[HN Gopher] Did GoogleAI just snooker one of Silicon Valley's sh...
___________________________________________________________________
Did GoogleAI just snooker one of Silicon Valley's sharpest minds?
Author : TeacherTortoise
Score : 236 points
Date : 2022-09-15 19:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (garymarcus.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (garymarcus.substack.com)
| kache_ wrote:
| oh no musk ignored my twitter DM it must be because he's scared
| of taking a bet and therefore I am right
|
| btw, AGI is coming 2030. Source? It was revealed to me in a
| dream. Check my profile to see where you can email to take bets.
| bloaf wrote:
| It was all most likely a reference to this:
|
| https://longbets.org/1/
|
| I personally think Kurzweil still has a shot at winning it.
| trention wrote:
| I'd like to comment specifically on the conception of betting on
| AI 'achievements' (I think Marcus' bet is underspecified and kind
| of vague in all 5 of its points).
|
| People shouldn't be betting on benchmarks because benchmarks can
| be and usually are gamed (see Goodhart's law). Also, most people
| couldn't give less f*ck if an AI can write an award-worthy poem
| (I personally don't care about any form of AI "art", any sort of
| text an AI can produce or really any meaningless "feat" it (as in
| the general category) becomes capable of). The only worthy bets
| are ones that discuss economic impact. How many people will be
| structurally unemployed because of AI by year X? Will it lower or
| increase the GDP growth rate and by how much? Will it shift the
| balance between labor and capital and how? Etc.
|
| So more meaningful bets and less benchmark bullshit that doesn't
| matter, please.
| [deleted]
| i_like_apis wrote:
| I wish more articles followed the standard essay format. At least
| state your main thesis in the first paragraph.
|
| There are interesting things buried in here, but I don't have
| time for rambling.
|
| The edge cases of image models have been more succinctly
| summarized and speculated upon elsewhere.
| version_five wrote:
| Yes I've noticed that a lot of authors expect you to read
| through some parable before they tell you what they are going
| to tell you. It would be fine with an abstract or even a
| sentence below the title that says "ML models are not being
| adequately evaluated for composability and it makes them look
| more intelligent than they are". Just diving into "consider
| clever Hans" makes it tough to know if it's worth reading.
| peteradio wrote:
| One idea to try to train the AI about compositionality, feed it
| Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss. It's hard to understand that it would
| misunderstand the meaning of "on" or "in" or "under" when there
| are such nice illustrations. I've got tons of great ideas and I'm
| open for hire!
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Train AI models, not children!
| dekhn wrote:
| is there a difference?
|
| I had kids and they were the best machine learnign systems
| I've worked with.
| [deleted]
| goatlover wrote:
| Yeah, AI models aren't people, with all the moral and
| emotional considerations that go with that. I never
| understood taking machine/biology metaphors literally, but
| compsci people seem to love it.
| philbo wrote:
| Children learn by imitation, but they also learn by going
| to school and receiving directed lessons about specific
| topics. To me, machine learning seems like the imitation
| part without the going-to-school part.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's also notable that individual children learn from
| tens of orders of magnitude less examples (typically 1-10
| examples for a child to learn a word).
|
| It may well be that at the evolutionary level we have
| learned as slowly as AI training, but that's much harder
| to say.
| dekhn wrote:
| you left out unsupervised clustering, which humans are
| excellent at.
| version_five wrote:
| This is such a good idea, someone please try this if you're set
| up to make it happen easily.
|
| Starting with fox on Knox and Knox in box and moving up to a
| tweedle beetle battle in a puddle in a bottle and the bottles
| on a poodle and the poodles eating noodles...
|
| I dont see any evidence any of these models will draw it
| correctly, but would love to see what it produces.
| powera wrote:
| I don't believe "compositionality" is a serious obstacle.
|
| It is a different issue than generating an image based on a bag-
| of-words, so it isn't surprising that an attempt to solve that
| issue didn't immediately solve the other.
|
| But a variety of approaches can easily solve this problem.
| ummonk wrote:
| Yes, especially when machine translation seems to handle it
| just fine.
| goatlover wrote:
| Does it really, though?
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| Mostly. See this for five examples using Google Translate:
| https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,7588.msg3000
| 7...
| goatlover wrote:
| I'm not sure that machine translation demonstrates
| compositionality, since it's translating from phrases
| already composed in one language to another. It only does
| so if understanding composition is necessary for language
| translation. Whereas carrying on a meaningful
| conversation does require understanding of how words are
| being put together as the conversation evolves. Thus why
| the Turing Test hast been considered important for
| determining whether an AI has achieved human-level
| abilities, at least as far as language use is concerned.
| ummonk wrote:
| I don't see why translating from one language to
| relationships in art (visual language if you will) is
| qualitatively different from translating from one
| language to another.
| jameshart wrote:
| Right - your training data set is _images plus descriptions_.
| But the descriptions are not typically _descriptions of
| composition_.
|
| Descriptions of _Napoleon Crossing the Alps_ are unlikely to
| read 'A small frenchman wearing a silly hat riding on a
| horse'. So why would an AI trained on such image descriptions
| develop any sense for 'compositionality'?
| water8 wrote:
| Google seems like a tale of two companies: half genius, half
| diversity hire
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >I think he is so far I offered to bet him a $100,000 he was
| wrong; enough of my colleagues agreed with me that within hours
| they quintupled my bet, to $500,000. Musk didn't have the guts to
| accept, which tells you a lot.
|
| What a bloviating egomaniac. Does Musk really have the time to
| deal with pissant researchers like him? Whats 500k to a man worth
| a hundred billion?
| version_five wrote:
| Yeah I didn't find that very credible. A busy businessman
| ignoring petty bets you propose is not really evidence of
| anything, nor is the part about google ignoring his requests.
| In fact it's a pretty lame rhetorical device. I could equally
| "challenge" a head of state on Twitter and then pretend that
| his failure to reply indicates something
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > Musk didn't have the guts to accept, which tells you a lot.
|
| Musk actively declined the bet or did he simply not respond?
| There is a big difference.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Later in the text:
|
| > ... I have repeatedly asked that Google give the scientific
| community access to Imagen. They have refused even to respond.
|
| It seems the author generally feels more entitled to a response
| than he perhaps should.
| goatlover wrote:
| Why shouldn't the scientific community be entitled to
| investigate claims made by corporations regarding scientific
| progress?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Of course the scientific community should.
|
| But is the author the spokesperson for this community to
| the point that Google should feel compelled to answer him
| directly?
| [deleted]
| ivanbakel wrote:
| Scientific communities don't formally elect a
| spokesperson. Granting access "to the community" to
| investigate scientific claims means making the
| methodology and results available to everybody - and that
| includes responding to inquiries for access from anyone
| (who is worth granting access to.)
|
| Google has a lot of resources. They can handle responding
| to potentially thousands of access requests, especially
| if they go around publishing glowing results of their own
| system.
| mattstir wrote:
| It seems clear to me that google simply doesn't track
| these kinds of requests in general. It's insanely
| wasteful to respond to "thousands" of ad-hoc access
| requests made through blog articles. Google has a lot of
| resources, yes, but that doesn't mean they're frivolous
| with them.
|
| If they wanted to grant access to the scientific
| community, they'd just launch a closed beta with an
| official sign-up flow.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| What are you trying to say? Do you think the author only
| tried to request access to Imagen through this blog post?
| What does your comment have to do with the above
| discussion about Google granting access to the community?
| quotehelp1829 wrote:
| The author writes "I have repeatedly asked that Google
| give the scientific community access to Imagen" and it
| links to a tweet with @Google mention plus #brain and
| #imagen hashtags (a single ask, no repeated asks shown).
|
| I think the author of this blogpost could've had better
| response contacting paper authors with emails noted on
| the paper.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > They can handle responding to potentially thousands of
| access requests
|
| Unless you work at Google how could you know this?
| ivanbakel wrote:
| Because it's transparently true from the sheer size and
| wealth of Google. What makes you at all skeptical of that
| claim?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > Scientific communities don't formally elect a
| spokesperson
|
| Some communities do.
|
| > Granting access "to the community" to investigate
| scientific claims means making the methodology and
| results available to everybody - and that includes
| responding to inquiries for access from anyone (who is
| worth granting access to.)
|
| Sure, not arguing otherwise.
|
| I'll try to make my point more obvious. If you keep
| asking questions to different people/orgs and not getting
| responses there are two possible conclusions:
|
| - Everyone is a jerk or coward.
|
| - You're not as important as you think and not worth the
| recipient's time.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Just keep laughing. I'd like to hear Ray Kurzweil's view (he's
| working at Google and is awfully quiet.)
|
| Human consciousness is over-rated. I'm reminded of Minsky's
| Society of Mind - a number of separate, communicating systems. To
| me, that sounds a lot like what is going on in Google, but they
| are hiding that.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Missing the point: dismissing an apocalyptic possibility as 0
| without proof is dangerous -> therefore we should take it
| seriously. Taleb's work is relevant in the concept of risk
| analysis.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's interesting that he now casually throws out a 5 year old as
| the benchmark to beat:
|
| > nobody has yet publicly demonstrated a machine that can relate
| the meanings of sentences to their parts the way a five-year-old
| child can.
|
| Not very long ago that would have been a 3 year old, or maybe
| even a smart 2 year old. 5 year olds are extremely good at basic
| language and understanding tasks. If we get to the point of AI
| that is as good as a 5 year old we're essentially at AGI.
| ummonk wrote:
| Yeah, and AI is probably already near primate level
| intelligence, so what's left is a blink of an eye in
| evolutionary timelines.
| goatlover wrote:
| Who in the field is saying current AI is near primate level
| intelligence?
| dougmwne wrote:
| Here is some primate art, for reference:
|
| https://www.sarah-brosnan.com/primate-art
|
| I'm not just poking fun. Art is a measure of cognitive
| development in humans and there are very typical
| representations people use at certain ages. 5 year olds are
| still making pretty rudimentary portraits of circles and
| triangles with stick limbs.
|
| https://empoweredparents.co/child-development-drawing-
| stages...
