do that.
- barnacs 1y agoBut it's only able to answer the question because it has been trained on all text in existence written by humans, precisely with the purpose to mimic human language use. It is the humans that produced the training data and then provided feedback in the form of reinforcement that did all the "thinking". Even if it can extrapolate to some degree (altough that's where "hallucinations" tend to become obvious), it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- CamperBob2 1y agoThe proof burden is on AI proponents. Why? Team "Stochastic Parrot" will just move the goalposts again, as they've done many times before.
- exe34 1y agomy favourite game is to try to get them to be more specific - every single time they manage to exclude a whole bunch of people from being "intelligent".
- mindcrime 1y ago> People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, It doesn't matter anyway. The marquee sign reads "Artificial Intelligence" not "Artificial Human Being". As long as AI displays intelligent behavior, it's "intelligent" in the relevant context. There's no basis for demanding that the mechanism be the same as what humans do. And of course it should go without saying that Artificial Intelligence exists on a continuum (just like human intelligence as far as that goes) and that we're not "there yet" as far as reaching the extreme high end of the continuum.
- hermitcrab 1y agoAircraft don't fly like birds, submarines don't swim like fish and AIs aren't going to think like a human.
- chpatrick 1y agoDo you need to "think like a human" to think? Is it only thinking if you do it with a meat brain?
- hermitcrab 1y agoIs the substrate important? If you made an accurate model of a human brain in software, in silicon or using water pipes and valves, would it be able to tnink? Would it be conscious? I have no idea.
- chpatrick 1y agoMe neither but that's why I don't like arguments that say LLM's can't do X because of their substrate, as if that was self-evident. It's like the aliens saying surely humans can't think because they're made of meat.
- utyop22 1y agoDo these comparisons actually make sense though? Aircraft and submarines belong to a different category and of the same category, than AI.
- jbritton 1y agoI recently saw an article about LLMs and Towers of Hanoi. An LLM can write code to solve it. It can also output steps to solve it when the disk count is low like 3. It can’t give the steps when the disk count is higher. This indicates LLMs inability to reason and understand. Also see Gotham Chess and the Chatbot Championship. The Chatbots start off making good moves, but then quickly transition to making illegal moves and generally playing unbelievably poorly. They don’t understand the rules or strategy or anything.
- leptons 1y agoCould the LLM "write code to solve it" if no human ever wrote code to solve it? Could it output "steps to solve it" if no human ever wrote about it before to have in its training data? The answer is no.
- chpatrick 1y agoCould a human code the solution if they didn't learn to code from someone else? No. Could they do it if someone didn't tell them the rules of towers of hanoi? No. That doesn't mean much.
- Gee101 1y agoIt does since humans where able to invent a programming language.
- chpatrick 1y agoHave you tried asking a modern LLM to invent a programming language?
- CamperBob2 1y agoHave you? If so, how'd it go? Sounds like an interesting exercise.
- leptons 1y agoWhen I write a sentence, I do it with intent, with specific purpose in mind. When an "AI" does it, it's predicting the next word that might satisfy the input requirement. It doesn't care if the sentence it writes makes any sense, is factual, etc, so long as it is human readable and follows gramatic rules. It does not do this with any specific intent, which is why you get slop and just plain wrong output a fair amount of time. Just because it produces something that sounds correct sometimes does not mean it's doing any thinking at all. Yes, humans do actually think before they speak, LLMs do not, cannot, and will not because that is not what they are designed to do.
- chpatrick 1y agoActually LLMs crunch through half a terabyte of weights before they "speak". How are you so confident that nothing happens in that immense amount of processing that has anything to do with thinking? Modern LLMs are also trained to have an inner dialogue before they output an answer to the user. When you type the next word you also put a word that fits some requirement. That doesn't mean you're not thinking.
- leptons 1y ago"crunch through half a terabyte of weights" isn't thinking. Following grammatical rules to produce a readable sentence isn't thought, it's statistics, and whether that sentence is factual or foolish isn't something the LLM cares about. If LLMs didn't so constantly produce garbage, I might agree with you more.
- chpatrick 1y agoThey don't follow "grammatical rules", they process inputs with an incredibly large neural net. It's like saying humans aren't really thinking because their brains are made of meat.
