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Or even to come up with a definition of cognitive versatility and proficiency that is good enough to not get argued away once we have an AI which technically pa
by ben_w 1y ago
Or even to come up with a definition of cognitive versatility and proficiency that is good enough to not get argued away once we have an AI which technically passes that specific definition.
The Turing Test was great until something that passed it (with an average human as interrogator) turned out to also not be able to count letters in a word — because only a special kind of human interrogator (the "scientist or QA" kind) could even think to ask that kind of question.
- lumost 1y agoOr that this system would fail to adapt in anyway to changes of circumstance. The adaptive intelligence of a live human is truly incredible. Even in cases where the weights are updatable, We watch AI make the same mistake thousands of times in an RL loop before attempting a different strategy.
- alganet 1y agoAbsolute definitions are weak. They won't settle anything. We know what we need right now, the next step. That step is a machine that, when it fails, it fails in a human way. Humans also make mistakes, and hallucinate. But we do it as humans. When a human fails, you think "damn, that's a mistake perhaps me or my friend could have done". LLMs on the other hand, fail in a weird way. When they hallucinate, they demonstrate how non-human they are. It has nothing to do with some special kind of interrogator. We must assume the best human interrogator possible. This next step I described work even with the most skeptic human interrogator possible. It also synergizes with the idea of alignment in ways other tests don't. When that step is reached, humans will or will not figure out another characteristic that makes it evident that "subject X" is a machine and not a human, and a way to test it. Moving the goalpost is the only way forward. Not all goalpost moves are valid, but the valid next move is a goalpost move. It's kind of obvious.
- AstroBen 1y agoThis makes sense if we're trying to recreate a human mind artifically, but I don't think that's the goal? There's no reason an equivalent or superior general intelligence needs to be similar to us at all
- card_zero 1y agoThere's no reason to the idea "superior intelligence". Nobody can say what that means, except by assuming that animal intelligence is the same category as the kind we want and differs from human intelligence in degree rather than qualitatively, and then extrapolating forward from this idea of measuring intelligence on the intelligence meter that we don't have one of. Besides which we already defined "artificial intelligence" to mean non-intelligence: are we now going to attain "artificial general intelligence" by the same process? Should we add another letter to the acronym, like move on to "genuine artificial general intelligence"?
- AstroBen 1y agoIs there really no agreement to what intelligence refers to? I've seen it defined as the ability to reach a goal, which was clear to me. Eg. a chess AI with 1500 ELO is more intelligent than one at 1000
- ben_w 1y agoThat's capability, intelligence can also be how quickly it learned to get to that capability. Consider the difference in intelligence between a kid who skipped five years of school vs one who was held back a year: if both got the same grade in the end, the one who skipped five years was smarter.
- AstroBen 1y agomakes sense. Maybe a combination of both would be most accurate - how fast you can learn + what's your peak capability Looking at it solely on rate of learning has LLMs way smarter than humans already which doesn't seem right to say
- ben_w 1y ago> Looking at it solely on rate of learning has LLMs way smarter than humans already which doesn't seem right to say Sure, but "rate" also has two meanings, both useful, but importantly different: per unit of wall-clock time, and per example. Transistors are just so much faster than synapses, that computers can (somewhat) compensate for being absolutely terrible by the latter meaning — at least, in cases where there's enough examples for them to learn from. In cases where the supply of examples is too small (and cannot be enhanced with synthetic data, simulations and so on), state of the art AI models still suck. In cases where there is sufficient data, for example self-play in games of chess and go, the AI can be super-human by a substantial margin.
- hackinthebochs 1y agoWhy are human failure modes so special?
- alganet 1y agoBecause we have 300 thousand years of collective experience on dealing with humans.
- ben_w 1y agoIronically, one of the ways that humans are worse than AI, is that any given human learns from an even smaller fraction of that collective experience than AI already does.
- alganet 1y agoI don't understand your point. How does that observation help in setting up a test or definition?