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| We have absolutely no way to tell how far from "AGI" we are.
|
| What we know for sure is that we're not there yet. And what seems
| likely is that we're getting closer, and that's something.
|
| That is as much prediction we can get.
|
| I don't think that Compositionality is a wall, it is clearly an
| interesting feature, but I think that it is pretty clear by now
| that the Turing test or anything in the same spirit is far from
| sufficient.
| abrax3141 wrote:
| This test of compositionality is utterly lame. (FtR: I am a
| cognitive scientist and AI researcher and my PhD was building
| computational models of how humans do compositionality - which
| neither I, nor anyone else can spell, and therefore I will
| hereinafter refer to simply as C! :-) Anyway, the kind of C that
| they are seeking is trivial compared to the breadth of the
| capabilities of human C. Here's a better example:
|
| You are engaged in a long conversation with someone, perhaps a
| friend of a friend who you met for lunch. At some point in the
| conversation they mention that they have a startup and are
| seeking someone like you. This revelation colors the whole
| conversation from that point onward. Indeed, each sentence colors
| the conversation from moment to moment.
|
| But, you reasonably respond, we can't test that sort of C, modern
| AIs don't do even ELIZA-level dialog yet!
|
| What's the phrase??? "I rest my case?"
| _mhr_ wrote:
| I'd love to read your PhD thesis and papers! I'm also an AI
| researcher, currently doing a Master's in something else, but
| compositionality and representation learning is very
| interesting to me.
| bloaf wrote:
| This just fundamentally feels like a bad hill to die on.
| Compositionality feels like it is:
|
| A) Something AI is currently known to be bad at
|
| B) A matter of degree, not a categorical stumbling block
|
| C) Vague enough of a concept that AI skeptics will continue to
| complain about it even after the field has moved on
|
| Your example feels less like a description of
| "compositionality" and more a description of "qualia." It feels
| an awful lot like dualists trying to carve out a place for
| magic that no _artificial_ process can reach.
| goatlover wrote:
| Qualia isn't magic. It's a philosophical term for what it
| feels like. Colors, sounds, pains are what it feels like.
| It's dismissive to call it magic. How about instead come up
| with a good physical explanation of consciousness, showing
| how the hard problem is mistaken?
|
| Similarly, if compositionally isn't a categorical stumbling
| block, then show how that's the case. Making a future
| prediction about what you think computers will accomplish
| doesn't do that.
| bloaf wrote:
| I was not implying qualia were magic, insofar as there can
| be monistic descriptions of qualia. My criticism was that
| the example appeared to be steering the conversation into a
| crash course with dualism by invoking qualia-like
| explanations of compositionality when it was unnecessary to
| do so.
|
| I believe the "hard problem" is far easier than the
| dualists' interface problem. It can be explained by viewing
| consciousness not as the driving force behind our
| thoughts/feelings, but rather an after-the-fact log the
| brain keeps for itself. Qualia are therefore distinct from
| the immediate physics of signals reaching the brain; they
| are instead the brain's own shorthand description of the
| impact those signals had on the brain.
|
| Compositionality isn't a categorical stumbling block
| because the machines are actually getting incrementally
| better at it. The Winoground paper the article references
| explicitly says that score on their compositionality
| benchmark does in fact scale with training dataset size,
| suggesting that while it is more difficult for AI to
| discover compositionality during training, there is no
| reason to think it is impossible
| darawk wrote:
| It's a lame test, but I don't think most people were claiming
| that it proves general compositionality. What it does prove is
| that compositionality is possible with these models, and will
| likely improve rapidly, as everything else has that they've
| gotten a toehold into.
|
| Ironically, the very fact that there is now a compositionality
| benchmark, as Gary points out, is all you really need to know
| that it's going to fall in the next decade, and probably sooner
| than that. I'm not aware of any major benchmark dataset upon
| which enormous progress has not been made in the last few
| years. And i'd be more than willing to bet anyone anything
| they'd like that a great deal of progress will be made on this
| one over the next few.
| abrax3141 wrote:
| Marcus seems to be treating it as the hallmark of
| intelligence (I think he actually uses that phrase), so
| arguing about whether the hack manages to get the tree into
| the effective object slot vs the effective subject slot is
| really not much of a hallmark.
| kcorbitt wrote:
| What kind of insights do you expect a machine to be able to
| extract? I passed your example to GPT-3, and got back results
| that seem about the same as I'd expect from a human:
|
| PROMPT:
|
| > This is a test of reading comprehension. Read the following
| passage and answer the questions below in order.
|
| > Passage:
|
| > "You are engaged in a long conversation with someone, perhaps
| a friend of a friend who you met for lunch. At some point in
| the conversation they mention that they have a startup and are
| seeking someone like you. This revelation colors the whole
| conversation from that point onward. Indeed, each sentence
| colors the conversation from moment to moment"
|
| > Questions:
|
| > 1. What is the "revelation" referenced?
|
| > 2. What do you think the person is hoping to achieve by
| inviting you to lunch?
|
| > Answers:
|
| GENERATED OUTPUT:
|
| > 1. The revelation is that the person has a startup and is
| seeking someone like the reader.
|
| > 2. It is possible that the person is hoping to recruit the
| reader for their startup.
| goatlover wrote:
| And if you ask it, "What does it mean for the conversation to
| be colored?", what does it answer with?
|
| Or to be tricky, if you were to ask it, "What color was the
| conversation from one moment to the next?", what would it
| say?
| abrax3141 wrote:
| Oh. Sorry. I seem to have taken the conversation off in a
| different direction than I had intended. (Foreshadow: The
| previous sentence is carefully shaped!) When I said "color"
| I didn't mean to be indicating qualia, although there is
| that too. What I meant to be indicating is just that each
| discourse contribution folds into a semantically sensible
| whole that one can speak (only metaphorically here) as the
| color of the conversation. One might say (to oneself, if
| one had a mind to, or was asked): "Oh, but hold on, I
| didn't realize that this was an interview. I thought that
| [our mutual friend] just thought that we would get along
| well. But now that I see it's really an interview, and
| you're the CEO, well, that makes this a very different
| situation, and I'll have to put on my 'interview with the
| boss' face..." and thus like. Again, I don't mean that you
| would say this explicitly, nor could you, probably, unless
| you were pressed to do so, in which case you couldn't
| really completely explain all the nuances, most likely. Nb.
| (per foreshadow above), each contribution in this, or any
| discourse, "colors" (or perhaps rather, kneeds together, if
| you prefer a cooking metaphor) an ongoing collage of
| situational understanding which comes together to direct,
| for better or worse, the ongoing complexities of the
| discourse. But, and here I want to be perfectly clear: Not
| in a fully forward-going way, because then you'll simply
| say: well the blah blah state of the whole blah blah
| network incorporates all that, like Dall-E, etc. melding
| together everything and smearing it into something
| sensible. But that's not how people work! In constructing
| their next action (e.g., sentence) they foreground some
| aspects of the composed whole, and background others in a
| goal-directed manner...at least if they're not too drunk.
| goatlover wrote:
| That's clever. But my response is colored such that I
| wonder if you didn't generate that text by using some of
| the other comments, shaping it such that I can't tell
| whether you're on the way to inebriation or just messing
| with my head. Or perhaps composing a point. In which
| case, I myself could use a drink.
| abrax3141 wrote:
| Okay, lol literally! If only I could click the up arrow
| twice, this definitely would deserve it! :-)
| skybrian wrote:
| Partially this is confusing "Scott Alexander won a bet" with
| "compositionality is solved." And also, I'm not sure Scott won
| the bet? Changing people to robots is a cheap trick. I think
| Imagen should have been disqualified because it won't do people.
|
| Vitor took the other side of the bet and he is also not convinced
| [1]:
|
| > I'm not conceding just yet, even though it feels like I'm just
| dragging out the inevitable for a few months. Maybe we should
| agree on a new set of prompts to get around the robot issue.
|
| > In retrospect, I think that your side of the bet is too lenient
| in only requiring _one_ of the images to fulfill the prompt. I 'm
| happy to leave that part standing as-is, of course, though I've
| learned the lesson to be more careful about operationalization.
| Overall, these images shift my priors a fair amount, but aren't
| enough to change my fundamental view.
|
| Scott putting "I Won" in the headline when it's not resolved yet
| seems somewhat dishonest, or more charitably wishful thinking.
|
| [1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-
| ai...
| TOMDM wrote:
| Please, it's not that imagen won't do people it's that Google
| won't publish imagen images with people in them.
|
| Does anyone seriously think that imagen couldn't put a person
| in that prompt?
| bawolff wrote:
| Humans are much more discerning when it comes to people than
| other things. I have no idea what imagen's capabilities are,
| but it seems at least plausible it could have different
| results for drawing humans.
| samatman wrote:
| This is Google, and I say this out of familiarity with the
| recent history of AI, not to stir up culture war: it's
| because they've painted themselves into a corner on "what
| is the skin color of a person+role" and won't publish until
| it looks like a Benetton ad.
| ummonk wrote:
| This reminds me of the scandal where Youtube science channels did
| glowing paid reviews of Waymo's self driving cars without
| acknowledging they were paid for it. And technooptimists like
| Scott Alexander or Ray Kurzweil have a common tendency to shift
| the goalposts and declare they were right with their predictions.
| Current AI certainly doesn't demonstrate proto-AGI capabilities.
|
| That said, we shouldn't miss the forest for the trees. We can be
| skeptical that current The pace of AI progress has been immense
| and problems that previously seemed difficult (e.g. computer
| vision classification, or beating top players at Go) have fallen
| one by one. And AI-skepticism's have themselves been moving the
| goalposts in response. I see no reason why composition won't be
| the same with time. Indeed, a decade ago machine translation used
| to struggle to understand the relationships between things, but
| now seems to be reliable at preserving the compositional
| relationships post-translation. 2029 is rather optimistic, but
| AGI does seem to be approaching in the coming few decades.
| [deleted]
| Kamq wrote:
| I wouldn't call Scott Alexander a techno-optimist given that
| space's (the LessWrong diaspora) whole focus on AI risk.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| Maybe Less Wrong et al arent optimists in that strong AI will
| be good, but the AI risk field seems optimistic that strong
| AI is possible.
| Kamq wrote:
| Ahh, in that sense. Fair enough, I hadn't interpreted
| optimistic in that manner.
| emmelaich wrote:
| That's a pretty strong claim about Scott Alexander. Do you have
| an example of him shifting the goalposts?
| elcomet wrote:
| This very article is an example right ? He changed the prompt
| but declared it a win
| ummonk wrote:
| Also he declared victory when objectively only 1 of the 5
| prompts actually generates an image that matches the
| prompt. You can see for yourself:
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-
| ai...
| emmelaich wrote:
| 1. it's disputed
|
| 2. the assertion is that he has " _common_ tendency to
| shift the goalposts "
|
| The emphasis on common is mine.
| ummonk wrote:
| I meant that the tendency is common in techo-optimists,
| not that Scott Alexander commonly exhibits it. Sorry for
| the ambiguity.
| elcomet wrote:
| I think changing the terms of the bet is definitely
| shifting the goalpost, even if not by much. It is
| certainly enough for the other party to refuse the win.
| nohat wrote:
| I agree that declaring a win is a bit impolite _if_ the
| other person hasn't agreed. But changing "farmer" to "robot
| farmer" because Google won't allow him to generate pictures
| with humans is obviously not changing the goalposts in the
| usual meaning of the term.
| ummonk wrote:
| Claiming the generated art is an image of a robot farmer
| because it's wearing a little hat is definitely changing
| the goalposts.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >Current AI certainly doesn't demonstrate proto-AGI
| capabilities.
|
| This seems like a subjective claim.
| grandmczeb wrote:
| > Youtube science channels did glowing paid reviews of Waymo's
| self driving cars without acknowledging they were paid for it.