- elbasti 1y agoIt's not some "magical way"--the ways in which a human thinks that an LLM doesn't are pretty obvious, and I dare say self-evidently part of what we think constitutes human intelligence: - We have a sense of time (ie, ask an LLM to follow up in 2 minutes) - We can follow negative instructions ("don't hallucinate, if you don't know the answer, say so")
- chpatrick 1y agoI think plenty of people have problems with the second one but you wouldn't say that means they can't think.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoWe don't need to prove all humans are capable of this. We can demonstrate that some humans are, therefore humans must be capable, broadly speaking Until we see an LLM that is capable of this, then they aren't capable of it, period
- chpatrick 1y agoSometimes LLMs hallucinate or bullshit, sometimes they don't, sometimes humans hallucinate or bullshit, sometimes they don't. It's not like you can tell a human to stop being delusional on command either. I'm not really seeing the argument.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoIf a human hallucinates or bullshits in a way that harms you or your company you can take action against them That's the difference. AI cannot be held responsible for hallucinations that cause harm, therefore it cannot be incentivized to avoid that behavior, therefore it cannot be trusted Simple as that
- chpatrick 1y agoThe question wasn't can it be trusted, it was does it think.
- lordhumphrey 1y agoYes, and the name for this behaviour is called "being scientific". Imagine a process called A, and, as you say, we've no idea how it works. Imagine, then, a new process, B, comes along. Some people know a lot about how B works, most people don't. But the people selling B, they continuously tell me it works like process A, and even resort to using various cutesy linguistic tricks to make that feel like it's the case. The people selling B even go so far as to suggest that if we don't accept a future where B takes over, we won't have a job, no matter what our poor A does. What's the rational thing to do, for a sceptical, scientific mind? Agree with the company, that process B is of course like process A, when we - as you say yourself - don't understand process A in any comprehensive way at all? Or would that be utterly nonsensical?
- chpatrick 1y agoAgain, I'm not claiming that LLMs can think like people (I don't know that). I just don't like that people confidently claim that they can't, just because they work differently from biological brains. That doesn't matter when it comes to the Turing test (which they passed a while ago btw), just what it says.
- mvdtnz 1y agoThe classic God of the Gaps - we don't know how human brains think, so what LLMs do must be it!
- chpatrick 1y agoI'm not saying that LLMs do anything, just that it's rich to confidently say they don't do something when we don't even understand how humans do it. It's like we're pretending cognition is a solved problem so we can make grand claims about what LLM's aren't really doing.
- OJFord 1y agoIt will depend on the final form the normal useful tools take, but for now it's 'LLMs', 'coding agents', etc.
- bradgessler 1y agoArtificial Interpolator Augmented Intelligence
- ronsor 1y agoAye-aye, that's a good name
- exe34 1y agoI think it's fine to keep the name, we just have to realise it's like magic. real magic can't be done. magic that can be done is just tricks. AI that works is just tricks.
- 1c2adbc4 1y agoI didn't realize that magic was the goal. I'm just trying to process unstructured data. Who's here looking for magic?
- stillsut 1y agoI think the "magic" that we've found a common toolset of methods - embeddings and layers of neural networks - that seem to reveal useful patterns and relationships from a vast array of corpus of unstructured analog sensors (pictures, video, point clouds) and symbolic (text, music) and that we can combine these across modalities like CLIP. It turns out we didn't need a specialist technique for each domain, there was a reliable method to architect a model that can learn itself, and we could already use the datasets we had, they didn't need to be generated in surveys or experiments. This might seem like magic to an AI researcher working in the 1990's.
- exe34 1y agodid you miss the word "like"? have you come across the concept of an analogy yet?
- int_19h 1y agoMany humans like to think that their own intelligence is "magic" that cannot be reduced to physics.
- imtringued 1y agoJust play word games and have magic be a branch of physics.
- J_McQuade 1y agoBroadly Uneconomical Large Language Systems Holding Investors in Thrall.
- lordhumphrey 1y agoExcellent name! BULLSHIT really captures the spirit of the whole thing.
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoStatistics. A lot of this is marketing bullshit. AFAIK, even "machine learning" was a term made up by AI researchers when the AI winter hit who wanted to keep getting a piece of that sweet grant money. And "neural network" is just a straight up rubbish name. All it does is obscure what's actually happening and leads the proles to think it has something to do with neurons.
- stillsut 1y ago"Unstructured data learners and generators" is probably the most salient distinction for how current system compare to previous "AI systems" examples (NLP, if-statements) that OP mentioned.