- ben_w 1y agoThat's because it's not trying to do so. The observation is that humans are broadly unable to prepare for the failure modes of other humans, even when those failure modes have been studied and the results of those studies widely published. This means that while the failure modes of humans are indeed different from the failure modes of LLMs (and AI more broadly), these differences are not what I anticipate to be the most important next step in AI research.
- akoboldfrying 1y ago> This next step I described work even with the most skeptic human interrogator possible. To be a valid test, it still has to be passed by ~every adult human. The harder you make the test (in any direction), the more it fails on this important axis.
- alganet 1y agoYou are wrong. Please read the Turing paper: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf > A number of interrogators could be used, and statistics compiled to show how often the right identification was given Turing determines that we need enough competent-interrogator passes just to estabilish a statistical certainty, not ~everyone. I tend to agree with him on this.
- akoboldfrying 1y agoPlease reread that section. You'll discover it has nothing to do with whether humans can pass the test. If you can find a part of the paper in which Turing really does claim that it is unnecessary for most adult humans to be able to pass the test, by all means quote it. But this would be a surprising thing for him to claim, because it would undermine the entire foundation of his Imitation Game.
- alganet 1y agoDo you understand how using statistics to determine degrees of certainty works? That is a must-have to understand academic work. I think that if you did, you wouldn't be answering like you did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value
- akoboldfrying 1y agoYour quote does not back up your claim. My original claim was that the Turing test needs to be passable by ~every adult human. You counterclaimed that Turing himself didn't think so, and provided that quote from the IG paper as evidence. But that quote is in a section about testing digital computers, not humans. Thus it is unconnected to your counterclaim. I don't know how much simpler I can make it. Find a quote that actually backs up your claim, or accept that you've learned something about the paper you told me to read.
- latentsea 1y ago> We know what we need right now, the next step. That step is a machine that, when it fails, it fails in a human way. I don't know if machines that become insecure and lash out are a good idea.
- alganet 1y agoThe issue is if they lash out in some incomprehensible way, or lash out as a alien superingelligence. If they lash out as a human, that's fine.
- latentsea 1y agoDepends on how much power the human has.
- alganet 1y agoThe super-AI is going to have power. Deployed everywhere, used by millions, etc. You have two choices: - It can potentially lash out in an alien-like way. - It can potentially lash out in a human-like way. Do you understand why this has no effect on the argument whatsoever? You are just introducing an irrelevant observation. I want the AI to behave like human always, no exceptions. "What if it's a bad human" Jesus. If people make an evil AI, then it doesn't matter anyway how it behaves, it's just bad even before we get to the discussion about how it fails. Even when it accomplishes tasks succesfully, it's bad.
- latentsea 1y ago> Do you understand why this has no effect on the argument whatsoever? You are just introducing an irrelevant observation. I want the AI to behave like human always, no exceptions. Do you like how humans behave? Also, how DO humans behave? What kind of childhood should we give the AI? Daddy issues? Abused as a child? Neglected by a drug addicted mother? Ruthlessly bullied in school?
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- parineum 1y agoI think the turing test suffers a bit from the "when a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement." An AI that happened to be able to pass the turing test would be pretty notable because it probably implies much more capabilities behind the scenes. The problem with, for example, LLMs, they're essentially optimized turing test takers. That's about all they can do. Plus, I don't think any LLM will pass the turing test in the long term. Once something organically comes up that they aren't good at, it'll be fairly obvious they aren't human and the limits of context will also become apparent eventually.
- mikepurvis 1y agoYou can also be interrogating a human and in the course of your conversation stumble across something it isn’t good at.
- taormina 1y agoSee, humans respond very differently when that happens. The failure to do what humans do when they don’t understand something or know something is frequently what fails LLMs at the TT.
- geysersam 1y agoSure, but very likely they'll be able to explain their lack to you in a satisfactory way, or, at least in a way that makes you think they're human.