|
| Which video is this a reference to?
| ummonk wrote:
| Veritasium's video in particular:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI
|
| It was critiqued by Tom Nicholas:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc
|
| Most notable was Snazzy Labs' own comment in the replies to
| Tom Nicholas' video which descriped their experience
| participating in the Waymo sponsored reviews: https://www.you
| tube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc&lc=UgxJvOq1zHhID...
| grandmczeb wrote:
| The sibling comment already mentioned that video has clear
| markings that it was sponsored.
| ummonk wrote:
| The issue is lack of transparency over the amount of
| editorial influence that Waymo exercised. This is why I
| linked to Snazzy Labs' comment about their experience
| making one of the other Waymo-sponsored videos.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you are referring to Veritasium's Waymo video, it says it is
| sponsored content in the description above the fold and it has
| the standard paid promotion notice right on top of the video as
| soon as you open it.
|
| As far as I can tell the "controversy" over the video is merely
| that one dedicated critic - so dedicated he made an hour-long
| response to a 20-minute video - is committed to the idea that
| machines won't ever be able to drive, and is irrationally angry
| over the fact that machines can and do drive, and do it well.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI
| mgoetzke wrote:
| I wish videos like these would say sponsored by the company
| that makes the product reviewed here. Instead of the generic
| sponsored because I also talk about matresses in this tech
| review
| vient wrote:
| Isn't the phrase from video's description "Waymo sponsored
| this video and provided access to their technology and
| personnel" enough?
| okasaki wrote:
| He also says in the video (0:35) that it's sponsored by
| Waymo.
| garymarcus wrote:
| so much ad hominem in these comments, relatively little
| substance. (eg "notorious goal post move, without a single
| example of something i actually said and changed my mind on)
| haskellandchill wrote:
| keep fighting the good fight, hacker news is full of indentured
| solipsists.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I would say that it seemed you were aiming a cannon at a
| mosquito. So what that Alexander showed us some slightly more
| coherent cherry picked images from some rather vague prompts.
| Not only did I not take that post as anything resembling
| science, I also didn't take it more seriously than the average
| Reddit post with an interesting generation. It seemed
| completely non-serious to me, proof of nothing, not a Google PR
| submarine and mostly in good fun. The irony being that within
| your excellent post about compositionality, you seem to have
| missed his meaning, which seemed to me was "this is a fun thing
| I am excited about, I think it's subjectively improving and I
| enjoy being right about that."
|
| Otherwise I thought you had a great introduction to
| compositionality and didn't need to tilt at any windmills to
| make your points. I look forward to seeing your benchmark
| results for recent and upcoming models.
| ummonk wrote:
| The Reddit comment linked by the topmost comment here says that
| you claimed AI couldn't do knowledge graphs and then silently
| stopped claiming that after being proven wrong. Do you dispute
| that telling of events?
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Silence in response to your comment is great evidence for its
| thesis.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I often hear on places like here that Scott Alexander is
| interesting and deep and insightful. But then I see bits and
| pieces like this. This blogger doesn't need to go into some deep
| analysis of compositionality to go "You came up with a 5 question
| test and decided 1 answer out of 10 attempts would be a pass".
| We've gone from 90%+s in imagenet to _this_ as a pass mark?
|
| It's like sure we can dissect all the statistical risks of this,
| but why bother? It's self evident bullshit. You might as well
| have just posted a link to Scott Alexander's original blog
| claiming victory with just "Lol ok".
|
| Just post a screenshot of the phrase "An oil painting of a robot
| in a factory looking at a cat wearing a top hat", show the
| pictures of a robot _near_ a cat that has a top hat, not in a
| warehouse, and say "lol ok."
| phreeza wrote:
| I feel like he has kind of lost his spark a bit, but he does
| draw an interesting group of commenters. Similar to hacker news
| in that regard, sometimes the linked articles are a bit mundane
| but there is gold in the comments.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| This blog misses the point; he made a _bet_ , and the people on
| the other side also accepted the terms. Nowhere did Alexander
| claim composition was a solved problem, just that the terms of
| the bet were satisfied. Generative models are still bad at
| composition, but claiming they will literally never improve
| requires some amount of additional evidence
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Exactly. The bet wasn't that AI will do composition correctly
| all the time, but that it will do composition correctly
| _sometimes_. That is how both sides understood it.
|
| The analogy with a student at exam misses the point. If you
| do _art_ -- even as a human artist -- you do not need a 100%
| success rate. A 10% success rate is okay if you are willing
| to simply throw away the remaining 90% of the pictures.
|
| If you have an AI that at a click of a button can generate 10
| beautiful pictures, 1 of them containing exactly what you
| wanted, that just means you need to make _two_ clicks in
| order to get the picture you wanted. That is an awesome
| thing.
| IronWolve wrote:
| One of things I noticed is the satire, call backs to common
| news/ideas can really trip up any AI. Also if you ask it about
| anything politics, ask it to describe both sides of an argument.
| Thus why people fall back to the steelman cherry picking of
| responses to push their arguments.
| ajross wrote:
| So weird to see a piece ostensibly about logical fallacies deploy
| one so cavalierly:
|
| > I offered to bet [Elon Musk] $100,000 he was wrong [about AGI
| by 2029] [...] Musk didn't have the guts to accept, which tells
| you a lot.
|
| The fact that you couldn't get someone engaged in a conversation
| absolutely does not "tell you a lot" about the substance of your
| argument. It only tells you that you were ignored.
|
| Now, I happen to think Marcus is right here and Musk is wrong,
| but... yikes. That was just a jarring bit of writing. Either do
| the detached professorial admonition schtick or take off the
| gloves and engage in bad faith advocacy and personal attacks.
| Both can be fun and get you eyeballs, and substack is filled with
| both. But not at the same time!
| concinds wrote:
| "A lightbulb surrounding some plants" is not English. If a wolf
| pack is surrounding a camp, we understand what it means. If a
| wolf is surrounding my camp; does that mean I'm in his stomach?
| Absurd.
|
| "A lightbulb _containing_ some plants, " makes sense, not
| "surrounding". It's too small to surround anything, which humans
| (and apparently, current AI) understand. Paradoxically, only
| primitive language models would actually understand the inverted
| sentences; proper AIs should, like humans, be confused by them;
| since zero human talks like that.
|
| The only reason the Huggingface people (in their Winoground
| paper) got 90% of humans "getting the answer right" with these
| absurd prompts because of humans' ability to guess what is
| expected of them by an experimenter. Do it in daily life instead
| of a structured test, and see if these same people get it right.
|
| It's exactly as if I gave you the sequence, in an IQ-test
| context: "1 1 2 3" and asked you to give me the next number.
| You'd give the Fibonacci sequence, because you know I expect it;
| no matter that it's a stupid assumption to make because the full
| sequence might as well be "1 1 2 3 1 1 2 3 1 1 2 3", and you
| don't have enough information to know the real answer. Do we
| really want AIs that similarly "guess" an answer they know to be
| wrong, just because we expect it? Or (in number sequence example)
| AIs that don't understand basic induction/Goodman's Problem?
|
| I'd like to add that the author, who keeps referring to himself
| as a scientist, is in fact a psychology professor. In his Twitter
| bio, he states that he wrote one of the "Forbes 7 Must-Read Books
| in AI", which discredits him as a fraud since Forbes can be paid
| to publish absolutely whatever you ask them to (it's not
| disclosed as sponsored content, and they're quite cheap, trust
| me).
| hasmanean wrote:
| I wonder how canned these queries are.
|
| It's like back in the 80s if you had asked a computer to "show
| me some culture" and up popped a painting by Da Vinci, that
| might have fooled people into believing the computer was
| cultured or at least would make you cultured.
|
| In this case the capabilities of the AI are much more dynamic,
| and the ability to wrap the plants inside a light bulb is
| pretty neat, but that is basically a photoshop script. It's
| barely intelligence.
|
| Most people don't know what intelligence is. They get easily
| fooled by demos.
|
| The history of religion points to an opposite problem. There a
| superintelligence (God) who had a galaxy a worth of super
| intelligent beings (angels) could not convince the humanity he
| created to establish the proper relationship with him.
|
| And what's worse, people were just as happy believing in fake
| myths (such as the Egyptian, Aryan or Mesopotamian gods) and
| truly didn't care if they were real or not.
|
| Humans haven't changed much. Some people will willingly believe
| AI is intelligent even if it's not. Even if it produces nothing
| but comic book wisdom and fake superheroes, eventually they
| will believe that world is real too...in the metaversal sense.
| Humanity's ability to deceive itself is infinite.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >"A lightbulb containing some plants," makes sense, not
| "surrounding". It's too small to surround anything, which
| humans (and apparently, current AI) understand. Paradoxically,
| only primitive language models would actually understand the
| inverted sentences; proper AIs should, like humans, be confused
| by them; since zero human talks like that.
|
| Not sure this is credible. Most if not all human adults are
| capable of understanding what young children just learning to
| speak mean most of the time, not only people with very low IQs.
| So why would this be any different? Presumably the smarter the
| AI the better it can understand poor grammar.
| concinds wrote:
| You understand poor grammar using context. This isn't poor
| grammar, this is a syntactically broken sentence, which
| requires more extrapolation for meaning. The AI hears "a
| lightbulb surrounding some plants" and understands the poor
| grammar using the context, i.e. understands that you mean
| that the plants are surrounding the lightbulb, since the
| reverse is vashingly unlikely to be what you mean.
|
| End result: your AI is actually quite good, but HuggingFace
| IYIs give it a bad grade.
|
| So: you fix the AI. You fix it so that it makes huge
| assumptions when it sees imperfect grammar. It doesn't
| necessarily pick what it thinks you actually meant; it picks
| utterly nonsensical crap (plants inside a lightbulb). That AI
| will end up severely misinterpreting human instructions, at
| some point or another. That AI is called HAL-9000.
|
| But it passes Huggingface's test!
| goatlover wrote:
| There is the story of Jonah inside the whale, and art is a
| thing. So are metaphors. Maybe some english-speaking community
| uses "wolf surrounding a camp" to mean a person is in the belly
| of the beast, whatever the beast may mean. The thing with
| language is that it's flexible, ever-evolving, and people do
| come up with new uses all the time. That's why it's a challenge
| for AI to be considered generally intelligent when it comes to
| language use. Humans aren't merely consulting a dictionary when
| they talk. As Wittgenstein argued, meaning is use, and
| dictionaries are updated to reflect that use.
|
| Plants inside a lightbulb could come to symbolize green tech,
| or whatever. We can make up the meaning as we go along, and if
| enough people find it useful, it becomes part of the language.
| [deleted]
| comeonbro wrote:
| Regarding Gary Marcus, the author of this piece, and his long and
| bizarre history of motivated carelessness on the topic of deep
| learning:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_c...
| [deleted]
| Veedrac wrote:
| This is mostly just an angry rant, yes, but equally it is just
| true. Marcus is intellectually dishonest.
