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>objective metric for assessing "understanding" It should involve consciousness. You would not call an AI reacting to red color as "seeing" red. Same thing.

by qsera 8mo ago

fc417fc802 8mo ago
And where is this objective metric for consciousness? Last I checked we didn't even have a sensible definition for it. It seems to me you're just kicking the can. Setting that issue aside. While I certainly don't believe LLMs to be conscious (an entirely subjective and arbitrary take on my part I admit) I don't see any reason that concepts such as "intelligence" and "understanding" should require it. When considering how we apply those terms to humans it seems to me they are results based and highly contextual (ie largely arbitrary).
- qsera 8mo ago
  >humans it seems to me they are results based and highly contextual (ie largely arbitrary). Is that right? It seems that we generally say that "the computer is programmed to do", instead of "the computer understand" or "the computer knows", even if the programmed computer can produce the same result as a human who does it.
  - basch 8mo ago
    Language models aren’t “programmed” though.
    - qsera 8mo ago
      You are right, it is worse. It is generated by tweaking a bunch of `if` statements until the output starts to look about right.
  - fc417fc802 8mo ago
    Of course we don't say that. You can't ask the (traditionally) programmed computer a freeform question and get a sensible answer back. We tried that for going on 50 years and it never really worked. (The highest achievement that comes to mind is answering jeopardy questions.) You can very carefully construct a query in a dedicated language, debug that query, and get useful results back. But that's clearly just a human using a tool, not a machine exhibiting understanding or general knowledge. Meanwhile you can ask a multi-billion parameter LLM a freeform question in ~any human language and it can produce a coherent and meaningful response. It can one shot pieces of code. Track down bugs based on compiler error messages. It might not (yet) be human level in many cases but to get hung up on that is to miss the point.
    - qsera 8mo ago
      >multi-billion parameter LLM This is equivalent to an `if` statement with multi-billion levels of nesting. It is just a "traditional program", just unimaginably huge. Just because it is not "traditionally programmed" does not mean that it is not a really huge "traditional program". Scaling something by many order of magnitude does not put it in a different category. A computer program, no matter how big, is still a computer program.
      - fc417fc802 8mo ago
        No, it's not equivalent to nested if statements. If you can mathematically demonstrate that it is I would be interested. Anyway that's irrelevant. The point is that we use different language when referring to the one because its capabilities appear to be fundamentally different. Your argument comes down to a claim of human exceptionalism - that a computer program can never "understand" simply by virtue of being a computer program. You haven't actually provided any defense of that claim though. You've just assumed it without justification.
        qsera 8mo ago
        >No, it's not equivalent to nested if statements. It is. If you control the randomness involved, the output of a model is completely deterministic. Which means that it can be represented by a huge lookup table. Anything that can be represented by a lookup table can be expressed as an `if then else` statement.
        fc417fc802 8mo ago
        By that logic sin(x) is equivalent to a lookup table. Yeah, you can approximate it that way. But doing so at any reasonable level of precision will quickly become an exercise in the absurd. Neural networks are far worse, consisting of stacks of massive linear combinations fed into nonlinear functions. Regardless, it remains irrelevant to the subject at hand. You're going off on a tangent rather than admit your initial claim was wrong.
basch 8mo ago
If I “convey understanding” I transfer it from one person to another. Consciousness does not transfer with understanding. Some people argue that consciousness emerges in early childhood. I can get an infant to understand what I am saying even if they aren’t conscious.

>objective metric for assessing "understanding" It should involve consciousness. You would not call an AI reacting to red color as "seeing" red. Same thing.

by qsera 8mo ago

>objective metric for assessing "understanding" It should involve consciousness. You would not call an AI reacting to red color as "seeing" red. Same thing.

fc417fc802 8mo ago

And where is this objective metric for consciousness? Last I checked we didn't even have a sensible definition for it. It seems to me you're just kicking the can. Setting that issue aside. While I certainly don't believe LLMs to be conscious (an entirely subjective and arbitrary take on my part I admit) I don't see any reason that concepts such as "intelligence" and "understanding" should require it. When considering how we apply those terms to humans it seems to me they are results based and highly contextual (ie largely arbitrary).

qsera 8mo ago
>humans it seems to me they are results based and highly contextual (ie largely arbitrary). Is that right? It seems that we generally say that "the computer is programmed to do", instead of "the computer understand" or "the computer knows", even if the programmed computer can produce the same result as a human who does it.
- basch 8mo ago
  Language models aren’t “programmed” though.
  - qsera 8mo ago
    You are right, it is worse. It is generated by tweaking a bunch of `if` statements until the output starts to look about right.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  Of course we don't say that. You can't ask the (traditionally) programmed computer a freeform question and get a sensible answer back. We tried that for going on 50 years and it never really worked. (The highest achievement that comes to mind is answering jeopardy questions.) You can very carefully construct a query in a dedicated language, debug that query, and get useful results back. But that's clearly just a human using a tool, not a machine exhibiting understanding or general knowledge. Meanwhile you can ask a multi-billion parameter LLM a freeform question in ~any human language and it can produce a coherent and meaningful response. It can one shot pieces of code. Track down bugs based on compiler error messages. It might not (yet) be human level in many cases but to get hung up on that is to miss the point.
  - qsera 8mo ago
    >multi-billion parameter LLM This is equivalent to an `if` statement with multi-billion levels of nesting. It is just a "traditional program", just unimaginably huge. Just because it is not "traditionally programmed" does not mean that it is not a really huge "traditional program". Scaling something by many order of magnitude does not put it in a different category. A computer program, no matter how big, is still a computer program.
    - fc417fc802 8mo ago
      No, it's not equivalent to nested if statements. If you can mathematically demonstrate that it is I would be interested. Anyway that's irrelevant. The point is that we use different language when referring to the one because its capabilities appear to be fundamentally different. Your argument comes down to a claim of human exceptionalism - that a computer program can never "understand" simply by virtue of being a computer program. You haven't actually provided any defense of that claim though. You've just assumed it without justification.
      - qsera 8mo ago
        >No, it's not equivalent to nested if statements. It is. If you control the randomness involved, the output of a model is completely deterministic. Which means that it can be represented by a huge lookup table. Anything that can be represented by a lookup table can be expressed as an `if then else` statement.
        fc417fc802 8mo ago
        By that logic sin(x) is equivalent to a lookup table. Yeah, you can approximate it that way. But doing so at any reasonable level of precision will quickly become an exercise in the absurd. Neural networks are far worse, consisting of stacks of massive linear combinations fed into nonlinear functions. Regardless, it remains irrelevant to the subject at hand. You're going off on a tangent rather than admit your initial claim was wrong.

basch 8mo ago

If I “convey understanding” I transfer it from one person to another. Consciousness does not transfer with understanding. Some people argue that consciousness emerges in early childhood. I can get an infant to understand what I am saying even if they aren’t conscious.