- ben_w 1y agoCounterpoint: people were accusing each other of being bots simply for disagreeing with each other even back when Twitter was still called that. "Mr Firstname Bunchanumbers" etc. (And we've been bemoaning "the lack of common sense these days" for at least as long as I've been an adult, and racists and sexists have been denying the intelligence of the outgroup as far back as writing can show us).
- mikepurvis 1y ago
- GolDDranks 1y agoNote that Turing test allows a lot leeway for the test settings, i.e. who interrogates it, how much they know about the weakness of current SOA models, are they allowed to use tools (I'm thinking of something like ARC-AGI but in a format that allows chat-based testing), and how long a chat is allowed etc. Therefore there can be multiple interpretations of whether the current models pass the test or not. One could say that if there is maximally hard Turing test, and a "sloppy" Turing test, we are somewhere where the current models pass the sloppy version but not the maximally hard version.
- photonthug 1y agoHah, tools-or-no does make things interesting, since this opens up the robot tactic of "use this discord API to poll some humans about appropriate response". And yet if you're suspiciously good at cube roots, then you might out yourself as robot right away. Doing any math at all in fact is probably suspect. Outside of a classroom humans tend to answer questions like "multiply 34 x 91" with "go fuck yourself", and personally I usually start closing browser tabs when asked to identify motorcycles
- cma 1y agoIf a human learned only on tokenized representations of words I don't know that they would be as good at inferring the numbers of letters in the words in teh underlying tokens as llms.
- ben_w 1y agoWhile true, it is nevertheless a very easy test to differentiate humans from LLMs, and thus if you know it you can easily figure out who is the human and who is the AI.
- arw0n 1y agoIt is a solvable problem, just not a very interesting or useful one, which is why no one (but possibly scammers) is currently employing letter-counter detectors and agents.
- ben_w 1y agoSure, I'm not saying this to diss language models, I'm saying that (1) specifically this failure mode means they were only passing the Turing test in the specific time before this became a well-known trick to detect them as non-human, and (2) it took an unusual kind of human to realise this trick, it wasn't obvious to most of the normal people using them. I don't know for sure, but I suspect most people right now are using style and tone as authorship hints, which is even easier to get around by adding "reply in style of ${famous writer}" to the custom instructions.
- cma 1y agoContext length compute complexity scales N^2 with input, so moving to give it the individual letters would just hurt context length vs an optimal tokenization. We could still have it paste the tokens into python and count the letters in hidden thinking traces if we wanted to solve that part of the Turing test instead and focus on useful things, but solving the Turing test is basically solving a deception goal instead of working on useful assistants. It's not really the goal of these systems outside of their use in North Korean scam bots etc. I still think it's useful to say we've essentially solved the Turing test even if there are these caveats about how it is optimized in practice.
- socalgal2 1y agoCan you point to an LLM passing the turing test where they didn't invalidate the test by limiting the time or the topics? I've seen claims of passing but it's always things like "with only 3 questions" or "with only 3 minutes of interrogation" or "With only questions about topic X". Those aren't Turing Tests. As an example, if you limit the test to short things than anything will pass "Limit to 1 word one question". User types "Hello", LLM response "Hi". PASS! (not!)
- acdha 1y agoThis is the best one I’ve seen but it has the notable caveat that it’s a relatively short 5 minute chat session: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.08007 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.08007 I do think we’re going to see this shift as AI systems become more commonplace and people become more practiced at recognizing the distinction between polished text and understanding.
- thinmalk 1y agoThe Turing test isn't a good test in general, but writing a paper about an AI "passing" it when it only wrote 4 short messages in the whole conversation is almost farcical. Hard coded chatbots were "passing the Turing test" in the 90's with this standard.
- atbvu 1y agoThe Turing test is long outdated. Modern models can fool humans, but fooling isn’t understanding. Maybe we should flip the perspective AGI isn’t about imitation, it’s about discovering patterns autonomously in open environments.
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