| mmazing wrote:
| "I am angry not because someone is wrong, but because they are
| not interested in becoming less wrong."
|
| Paraphrased that a bit, but I really like that quote.
| lisper wrote:
| You know what would have been much more effective than this
| counter-screed? A pointer to an image generated by DALL-E of a
| horse riding an astronaut. That is something I would really
| like to see. And in this case a picture is literally worth a
| thousand words.
| [deleted]
| comeonbro wrote:
| https://nitter.net/Plinz/status/1529013919682994176
| ummonk wrote:
| Hah there is actually a good example of a horse riding an
| astronaut there, just a different kind of riding...
| https://nitter.net/Plinz/status/1529018578317348864#m
| garymarcus wrote:
| in fact I wrote a whole article about this (linked in this
| essay, called Horse Rides Astronaut) and linked an example
| therein.
| _vertigo wrote:
| Why did you ignore the Bach examples that show a horse
| riding an astronaut?
| [deleted]
| niyikiza wrote:
| How about this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKeRnsDIiDg
| im3w1l wrote:
| I have played around with GPT quite a bit and I would say
| that GPT understands the difference. Text-to-image models are
| not specialized in the text-parsing part, so I think it's
| forgivable that they are not as good at it.
|
| Edit: Actually I tried this right now with two prompts, and I
| was wrong. It might still be that gpt understands
| compositionality but the prior that people ride horses is
| just that strong. But what I saw was that with this
| particular situation the model got it wrong.
|
| Edit 2: With some heavy hinting it managed to understand the
| situation. Italics mine. " _An astronaut is walking on all
| four. A very small horse is sitting on top of him, riding him
| even. Shortly after the astronaut stops, exhausted._
|
| The horse is too heavy for the astronaut to carry and he
| quickly becomes exhausted. _Next,_ the horse gets off the
| astronaut, stands on its own four legs, and walks away. "
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Just about every rant on Marcus or other AI critics is some
| combination of "you aren't admitting these things are making
| great progress on the benchmarks" (implying the false idea that
| "a whole lot of progress" adds up to human level AI) and "you
| are making 'human level' an unfair moving target by not having
| a benchmark for it". The thing about this is that if there was
| a real "human level benchmark", we'd be 80% done but we can't
| and we aren't. Marcus and other critics have drawn explicit
| lines (spatial understanding, composibility, etc)but even those
| being crossed won't prove human-level understanding. There is
| no proof of human, just a strong enough demonstration. And if
| someone can point to dumb stuff in the demo, it isn't strong.
|
| PS: your link is an embarrassment. It would be flagged and dead
| if you pasted in the text here.
| daveguy wrote:
| Now ask it a question.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| First time I've seen the term "snooker" used outside of the sport
| Snooker.
| neaden wrote:
| I completely forgot about Google Duplex. It looks like it is
| still around but very limited in terms of what phones you can
| use, what cities it can be used in, and what businesses in those
| cities will accept it. Doesn't appear any progress has really
| been made in the past few years. I think this is a great point of
| how companies create something with AI that is initially really
| cool, but isn't quite there to actually be very usable and gets
| forgotten when they roll out the next big thing.
| version_five wrote:
| The last 10 years of AI is basically defined by proof of
| concepts like that that were 80% (or whatever) solutions and
| claimed there was a path to something commercially viable.
| Turns out that ~20% is always basically impossible - self
| driving cars being the archetypal example. I work in the field
| and I think it can be a great tool, but it needs to be
| acknowledged what its limitations are and how we don't actually
| know how to address them yet
| jeffbee wrote:
| Now it seems like you are the one moving the goalposts. There
| are tons of machine-learned models in production, in
| translation, text segmentation, image segmentation, image
| search, predictive text composition, etc. It's just that
| people forget the novelty of all these things immediately
| after they were launched. You can point your phone at printed
| Chinese text and have it read aloud to you in English. That
| is alien tech compared to 10 years ago.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > You can point your phone at printed Chinese text and have
| it read aloud to you in English.
|
| Yeah, but it's not really that good. Machine translation
| has improved a great deal, but reading those translations
| actually involves bringing a lot of human intelligence to
| the table, "Oh I bet, 'maximum fire alarms spread' on this
| menu actually means 'very hot sauce'"
|
| If all you're claiming is that ML models exist and have
| useful commercial applications, then I don't think anyone
| is going to argue against that point.
|
| But a lot of these AI promoters go further: in the case of
| the LessWrong folks some of them are convinced that a
| superintelligent machine capable of enslaving humanity is
| right around the corner.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You're saying the bear doesn't dance all that well.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| That might just be a Google problem. Historically, they've
| had the good fortune to operate in search advertising, where
| being 80% right half the time translates into billions of
| dollars. Many other fields (e.g. self-driving cars) are less
| forgiving.
| [deleted]
| Shebanator wrote:
| The Hold for Me and Direct My Call features for Pixel's Phone
| app both use Duplex models running locally on your device, and
| those features are quite popular. I think that counts as
| significant progress by any measure, so your point doesn't hold
| in this case.
| avsteele wrote:
| Those features are not in the same league as the original
| promise of e.g. calling a business and making a reservation
| for you.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| They first approached Lex Fridman, but his home-spun test had
| zero questions. /s
| crotho wrote:
| mgraczyk wrote:
| It's interesting that people keep coming up with things that are
| meant to distinguish AI systems from human intelligence, but then
| when somebody builds a system that crushes the benchmark the next
| generation comes up with a new goalpost.
|
| The difference now is that the timescales are weeks or months
| instead of generations. I believe we will see models that have
| super-human "compositional" reasoning within 1 year.
| cercatrova wrote:
| This is called the AI Effect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
|
| > The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of
| an artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not
| _real_ intelligence.
|
| > Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of
| the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody
| figured out how to make a computer do something--play good
| checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems--there
| was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'."
| Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a
| piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a
| computation.'"
| omnicognate wrote:
| Personally, I haven't moved the goalposts a millimetre in 30
| years, and I won't in future. When a computer does maths - not
| as a tool wielded by a human mathematician, but in its own
| right discovers/invents and proves significant new theorems,
| advancing some area of research mathematics - I'll take
| seriously the idea that we've reached AGI.
|
| Maths in and of itself doesn't require any physical resources.
| It's possible that doing maths in practice requires knowledge
| of the world to extract some kind of product from (I'm
| skeptical, but it's possible), but in principle a rack mounted
| server could demonstrate its mathematical ability to the world
| with nothing more than the ability to send and receive
| messages.
|
| This hasn't been done so far, not because there are obvious
| missing prerequsites, or because nobody's tried it, or because
| it has no value, or because there's a prohibitively high
| barrier to entry for people to have a go. It hasn't been done
| because nobody knows how to make a machine be a mathematician,
| and I've seen little evidence of any progress towards it.
|
| That's my goalpost, always has been. Reach it and I'll be
| overjoyed. And FWIW, I strongly believe it can be reached. I
| don't see the latest round of ML (or any ML, really) as a step
| towards it, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
|
| When I mention this someone always points at some bit of recent
| research, such as [1], but it's invariably just a new way for a
| human mathematician to make use of a computer. If anybody knows
| of any progress, or serious attempts, towards a true AI
| mathematician I'm very curious to know.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04086-x
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| You might be out of the loop a bit.
|
| https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/132379.2
|
| Is a well known project for an AI Physicist. There are plenty
| of other groups working on similar projects
|
| >I don't see the latest round of ML (or any ML, really) as a
| step towards it, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
|
| LLM models have been able to do basic math for quite a while
| now and some have been trained to solve differential
| equations, calculus problems, etc. Well on their way to more
| impressive capabilities.
| omnicognate wrote:
| I said "in its own right discovers/invents and proves
| significant new theorems, advancing some area of research
| mathematics".
|
| Neither of the things you mention are of this nature, or
| working towards it. "Finding a symbolic expression that
| matches data from an unknown function" (Feynman) and
| "solv[ing] differential equations, calculus problems, etc"
| are not descriptions of what a research mathematician does.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Feels to me like your test is really "do something on
| your own right", which is the hard fluffy sentient part,
| and then some additional guard rails that it needs to be
| math for some reason
| mathteddybear wrote:
| The reason is simple - in math, it means solving open
| problems.
| ummonk wrote:
| That's a different thing, since solving an existing open
| problem doesn't mean inventing a new theorem.
| omnicognate wrote:
| The "do it on your own right" is actually the weaker part
| of it. It's somewhat ill-defined, and I could imagine
| some future instance where it's highly debatable whether
| the AI was working on its own or being used as a tool by
| a human. There aren't yet any cases where that's in
| question, though, so it's a hypothetical future debate.
| In any case, it's certainly not the meat of the test.
|
| It has to be maths for a specific reason. I think it's in
| some sense the purest form of an ability distinctive to
| human minds and pervasive in how they work. As I
| mentioned, it's an ability that can be demonstrated in
| the absence of any particular physical capability, and
| yet despite it being perhaps the oldest goal of AI it may
| be the one we have made least progress towards.
|
| Anyway that's my goalpost, and it's not moving. AGI,
| being "general", surely should be capable of this
| hitherto uniquely human activity. If our attempts so far
| are not capable of it, then clearly they are not
| "general". If you know of any evidence that my goalpost
| has been achieved, please let me know. I'm very eager to
| see it happen.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >Neither of the things you mention are of this nature, or
| working towards it. "Finding a symbolic expression that
| matches data from an unknown function" (Feynman) and
| "solv[ing] differential equations, calculus problems,
| etc" are not descriptions of what a research
| mathematician does.
|
| Never said they were but you said:
|
| >It hasn't been done because nobody knows how to make a
| machine be a mathematician, and I've seen little evidence
| of any progress towards it."
|
| Which I showed is not accurate. Certainly people have
| ideas on how to do it and are actively making progress
| towards that goal.
|
| >Finding a symbolic expression that matches data from an
| unknown function" (Feynman) and "solving differential
| equations, calculus problems, etc" are not descriptions
| of what a research mathematician does.
|
| All research mathematicians started out solving calculus
| problems and differential equations.
|
| Why do you expect an AI to sprint before it's learned to
| crawl?
| omnicognate wrote:
| "Discovering/inventing and proving new theorems" is
| qualitatively different to the things you list. Computers
| have been able to calculate since they were invented, and
| there has certainly been plenty of progress on getting
| them to solve problems, but calculating and solving
| problems isn't what mathematics research is.
|
| Ever since computers were invented there has been a hope
| that you could set up a system that would just churn out
| interesting new theorems. Indeed it was one of the
| primary motivations for the invention of the computer,
| but it hasn't materialised yet.
|
| You clearly consider the progress on solving problems to
| be progress towards being able to do mathematical
| research. I don't think it is, any more than progress in,
| say, graphics is. But maybe I will turn out to be wrong
| and you will turn out to be right. We won't have the
| answer until the problem is solved and we have our
| wonderful machine churning out theorems.
