[HN Gopher] The AI Illusion - State-of-the-Art Chatbots Aren't W...
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The AI Illusion - State-of-the-Art Chatbots Aren't What They Seem
Author : agnosticmantis
Score : 13 points
Date : 2022-03-28 16:47 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mindmatters.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (mindmatters.ai)
| blamestross wrote:
| > "GPT-3 is not necessarily well-calibrated in its predictions on
| novel inputs."
|
| I don't thing even humans are well calibrated on novel inputs. We
| just put a LOT of effort via training into preventing inputs from
| being novel.
|
| Honest to God "novel inputs" break people too.
|
| Honestly I think the AGI problem will end with us admitting
| humans are a lot dumber than we like to believe they are more
| than it will require AGI getting smarter.
| kromem wrote:
| "The Broca area isn't true intelligence as it can't comprehend
| speech, only make it."
|
| Seems like a weird and overly obvious statement, right?
|
| Focusing on only one specialized area of the brain and claiming
| that in isolation what it brings to the table isn't comparable to
| the general intelligence provided by the intersection of that
| specialized area with multiple other specialized areas and
| networks.
|
| Wow, GPT-3 isn't actually a self-aware and self-determining
| intelligence understanding what it is producing. There's only a
| dozen articles and blog posts every week making that point.
|
| But the whole Captain Obvious statement obfuscates that our own
| generalized intelligence has been increasingly realized over the
| years in neuroscience from Phineas Gage onwards to be the
| byproduct of interconnected but localized specialization.
|
| We have some very impressive AI specialization for a number of
| things from vision processing to text generation.
|
| And we are increasingly improving on ways to network that
| specialization together in novel ways to great effect.
|
| It's a sorry state of affairs when people get caught up in
| declaring that the present position in a journey isn't its end
| and somehow think that statement alone meaningfully represents
| data about the journey.
|
| Far more relevant than a single point in time is where we've come
| from in that journey and how long each leg of it has taken, and
| the acceleration or deceleration thereof in determining how long
| until we reach that destination.
|
| We shouldn't expect that AGI will result from a single monolith
| model, and the presence of "magic tricks" is hardly an indication
| the current specialized stepping stones are insufficient
| components of that result.
|
| Most of the neurology making up our perceived subjective
| consciousness is filled to the brim with "magic tricks" that fall
| apart when any number of things go wrong.
|
| And we're yet to see just what happens when the gains from
| photonic AI products like Lightmatter enters the scene. (An
| interesting paper a year or two ago from the IIT theory of
| consciousness folks was the argument that the level of self-
| interaction of information that gives rise to consciousness in
| our brains is impossible in classical computing architectures).
|
| I think articles like this aren't going to age particularly well
| within the next decade.
| ars wrote:
| This article is about labelers behind the scenes, not about if
| GPT is a real AI.
|
| If the only way they can make GPT better is to override bad
| answer with a human, then it's an even weaker tool than it
| appears.
| xg15 wrote:
| I personally don't believe either that there is some
| fundamental difference between human consciousness and
| computation - so, I believe that _in principle_ , AGI should be
| possible.
|
| But I think he noted some concrete shortcomings that current
| models have that still place them not even close to AGI.
|
| In particular the ability to map words to their real-world
| concepts and imagining hypothetical situations with those
| concepts.
|
| Most of the trick questions the author was asking weren't about
| formulating a natural-sounding answer to novel input (though
| that is impressive enough and the network seems to excel at
| _that_ task). They were more a test if the network "pulls its
| answers from books" or if it can really "imagine" the
| situation, i.e. perform a simulation, taking in the real-world
| characteristics of the question and come to a conclusion.
| Results suggested that the network indeed did not imagine the
| situations.
|
| I think other concrete aspects that are still missing would be
| social awareness and empathy, the ability to guess what another
| person is thinking or feeling. Adding to that would be sense of
| self and all that follows.
|
| Finally, there is the practical problem of acquiring world
| knowledge. Humans get a nonstop stream of training data on both
| world and social knowledge from the moment they were born :)
| Even more, it's extremely high-quality training data, because
| we're able to explore _causations_ - "I did A and then B
| happened". Whereas most current networks today only seem to
| work with pre-existing training data, which would amount to
| correlations: "When A happens, B often happens as well".
|
| Because of that stuff, I'm still extremely sceptical on any
| claims that AGI is already archieved (or will be archived soon)
| - not because I think it's impossible but because it seems to
| me we have just scratched the surface of what intelligence and
| consciousness even entails.
|
| Another thought btw: I'm a bit surprised that there seems to be
| so little talk about animals in the whole AI discussion. There
| is lots of talk comparing computers with human intelligence -
| which seems to amount to how well an AI could mimic texts
| written by north american adults during their working hours -
| but I haven't read anything yet about how well we could build a
| robot that could survive in the wilderness or e.g. take part in
| the social dynamics of a wolf pack.
|
| If we're aiming to build AI that is as intelligent as a human,
| shouldn't we first be able to build one that is as intelligent
| as an animal?
| jasfi wrote:
| It's an incredibly difficult problem right now, that's why. Once
| it's cracked it won't seem that difficult anymore. My own effort
| has a landing page: https://lxagi.com.
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