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> I just don't see how you can argue with a straight face that this is "pattern matching". If that's pattern matching, then pattern matching is not an insult.

> I just don't see how you can argue with a straight face that this is "pattern matching". If that's pattern matching, then pattern matching is not an insult. IMO its still "just" a, very good, autocomplete. No actual reasoning, but lots of statistics on what is the next token to spit out.

NoahZuniga 1y ago
> Do submarines swim? That's the main point of the parent comment. Arguing about the definition of "reasoning" or "pattern matching" is just a waste of time. What really matters is if it produces helpful output. Arguing about that is way better! Instead of saying: "It's just pattern matching -> It won't improve the world", make an argument like: "AI's seem to have trouble specializing like humans -> adopting AI will increase error rates in business processes -> due to the amount of possible edge cases, most people will get into an edge case with no hope of escaping it -> many people's lives will get worse". The first example relies on us agreeing on the definition of pattern matching, and then taking a conclusion based on how those words feel. This has no hope of convincing me if I don't like your definition! The second one is an argument that could potentially convince me, even if I'm an AI optimist. It is also just by itself an interesting line of reasoning.
ozgung 1y ago
No it's not "just a very good autocomplete". I don't know why people repeat this thing (it's wrong) but I find it an extremely counterproductive position. Some people just love to dismiss the capabilities of AI with a very shallow understanding of how it works. Why? It generates words one by one, like we all do. This doesn't mean it does just that and nothing else. It's the mechanics of how they are trained and how they do inference. And most importantly how they communicate with us. It doesn't define what they are or their limits. This is reductionism. Ignoring the mathematical complexity of a giant neural network.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- karmakaze 1y ago
  I can't say for certain that our wetware isn't "just a very good autocomplete".
  - esafak 1y ago
    A very good autocomplete is realized by developing an understanding.
- Bjartr 1y ago
  > like we all do Do we though? Sure, we communicate sequentially, but that doesn't mean that our internal effort is piecewise and linear. A modern transformer LLM however is. Each token is sampled from a population exclusively dependent on the tokens that came before it. Mechanistically speaking, it works similarly to autocomplete, but at a very different scale. Now how much of an unavoidable handicap this incurs, if any, is absolutely up for debate. But yes, taking this mechanistic truth and only considering it in a shallow manner underestimates the capability of LLMs by a large degree.
  - kenjackson 1y ago
    Our thinking is also based only on events that occurred previously in time. We don’t use events in the future.
    - ElevenLathe 1y ago
      Is this a certainty? I thought it was an open question whether quantum effects are at play in the brain, and those have a counterintuitive relationship with time (to vastly dumb things down in a way my grug mind can comprehend).
      - kenjackson 1y ago
        Well there’s no evidence of this that I’ve seen. If so, then maybe that is what is the blocker for AGI.
        ElevenLathe 1y ago
        I think it's more that there isn't yet evidence against it. In other words, we're not sure or not if the brain has some kind of special sauce that doesn't just reduce to linear algebra.
        wasabi991011 1y ago
        Quantum effects definitely reduce to linear algebra however.
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  I don't know why people repeat this thing (it's wrong) Because they simply don't care if they're wrong. At this point, given what we've seen, that seems like the only explanation left. You don't need to be a fanatical AGI evangelist, but when an "autocomplete" starts winning international math competitions, you need to start calling it something else.

NoahZuniga 1y ago

> Do submarines swim? That's the main point of the parent comment. Arguing about the definition of "reasoning" or "pattern matching" is just a waste of time. What really matters is if it produces helpful output. Arguing about that is way better! Instead of saying: "It's just pattern matching -> It won't improve the world", make an argument like: "AI's seem to have trouble specializing like humans -> adopting AI will increase error rates in business processes -> due to the amount of possible edge cases, most people will get into an edge case with no hope of escaping it -> many people's lives will get worse". The first example relies on us agreeing on the definition of pattern matching, and then taking a conclusion based on how those words feel. This has no hope of convincing me if I don't like your definition! The second one is an argument that could potentially convince me, even if I'm an AI optimist. It is also just by itself an interesting line of reasoning.

ozgung 1y ago

No it's not "just a very good autocomplete". I don't know why people repeat this thing (it's wrong) but I find it an extremely counterproductive position. Some people just love to dismiss the capabilities of AI with a very shallow understanding of how it works. Why? It generates words one by one, like we all do. This doesn't mean it does just that and nothing else. It's the mechanics of how they are trained and how they do inference. And most importantly how they communicate with us. It doesn't define what they are or their limits. This is reductionism. Ignoring the mathematical complexity of a giant neural network.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
karmakaze 1y ago
I can't say for certain that our wetware isn't "just a very good autocomplete".
- esafak 1y ago
  A very good autocomplete is realized by developing an understanding.
Bjartr 1y ago
> like we all do Do we though? Sure, we communicate sequentially, but that doesn't mean that our internal effort is piecewise and linear. A modern transformer LLM however is. Each token is sampled from a population exclusively dependent on the tokens that came before it. Mechanistically speaking, it works similarly to autocomplete, but at a very different scale. Now how much of an unavoidable handicap this incurs, if any, is absolutely up for debate. But yes, taking this mechanistic truth and only considering it in a shallow manner underestimates the capability of LLMs by a large degree.
- kenjackson 1y ago
  Our thinking is also based only on events that occurred previously in time. We don’t use events in the future.
  - ElevenLathe 1y ago
    Is this a certainty? I thought it was an open question whether quantum effects are at play in the brain, and those have a counterintuitive relationship with time (to vastly dumb things down in a way my grug mind can comprehend).
    - kenjackson 1y ago
      Well there’s no evidence of this that I’ve seen. If so, then maybe that is what is the blocker for AGI.
      - ElevenLathe 1y ago
        I think it's more that there isn't yet evidence against it. In other words, we're not sure or not if the brain has some kind of special sauce that doesn't just reduce to linear algebra.
        wasabi991011 1y ago
        Quantum effects definitely reduce to linear algebra however.
CamperBob2 1y ago
I don't know why people repeat this thing (it's wrong) Because they simply don't care if they're wrong. At this point, given what we've seen, that seems like the only explanation left. You don't need to be a fanatical AGI evangelist, but when an "autocomplete" starts winning international math competitions, you need to start calling it something else.