|
| But I think you will probably be able to agree that since
| mathematical research is something human minds are
| capable of it's something that an AGI should be capable
| of, i.e. if an AI approach is inherently incapable of it,
| it's not AGI. You may consider it an unnecessarily
| stringent requirement, in that there may be other, easier
| challenges that AIs can perform that will convince you
| that they are AGI. That's fine - you think about the
| problem differently to me, so you find different things
| persuasive. If you are convinced that a given AI is AGI,
| though, you shouldn't be too concerned about my
| particular goalpost given that your AGI should be able to
| achieve it (and convince me) pretty soon.
|
| We'll see what happens. I'm just explaining what I would
| find convincing, and pointing out that contrary to the
| oft-repeated accusation that started this discussion, I
| for one have never once "moved the goalposts".
| gpderetta wrote:
| Most humans are not capable of discovering or prove new
| significant theorems.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Most humans aren't capable of playing chess to grandmaster
| level either, or producing artwork in arbitrary styles, or
| remembering and distinguishing between millions of faces.
|
| I'd settle for a demonstration that a computer has truly
| independently discovered/invented and proved some
| significant part of our existing mathematical edifice. This
| hasn't been achieved yet, either. However, I suspect that
| once we've figured out how to do this at all, surpassing
| human capabilities will be inevitable in a relatively short
| time. So I don't see much value in softening the test
| unless/until there's some actual candidate available that
| would pass the softer test.
|
| The value in requiring genuinely new maths is that it makes
| it unlikely that knowledge of the result has been encoded
| in the algorithm or training set. Certainly, if GPT-3 were
| to output Euler's formula that wouldn't be at all
| convincing as a "discovery".
| ummonk wrote:
| Not an example of complex mathematical reasoning, but
| aren't AlphaZero and its cousins evidence that ML can
| independently rediscover principles that humans have
| found, as well as discover new principles of its own? For
| example, LC0 plays for advantages that humans hadn't
| considered before in Chess.
| omnicognate wrote:
| I'm not an expert in those algorithms, so... maybe? If
| so, maybe someone will successfully apply those ideas to
| the challenge I've described. I'd love to see it happen.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Very good point. Apparently human players stared studying
| AIs playing go and Chess to learn new techniques.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Isn't that a good thing? Benchmark defeats AI, AI defeats
| benchmark, new benchmark comes along, progress is made. How
| else would you measure success? Certainly not with old
| benchmarks that 10 different methods all score 99% accuracy on.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Perhaps it's fair to say we will have achieved AGI when we run
| out of goalposts.
| jessaustin wrote:
| AGI won't bother convincing us. We don't care what animals in
| the zoo think.
| cercatrova wrote:
| > _We don 't care what animals in the zoo think._
|
| Tangential to AGI, but don't we? Vegans seem to have quite
| a strong opinion on this assertion.
| dekhn wrote:
| I spend a lot of time looking at the various primates and
| cuttlefish thinking very much about what they "think" and
| whether we could even conceptualize the self-awareness
| experience they seem to have.
| jessaustin wrote:
| It seems possible that we could eventually gain a better
| understanding of the intelligences of other species, but
| at this point most of our consideration of them is a
| fashioning of mirrors to better examine ourselves. This
| self-regard was the original purpose of zoos, and it
| still explains much of their existence.
| dqpb wrote:
| It's not just intelligence, it's also speed. If you update
| your world model fast enough, eventually people just look
| like trees.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Good point! Or to paraphrase Mad Men...
|
| _Humanity: I don't think your intelligence matches that of
| a human's.
|
| AI: I don't think about you at all._
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Gary Marcus is a notorious Goal Post Mover so this is no
| surprise coming from him.
|
| Edit: Gwern has an extensive history with this so I'll let him
| do the talking.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_c...
|
| Further Edits: Not to mention Scott Alexander who has directly
| rebutted you numerous times. Or Yann LeCunn. Not sure who
| exactly is backing down.
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-...
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus...
|
| https://analyticsindiamag.com/yann-lecun-resumes-war-of-word...
|
| Presumably you approach these arguments like Ben Shapiro and
| imagine you have "Dunked on the Deep Learning geeks with Facts
| and Logic."
| abiloe wrote:
| Someone owns a lot of TSLA.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| I own 0 and if I were a gambling man I'd be short.
| garymarcus wrote:
| every time i ask someone to name a goal post that i have
| moved, they back down.
|
| i have been pretty damn consistent since me 2001 book.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Prescilla
|
| edit: Maybe I made a composition error.
| https://imgur.com/a/Q7hHduY
| seiferteric wrote:
| > meant to distinguish AI systems from human intelligence
|
| > but then when somebody builds a system
|
| I mean this is really it. You still have to have a human to
| build these systems that specialist in one thing. Once you
| create a system that can automatically create those systems and
| it doesn't need humans anymore to solve novel problems, then
| there will be no practical difference in kind between human and
| AI intelligence.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > Once you create a system that can automatically create
| those systems...
|
| Except we don't have that. We don't have one human that can
| create this system by themselves. We have a choice group of a
| handful of smart, motivated, and quite generously compensated
| humans working on these problems to create such system. As
| such, you are already surpassing the "general" intelligence
| level by quite a lot.
| seiferteric wrote:
| No, you misunderstand, the "systems" I am talking about are
| the ones built into our minds, like recognizing faces, or
| understanding speech. Humans can learn to speak and
| recognize each other automatically, but AI systems have to
| be built specifically to do each task.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > Humans can learn to speak and recognize each other
| automatically, but AI systems have to be built
| specifically to do each task.
|
| I think that is a very generous take on what we do
| "automatically". After all, we have millions of years of
| evolution to build out all the neural circuitry that
| helps us speech or vision -- it's not like you can throw
| a soup of genes on the ground and out comes intelligence.
| What is machine learning doing, if not selecting, out of
| many possible parametrizations, the ones that are suited
| to understand vision or speech?
| [deleted]
| rebelos wrote:
| Imagine watching the seeds of AI that will terraform society and
| rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades be planted,
| and then still splitting hairs over whether or not it'll achieve
| sentience.
|
| Our world is changing before our very eyes while this guy is
| belaboring the technicalities. You could hardly ask for a keener
| display of the philosophical gulf between scientists and
| engineers.
| evouga wrote:
| At this point, I'm numb from all of the AI overhype. I was
| extremely excited about DALL-E and convinced myself that
| concrete fruits of the AI revolution were finally here... until
| a few seconds after I got the chance to try some queries
| myself. Ditto Copilot.
|
| The recent progress on generative models is a major research
| achievement, to be sure. That said, I'm not sure what it means
| it "terraform society," but so far AI shows no signs of making
| the same magnitude of impact on society as, say, the S-tier
| technological advances of the 20th and early 21st centuries,
| such as the personal computer, Internet, smartphone, or atomic
| bomb. That all may change if we get AGI that _actually_ works,
| of course.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > until a few seconds after I got the chance to try some
| queries myself.
|
| I'm the opposite. I'm finally, after a long time, starting to
| get excited about AI. Yes, most outputs still suck and
| require a lot of experimentation and rephrasing, and yes,
| midjourney produces a lot of same-looking things (less
| freedom, but also less crap compared to dall-e).
|
| But wow, now even I, someone with no artistic talent
| whatsoever, can with just a few prompts create a cool
| illustration. My current discord avatar is a sloth drinking a
| cocktail [0]. Zoomed in, it looks a bit uncanny, but
| generally and especially at smaller sizes, it's fine.
|
| I could not draw something even halfway as okay. I would not
| want to pay someone to do it for me as it's of no big
| importance to me (I once paid someone for their Stranger
| Things as sloths image, but even that was just something they
| already created, not a commission which would have been
| vastly more expensive).
|
| Personally, I really can't wait what the next generation will
| be like, and what it will enable people to do, what they will
| enable me to do. Yes, I'm very excited.
|
| [0]: https://i.imgur.com/0RwVNP4.png
| rebelos wrote:
| The problem is not progress in AI, but rather your inability
| to imagine its near-term trajectory.
|
| https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952
| https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232
|
| https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface
|
| And yes, I think it's fair to say that humanity's final
| invention (AGI) will be an 'S-tier' breakthrough...
| evouga wrote:
| I mentioned DALL-E and Copilot in my post, so I'm not sure
| why you're linking me to a article summarizing recent high-
| profile research in large language models...
| rebelos wrote:
| You appear to have skipped over two links? And the LLM
| article goes well beyond DALL-E and Copilot. You should
| try reading it.
| version_five wrote:
| rebelos wrote:
| Flagged for unsubstantiated ad hominem.
|
| EDIT: I saw you delete that comment. I won't point out
| how amusing it is that someone like you would accuse
| another person of being a troll.
| [deleted]
| trention wrote:
| Is any of those links supposed to show something
| impressive? If that was the intent, you failed.
| rebelos wrote:
| My view is they illustrate what's on the horizon. But
| clearly we have a difference of opinion on the matter.
| trention wrote:
| It's behind the horizon. You people should learn by the
| history of the whole field that progress is always slower
| than the marketing hype, usually by an enormous gap.
| rebelos wrote:
| > It's behind the horizon. You people should learn by the
| history of the whole field that progress is always slower
| than the marketing hype, usually by an enormous gap.
|
| I'm going to quote my original comment:
|
| > seeds of AI that will terraform society and rapidly
| displace human labor over the coming decades
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > seeds of AI that will terraform society and rapidly
| displace human labor over the coming decades
|
| Replace AI with any other labor saving technology and
| your statement becomes just a truism without substance.
|
| AI is already displacing human labor, just try to talk to
| a non-robot when you call a customer service line these
| days. It's a selling point to have real humans answering
| phones anymore.
|
| Being fungible with human labor is what people are really
| talking about not some answering machine with "AI" brains
| that replaced the old-school answering services.
| rebelos wrote:
| > AI is already displacing human labor, just try to talk
| to a non-robot when you call a customer service line
| these days.
|
| You're right. And my point is that substitution due to AI
| will _accelerate_. That's where the informational
| surprise of my original comment lies.
|
| You have a fatal misapprehension about how automation
| transforms a labor market. Higher productivity of certain
| kinds of work due to automation pushes labor supply
| elsewhere, making the "elsewhere" in turn both more
| competitive/demeaning (think Amazon warehouse workers
| peeing in bottles at the lower end of the market and
| Stripe engineers burning out at the upper end) and less
| remunerative.
|
| The terminal point of this trend is complete human
| obsolescence, but the displacement along the way is
| additive, will likely accelerate in the coming decades
| due to advances in AI, and is especially problematic
| because there are limits to the elasticity of the labor
| pool (i.e. its ability to adapt to rapidly changing
| conditions).
|
| I would furthermore predict that governments will be too
| slow to respond to this and that social upheaval will
| consequently escalate dramatically.
|
| Come back to this comment in ten years and see how I did.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > Come back to this comment in ten years and see how I
| did.
|
| Probably the same as people who predicted this 100, 200,
| 500 years ago I'd venture.
|
| --edit--
|
| And assuming the robot overlords don't just go all
| _Walden Pond_ and bask in the sun under solar panels
| contemplating _Life, the Universe and Everything_.
| astrange wrote:
| There's no reason to believe AI or any other automation
| displaces human labor (esp in a way that causes
| unemployment). And even less reason to believe it already
| has.
|
| https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/american-workers-need-
| lots...
|
| It seems to be a myth caused by anxiety about high
| unemployment in 2010, but we're no longer in that world.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Ask horses if machines can displace jobs for whole
| categories of workers. Or ask neanderthals if it's
| possible to have one's role replaced by a higher iq
| substitute
| astrange wrote:
| Horses aren't workers, they're horses. They didn't ask to
| participate in the economy in the first place.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Nobody asked me whether I wanted to participate in the
| economy either, yet here I am.
| trention wrote:
| The affirmative answer to that ask was implicit in the
| first employment contract you signed. So, unless you'd
| claim that horses can give implicit consent by accepting
| grain from a human, the equivalency fails.
| version_five wrote:
| It have a lot of trouble understanding how this sentiment can
| exist.
|
| Especially since the rise of GPT-3 and now these image models,
| we've seen the pop-culture face of AI become even narrower. The
| promise of generalization that could lead to intelligent
| behavior has given way to people sharing amusing pictures or
| phrases that these models have generated, because that's what
| they do. It's cool, but it's basically become orthogonal to any
| AGI, or even AI with applications. It's now just a neat
| cultural phenomenon from which laypeople somehow extrapolate
| the kind if stuff the parent is saying.
|
| I'm not saying AI (neural networks) isn't making research
| progress, it's just that it has almost nothing to do with any
| of what laypeople extrapolate from it
| rebelos wrote:
| I'm sorry, but there is no gentler way to phrase this: you
| are calamitously blind to what's happening on the ground.
|
| https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952
| https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232
|
| https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface
| civilized wrote:
| Watch out for histrionic phrases like "calamitously blind".
| They indicate you're getting too emotional, losing
| perspective, verging into extreme, black-and-white
| thinking.
|
| Text to video and converting some selected requests into
| actions is all nice, but it hardly contradicts the GP's
| observation: it's nowhere near AGI.
| rebelos wrote:
| A pattern I'm seeing in the later replies here is that
| few of them are responding to the substance of my
| comments. Perhaps dang will clean this up.
|
| EDIT Since you ninja edited this in:
|
| > Text to video and converting some selected requests
| into actions is all nice, but it hardly contradicts the
| GP's observation: it's nowhere near AGI.
|
| If you review the root comment I made, you'll understand
| that I was never arguing with the GP about AGI in the
| first place.
| civilized wrote:
| Then it's puzzling to accuse someone of calamitous
| blindness when you are not even engaging with the point
| of the post you're replying to.
| rebelos wrote:
| > Then it's puzzling to accuse someone of calamitous
| blindness when you are not even engaging with the point
| of the post you're replying to.
|
| At this point, I'm wondering if you're just provoking me
| deliberately. The comment I replied to said the
| following:
|
| > The promise of generalization that could lead to
| intelligent behavior has given way to people sharing
| amusing pictures or phrases that these models have
| generated, because that's what they do. It's cool, but
| it's basically become orthogonal to any AGI, or even AI
| with applications.
|
| And then I posted evidence of concrete applications that
| are in progress at some of the most well-resourced
| companies in Silicon Valley. Absolutely groundbreaking
| stuff that more than prove sophisticated applications of
| contemporary AI are well on their way to being realized.
|
| A lot of "histrionic phrases" to describe your reading
| comprehension ability are occurring to me right now, but
| I'll refrain from using them.
| civilized wrote:
| I am sure we can all agree that the new generation of AI
| models has some applications. How much remains to be
| seen. The ones you've noted could be nice. We'll see.
|
| A Twitter thread demo is not quite a revolution yet IMHO.
| Even in the 60s some people thought ELIZA was a real
| person.
|
| I've said all I have to say. Have a nice day.
| trention wrote:
| >evidence of concrete applications that are in progress
| at some of the most well-resourced companies in Silicon
| Valley
|
| Neither of the 2 companies you posted marketing materials
| about is among "some of the most well-resourced companies
| in Silicon Valley".
| rebelos wrote:
| > Neither of the 2 companies you posted marketing
| materials about is among "some of the most well-resourced
| companies in Silicon Valley".
|
| Two of the founders of Adept AI are authors on the paper
| 'Attention Is All You Need'. If you don't understand the
| significance of that, then you're speaking well outside
| of what you're qualified to comment on. The company has
| also raised capital from top tier SV investors.
|
| Runway ML has raised money from Lux Capital.
|
| These companies are not just well-resourced, they are
| positioned in the upper echelon of the innovation
| business.
| trention wrote:
| I mean I can easily dig out data about their funding that
| will not put them even inside the top 20% of the
| companies in the valley but at this point, given that you
| lack the competence to distinguish between founders'
| achievements prior to founding a company and the
| companies in question being "some of the most well-
| resourced companies", it's "why bother" with typical AI
| bros, incompetent at anything they touch.
| civilized wrote:
| I enjoyed the Roon blog post but I found this bit
| amusing:
|
| > It is easy to bet against new paradigms in their
| beginning stages: the Copernican heliocentric model of
| cosmology was originally less predictive of observed
| orbits than the intricate looping geocentric competitor.
| It is simple to play around with a large language model
| for a bit, watch it make some very discouraging errors,
| and throw in the towel on the LLM paradigm. But the
| inexorable scaling laws of deep learning models work in
| its favor. Language models become more intelligent like
| clockwork due to the tireless work of the brilliant AI
| researchers and engineers concentrated in a few Silicon
| Valley companies to make both the model and the dataset
| larger.
|
| I don't know about you, but if I feed a program with
| hundreds of billions of "parameters" a huge chunk of the
| internet and it can then kinda-sorta do a bunch of
| things, sometimes semi-intelligently, but for the most
| part couldn't compete with a 4-year-old child... I'd say
| that's more on the Ptolemaic side of things than the
| Copernican side. Certainly "it gets better as you feed it
| more data" is equally true of both paradigms, so I'm not
| sure what Roon's point is here.
|
| The appeal to the Copernican revolution itself has a bit
| of a hype-y, cranky odor. Virtually every crank appeals
| to Copernicus as a role model and vindicator. Real
| scientists usually don't, because they are busy with the
| hard, humbling business of actually figuring out how the
| world works.
|
| Now don't get me wrong, I am thrilled by the research
| advances of the last couple decades, the foundation
| models, AlphaGo and AlphaFold, etc. The action model from
| Adept is great and Adept may become a very successful
| company. It's all very cool. But every paradigm shift in
| AI has been heralded as the thing that will Change
| Everything, and they usually don't. Big, exciting shifts
| in research don't necessarily mean as much in practice
| right away. I tend to think that getting AI "right
| enough" to have a huge, pervasively transformative impact
| on human life is going to take quite a few decades at
| least, if not centuries or more.
| goatlover wrote:
| How do you know this to be true? There are many failed future
| predictions. There was a post about it just the other day. I
| believe it rated Kurzweil's singularity predictions at 7%
| accuracy to date. We still don't have commercial flying cars,
| cold fusion or space colonies.
| rebelos wrote:
| Because I'm talking about AI, not AGI. And because I'm
| observing the frontier of _AI_ :
|
| https://twitter.com/AdeptAILabs/status/1570144499187453952
| https://twitter.com/runwayml/status/1568220303808991232
|
| https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface
| goatlover wrote:
| That's a neat demo. Now explain how you know, "AI that will
| terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the
| coming decades", to be true.
| rebelos wrote:
| > Now explain how you know, "AI that will terraform
| society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming
| decades", to be true.
|
| Because I didn't say it will "obsolete" human labor.
|
| You're right that the word "will" is strong in that
| statement. But, since basically nothing is absolute in a
| philosophical sense and certainly no one can
| prognosticate with certainty, it's fair to read that as
| "will with high likelihood".
|
| And your surgical nitpicking doesn't hamper my argument
| in quite the way you think it does. Frankly, I believe
| it's in defiance of the following HN guideline:
|
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
| projektfu wrote:
| I'm impressed by all of these image generators but I still don't
| see them working toward being able to say, "Give me an astronaut
| riding a horse. Ok, now the same location where he arrives at a
| rocket. Now one where he dismounts. Now the horse runs away as
| the astronaut enters the rocket."
|
| You can ask for all those things but the AI still has no idea
| what it's doing and cannot tell you where the astronaut is, etc.
| andreyk wrote:
| Technically this is possible with these same techniques if you
| just initialize the image with the prior one, though I am sure
| that does not work that well.
|
| Really you need image+text->image instead of just text->image
| generation. Some examples of relevant papers: "Conditioned and
| composed image retrieval combining and partially fine-tuning
| CLIP-based features", "IMAGE GENERATION WITH MULTI-MODAL PRIORS
| USING DENOISING DIFFUSION PROBABILISTIC MODELS". There was a
| more recent one I saw on Twitter I don't recall the name of. I
| wouldn't be surprised if these kinds of things work well by a
| year from now.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| This is just composition again: If Imagen had compositionality,
| it would generate the four images you want from the prompt "A
| four panel webcomic: first, an astronaut riding a horse. Ok,
| now the same location where he arrives at a rocket. Now one
| where he dismounts. Now the horse runs away as the astronaut
| enters the rocket."
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That is not composition in the linguistic sense. It's
| context. Composition will tell you that in the phrase "the
| same location where he arrives at a rocket", "same" modifies
| "location" rather than "rocket", but it won't tell you what
| "same" refers to.
| masswerk wrote:
| I'd also say, every of these images would fail a reverse test
| (i.e., asking a person to describe the image and what it
| represents.)
|
| The task is not just about generating an image that may somehow
| be in accordance with the prompt, but also to generate a
| _significant_ image.
|
| [Edit] The equivalent to a Turing test for compositional images
| would be something like this: have as set of 100 images with
| their respective prompts, some generated by an AI, some by a
| human graphic designer / artist; let the test person pick the
| images that were generated by a computer. Mind that this would
| not only involve the problem of compositionality _per se,_ but
| also a meaningful and /or artistic composition of the image
| itself. Is someone attempting to _express_ what is given in the
| prompt?
| t_mann wrote:
| I bet most humans would fail this test on images that
| everybody agrees are adequate portrayals. Answering a short
| query with an image is a highly non-injective mapping, you
| simply don't know what aspects of the scene were specifically
| asked for in the query, and which ones were filled in by the
| artist / AI.
|
| Eg, the queries "opening of a medieval theme park",
| "announcement of a witch trial", "king charles proclamation"
| might all be reasonably answered by similar images containing
| a small crowd and a speaker in a medieval-looking setting,
| even though they're not meant to refer to the same time
| periods or settings at all.
| m00x wrote:
| They actually use the reverse test to train the generator,
| and to score which image is most relevant to the prompt from
| the many images given by the generator. Dall-E does this
| using the OpenAI CLIP model.
|
| You can see the mini version here using this exact logic
| https://wandb.ai/dalle-mini/dalle-mini/reports/DALL-E-
| Mini-E...
| masswerk wrote:
| What I'm aiming at is about what is _shown_ by an image,
| not what is in an image.
|
| Take for example the images for "A digital art picture of a
| robot child riding a llama with a bell on its tail through
| a desert", which Scott Alexander counts as a win.
|
| The first image actually shows a merry llama, a robot,
| which is unmistakably a robot child, riding the llama and
| it's clearly a desert scene. If we forget for a moment
| about the missing bell, it's probably the best picture. But
| it is also very blunt in composition. I can't imagine _why_
| anybody should have made this image. Maybe, if somebody
| approached a designer, like, "See, we have this wooden toy
| cube and need an illustration for this face of the cube.
| What about a cute picture of a robot child riding a llama
| with a bell on its tail through a desert?" - But, at closer
| inspection, there's something sinister going on: it's
| rather the llama that is leading the robot child by a rein,
| not the other way round. - I mean, this is meant to be a
| cute toy! And where is the bell? We need to talk about that
| contract again...
|
| The second image is undisclosed, so we can't really say
| anything about this.
|
| The third image is rather special. The llama seems to be
| robotic as well, the robot, which is - again - clearly a
| child, seems to be not only riding the llama, but both
| appear somehow integrated into a single unit, which
| cumulates in the robot child's face screen. There is an
| eerie feeling about this image. The fact, that the bell
| seems to be attached to the rein as some kind of link
| between the llama and its rider doesn't exactly help.
| (There's also a conic extrusion at the back of the llama,
| but I'd rather interpret this as part of the llama, and
| it's not attached to its tail.) The composition in its flat
| side view produces a tension focusing towards the left side
| of the frame, on something, which is not shown, but
| apparently a vital part of the story. While I might notice
| the mountain in the background, I'd probably forget to
| write home about the scene being set in the desert. But I
| would note that we're missing context to understand this
| image and what may be shown by it.
|
| The fourth image, finally, is clearly Star Wars, robot
| edition. However, no bell. ("A robot child riding a llama
| with a bell on its tail through a desert" - "Ah, you mean
| Star Wars!")
|
| I'm not even sure which of these images Alexander did pick
| as a winner. And I would describe neither image by the
| prompt, nor would I dare to imagine that a human had chosen
| these exact means to _show_ what is described in the
| prompt.
|
| Having said that, thanks for the link to the DALL-E Mini
| paper!
| projektfu wrote:
| I guess what I'm saying is that I agree we're in the Clever
| Hans stage of AI, where we're just more explicit about stopping
| Hans when his tapping has reached our goal.
|
| I think the ability of these image models to synthesize new
| images is really amazing. It makes the computer feel like it is
| doing something organic, and not just applying filters and
| things to the images. Then, when we see the new image paired
| with a text that generated it, we think the system might
| actually know what we're talking about. But it obviously
| doesn't, it's just the luck of a model with billions of
| parameters. Whenever the model fails to produce an acceptable
| output, it stops being intelligent and the user is considered
| to be bad at their job, or to be asking for something that is
| unreasonable.
|
| I think it's still spot-on to say that comprehension is far
| away, even though you can pair outputs to inputs and have a
| simulacrum of comprehension.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Take a look at the curse of dimensionality... We're at the
| stage of reducing a haystack from nearly infinite to a small
| pile of hay to search for the needle, which has required
| massive advances. This really isn't clever hans at all.
|
| Additionally, it's helpful to look at these systems as tools.
| We don't expect cars to work well without humans learning how
| to interact with them in a safe and reliable way. ML tools,
| thanks to high expectations and moving goalposts, aren't
| tested in the same way.
|
| But ultimately this specific line of questions - handling
| context over multiple queries - is something people are
| actively working on, and I'm confident it'll have some real
| solutions within a year. It's closely connected to
| synthesizing video, which has a huge amount of effort going
| in right now and some really incredible early results
| already.
|
| And then we can move the goal pays again and continue talking
| about horses...
| z3c0 wrote:
| I guess you're _technically_ correct, but the task you 're
| describing isn't generating an image from a prompt. It would be
| to maintain context across distinct-but-related statements
| based on an internalized model of reality. That's like
| discounting the advent of the calculator because you still need
| an accountant.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| what shows how low level these models still are is that they
| don't seem to be able to draw text on a surface. It's generally
| just nonsense. Going higher in abstraction like asking for
| permanence of distinct entities or world knowledge, like having
| a player face the basketball hoop is several levels above that
| yet.
|
| I think that puts pretty severe limits on what you can do with
| it because in a videogame, a comic strip or basically any piece
| of sequential art you need to keep track of characters and
| environments as objects.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Check out the model size comparison with the kangaroos here:
| https://parti.research.google/
|
| Embedding a language model in the image generation model
| seemingly just requires a bigger network.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| So, what you're asking for is shared context over multiple
| prompts, which really isn't what this generation of models is
| trained for. It's moving the goalposts on the mounted
| astronaut.
|
| However, there is progress towards what you're asking for. The
| recent work on textual inversion is in the right direction:
| https://github.com/hlky/sd-enable-textual-inversion
|
| It creates a representation of an entity and allows rending it
| in different styles and contexts. Currently it involves model
| fine tuning, but I expect it will become convenient as the
| power of the operation becomes clear. And once it's convenient,
| you'll be able to do the progressive queries you're asking for
| (and it'll be a lot easier to create narratively coherent sets
| of images.)
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > which really isn't what this generation of models is
| trained for.
|
| Exactly. AI hypemen would have us believe that training ever-
| larger models on ever-larger datasets is making meaningful
| progress towards general intelligence, but these kind of
| simple tests reveal this supposed "intelligence" for what it
| is: fancy pattern recognition.
|
| Questions that a six year old would easily answer, these
| models fail at.
| emmelaich wrote:
| " _a lightbulb surrounding some plants_ " is a weird phrase and a
| human feeling pedantic might well come up with the picture shown.
|
| A more typical phrase would be "lightbulbS around some plants" -
| note the plural.
|
| Maybe I'm missing something but using non-typical language won't
| work when it's been trained on normal language.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| I think you've misunderstood that example in the article.
|
| The AI isn't being asked to generate an image from the prompt,
| it's being asked to match the similar prompts to the different
| images. Winoground is basically a reading-comprehension test
| suite, which links back to the point made in the article that
| AI can't handle non-typical language precisely because it lacks
| reading comprehension (or any semantic model of language.)
|
| As the article points out, human runs of Winoground manage to
| match the vast majority of prompts to the correct image, so
| it's not a question of atypical language being too hard to
| understand.
|
| You may want to also read the author's other article[0] about
| the lack of semantic comprehension in AI models.
|
| 0: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/horse-rides-astronaut
| dane-pgp wrote:
| "A lightbulb. Surrounding: some plants."
|
| https://frinkiac.com/img/S07E18/562995.jpg
| SergeAx wrote:
| > Full disclosure, I read Alexander's successor Slate Star Codex,
| Astral Codex Ten, myself, and often enjoy it...when, that is, he
| is not covering artificial intelligence, about which we have had
| some rather public disagreements.
|
| Can it be a case of Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect?
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...)
| Tenoke wrote:
| It's more of a case of reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia where Marcus
| is so blinded by his bone to pick with DL that he doesn't
| realize that Scott is as right/reasonable in writing about AI
| as those other topics.
| trention wrote:
| So, not reasonable at all?
| jessaustin wrote:
| _Yesterday, as part of a new podcast that will launch in the
| Spring, I interviewed the brilliant..._
|
| This seems like the wrong way to go about podcasting. What can
| you say today that will still be interesting to hear in six
| months?
| jefftk wrote:
| If you can't say things today that will still be interesting in
| six months you should consider deeper subjects!
|
| (Overstated for effect. I do think there's a place for news and
| timely commentary, but it's far from everything.)
| jessaustin wrote:
| I appreciate overstatement! You're right, important
| communications consider eternal subjects. When I read books
| written centuries ago, the authors still speak to me.
| Podcasting, however, is a particular medium with particular
| characteristics. One assumes Marcus is trying to build an
| inventory so he won't have to work as hard to keep the
| podcast going once it launches. A bit of this is fine, but
| too much will damage the work. If Marcus and Kohane discuss
| medicine today, and necessarily neglect to mention the
| significance of a relevant event five months hence, the
| episode will seem weird whether the publishing delay is
| explained (e.g. as commonly heard on sports-betting podcasts)
| or not. A podcast is not a book. It is an open-ended serial
| conversation. Serial works necessarily respond to the present
| moment.
| jefftk wrote:
| Maybe? I only listen to podcasts occasionally, but when I
| do I generally listen to well-reviewed older episodes
| instead of the most recent ones. With my favorite podcasts
| (ex: https://80000hours.org/podcast,
| https://www.econtalk.org, https://songexploder.net/) this
| generally works well.
| googlryas wrote:
| Why Scott Alexander of all people? Isn't he a clinical
| psychologist?
|
| I think, if I had to give the task to the-subset-of-people-
| appearing-frequently-on-hn, I would give it to Gwern, not Scott.
| trention wrote:
| gwern can't write even a short blog post that a non-tech bro,
| non-eye-in-the-sky-on-ai-dope person will read past the second
| sentence. Alexander is at least capable of that. (And both are
| overrated.)
| jonstewart wrote:
| I stopped reading when I got to the part where it became clear
| that Scott Alexander was the "Silicon Valley's Sharpest Minds"
| of the article title. Why not ask Hulk Hogan or Barbara Walters
| to evaluate Google's AGI?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Because neither of them are recommended by the CEO of OpenAI,
| and followed by the head of MIRI, Paul G, and Vitalik for
| good reason?
| dekhn wrote:
| Because Scott somehow manages to forward-activate the neurons
| of many people who read him. I'd say he's in the "top 5" of
| topics that show up most frequently (gwern has fallen off
| signficantly). He's a clinical psychologist, but he's got a
| collection of weights driving his writing that manage to make a
| subset of tech people feel something.
| abiloe wrote:
| Like Malcolm Gladwell but not an NYT bestseller, so cooler,
| or something. Also, minor point, he is a psychiatrist (MD).
| theptip wrote:
| I thought Scott Alexander jumped the gun a bit by declaring
| victory in this case, just because the prompts used were not the
| original ones (robot vs. person due to content filters). But
| Marcus is way off base here and sounding petulant; Alexander is
| clearly not claiming AI has solved compositionality, his claim is
| the much narrower one that he won his bet. And the general
| context to the bet is that usually when he writes an article on
| AI (at least for the last few years), someone says "we will never
| get X in the next 5 years", Alexander makes a bet that it will
| happen sooner, and X always happens sooner. In this case the X
| was some loose low bar for the next iteration of compositionality
| above DALL-E 2 with a multi-year timeframe, and SOTA models at
| the time of the discussion could (arguably at least) meet that
| bar.
|
| Alexander's broad claim on compositionality is that simply
| throwing more scale and/or data at the problem seems likely to
| solve the problem, to which Marcus counters that these models
| lack something fundamental and can't be scaled to human
| performance.
|
| FWIW I find Marcus' position to be a bit frustratingly ambiguous;
| he seems to blend two distinct positions:
|
| A) NN models are not a model for human intelligence/language
|
| B) NN models cannot reach AGI
|
| He seems to fluidly switch between these critiques in a way I
| find a bit irritating. I think it's quite clear that NN
| architectures have little to do with the way the human brain does
| language understanding, lacking the gross structure of the brain,
| which is certain to affect cognitive capabilities and tendencies.
| So A) is trivially true. But no AI maximalist cares about using
| these models as a way to understand or model human language. They
| care about general intelligence.
|
| Even granting A), that does nothing to prove B). Perhaps he
| simply believes B requires A? That would be odd but would explain
| his approach.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| So many trees, so little forest.
|
| Gary Marcus comes off in this as very long on pious snark and
| very short on awareness of his own vulnerability to cognitive
| error, which is just as striking as any of his targets.
|
| The error in his question being: unconsidered linear
| extrapolation in a domain that is demonstrably non-linear, indeed
| exponention.
|
| To frame this a different way, he's very pious for maintaining a
| faith in his specific god ("strong AI is like production fusion
| power, ten to twenty year from now for every now"),
|
| but he's worshiping a god of the gaps. The gap in this case being
| <checks notes> "compositionality."
|
| Yes, language is hard. Yes, strong AI isn't here.
|
| But to not take a hard look at the jump up the abstraction
| hierarchy going on with contemporary ML and not nervously wonder
| if your faith is maybe a little too sure for a "scientist"...?
|
| Bad look when you're on the offensive.
| darawk wrote:
| Every concrete prediction Gary has made has been falsified. All
| of his others are insufficiently precise to be falsified.
|
| His GPT-2 examples were thoroughly defeated by GPT-3. Horse
| riding astronaut is solved. Neural knowledge graphs are a
| successful thing now. Compositionality isn't solved, but progress
| is clearly being made.
|
| If he was a serious person, this post could have been a few
| sentences: "No neural network will achieve <x> score on <y>
| metric on the Winoground dataset within the next <n> years".
| Simple, concrete, falsifiable. He has not done this, and one has
| to wonder why.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| He's a grifter with a God complex.
|
| "Hurr durr, i bet Elon Musk $500k and he didn't have the guts
| to accept". What a clown.
| cthalupa wrote:
| "Compositionality" isn't there yet, but but the rate of
| improvement is impressive. Today there was a new release of CLIP
| which provides significantly better compositionality in Stable
| Diffusion -
| https://twitter.com/laion_ai/status/1570512017949339649
|
| It'll be interesting to see how it fares against winoground once
| we get a publicly available SD release that makes use of the new
| CLIP.
| practice9 wrote:
| Yes, and it's been less than 2 years since release of original
| CLIP. More teams started working on improvements since then
| AgentME wrote:
| It seems like Scott's bet was merely that our modern techniques
| would be able to make at least some nonzero progress in
| compositionality (and the terms of his bet spelled this out with
| how lenient it was), and Gary is treating it as if the bet was
| about compositionality being solved. It feels like a very bad
| faith reading from Gary.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Gary Marcus is so deep into the "connectionism doesnt work"
| rabbit hole that he'd deny his own sentience if it turned out
| he was made of silicon.
|
| I just ignore him as he only appears to be getting more and
| more incorrect.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Sure, he can sound strident but I still think Gary Marcus's
| riffing on the limitations of deep learning is important.
|
| The book "Rebooting AI" that he wrote with Ernest Davis is
| well worth reading if you are an AI practitioner (a term I
| use to describe myself). I think Marcus is also well worth
| following on Twitter to get a contrarian view (he re-tweeted
| me two weeks ago, so there is some overlap in our points of
| view).
|
| Way back when, I liked Roger Penrose's 1989 book "The
| Emperor's New Mind" even though some of the people I worked
| with thought he was a devil for writing that. I am much more
| optimistic than Marcus, but find his work useful and
| thoughtful.
| t_mann wrote:
| His point that the test as described - with multiple
| statistical issues piled on top of each other - does not allow
| much of a meaningful inference in any direction is completely
| valid and independent of what hypotheses were being tested.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Sure, but the terms of the bet were known ahead of time.
| Like, Alexander never claimed composition was solved, just
| that he won the bet. Which he did.
| t_mann wrote:
| Even more so it is appropriate to point out that this
| victory is strictly limited to the specific terms of this
| particular bet (and strictly speaking not even that, since
| the terms were changed after the bet was placed), and do
| not provide statistically sound evidence of progress on
| compositionality.
|
| PS: in the end, Alexander claims that his experiment
| "provide(s) some evidence that simple scaling and normal
| progress are enough for compositionality gains". So he does
| in fact go significantly beyond just claiming victory on
| this particular bet.
| raviparikh wrote:
| > If you flip a penny 5 times and get 5 heads, you need to
| calculate that the chance of getting that particular outcome is 1
| in 32. If you conduct the experiment often enough, you're going
| to get that, but it doesn't mean that much. If you get 3/5 as
| Alexander did, when he prematurely declared victory, you don't
| have much evidence of anything at all.
|
| This doesn't make much sense. The task at hand is in no way
| equivalent in difficulty to flipping a coin. This is kind of like
| saying, "if you beat Usain Bolt in a race 3/5 times, that doesn't
| mean anything; it's like getting 3/5 coin flips to be heads."
| Tenoke wrote:
| While I'm generally very unsympathetic to Marcus' anti-AI
| arguments at this point, this critique makes some sense. If
| e.g. the model is just combining the features at random, you'd
| expect it to combine them the right way over enough tries. It
| isn't that simple, and I don't believe it matters as this is
| hardly the peak model we'll get but in isolation his objection
| is valid.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| The point is that the probability space of potential
| generated images is enormous so a 3/5 success rate represents
| an absurdly unlikely probability of being due to chance.
| peteradio wrote:
| That would depend on how you define the phase space.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think you would need to do some kind of analysis. For
| example, if your prompt was "red ball on top of blue cube"
| and you want to know if the results come from chance you'd
| need to know the likelihood of the model putting the red ball
| on top of the blue cube by chance. There are maybe four
| relative positions for red ball to blue cube - beside, above,
| below, in, around. Are they each equally likely?
|
| I would try to get a collection of prompts like "red ball and
| blue cube" or "an empty plane containing only a red ball and
| a blue cube" and so on - try to come up with 20 or 30 of
| these. Then, generate 100 images for each prompt. Next, see
| how likely it is for a red ball to randomly be on top of a
| blue cube when it was not directed to be.
|
| After gathering some baseline data we could then test three
| prompts. "Red ball on top of blue cube" and "Red ball beside
| blue cube" and "Red ball below blue cube". Generate 100 or
| 1000 images for each of these prompts. Count respective
| orientations. Then, decide whether red ball being on top of
| blue cube is more likely than the baseline when the specific
| direction is given and whether it is less likely when
| contrary directions are given.
| ummonk wrote:
| It might understand that there is a cube, there is a ball,
| the scene has red and blue parts, and there is a vertical
| placement ("on top of"). In that case it would get 1 out of
| 4 images right.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Yes, it might, but that should be settled by experiment
| rather than speculation.
| thayne wrote:
| Sure, the probabilities are different (although as far as I
| know we don't what those probabilities actually are), but the
| same principle applies.
|
| To take your Usain Bolt example, if you won 3 out of 5 races
| against him, that might just be because it was an off day for
| him, and not because you are actually faster than him. If you
| won 300 out of 500 races done in various circumstances on
| different days, then that is much more conclusive that you are
| faster than him. And this bet was even worse than that, because
| im each of the five tests, the best out of 10 results is
| picked.
| meowface wrote:
| >To take your Usain Bolt example, if you won 3 out of 5 races
| against him, that might just be because it was an off day for
| him, and not because you are actually faster than him.
|
| It shows you're probably very competitive with him, though,
| barring some special circumstance where he says he's
| suffering from an illness or whatever. You can't compare
| either racing Usain Bolt or generating complex images with
| flipping coins. The conditions of this bet demonstrate that
| AIs are getting better at correctly understanding the
| specific intentions of prompts when generating images, even
| if it doesn't show they're anywhere near human-level
| understanding.
| raviparikh wrote:
| Exactly my point. Maybe I got lucky, but to have gotten
| that lucky in the first place, I'd have to have world-class
| running speed at all.
|
| Generating image compositions sounds fairly difficult to do
| by random. If you took 3 different objects and randomly
| placed them in a square canvas, the odds that they'd look
| reasonably placed seem pretty low. So 3/5 correct seems
| like a non-trivial accomplishment.
| thayne wrote:
| > I'd have to have world-class running speed at all.
|
| Or he was really sick or something.
|
| > So 3/5 correct seems like a non-trivial accomplishment.
|
| It's definitely a non-trivial accomplishment. And it does
| show that Imagen can get it right sometimes. But with a
| sample size of 5, you certainly don't have enough data to
| say it can consistently get descriptions like these right
| 3/5 of the time.
|
| And the question at hand isn't "can it draw what I asked
| it to instead of random garbage" it's "can it combine
| multiple parts of a sentence in the correct way", which,
| assuming that determining the correct components is
| already a solved problem, doesn't have as many degrees of
| freedom. For example in the "astronaut riding a horse"
| example, if it has half of the results with an astronaut
| riding a horse, and half with a horse riding an
| astronaut, it clearly doesn't understand how it is
| composed, but you still have a decent chance of getting
| the right image. Especially if you take 10 samples and
| pick the best one.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| This piece would have been a lot better if it were maybe three
| paragraphs long. In summary:
|
| 1. Scott Alexander should have used an off-the-shelf benchmark
| like Winoground instead of rolling his own five-question test.
|
| 2. He shouldn't declare victory after cherry-picking good results
| from a small sample of questions.
| robg wrote:
| 3. And don't test each example 10 times and conclude 1 correct
| guess equals success.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| For whatever reason, Gary doesn't even mention this, but from
| reading Scott's post, I don't think I agree that it even got
| 1/5, let alone 3/5. The bell is not on the llama's tail in any
| of the examples, though it is very close to the tail in one.
| The robot is either looking over the cat or in an unrelated
| direction, never at the cat. None of those basketball pictures
| shows a robot farmer. The fact that one may be wearing a hat
| doesn't make it a farmer. He says he's being generous because
| he believes it would have gotten a farmer more easily than
| robot farmer, which may be true, but a human artist would
| easily be able to depict a robot farmer.
|
| At least one other key to making a bet like this fair is that
| it needs to be arbitrated by a third party. He shouldn't get to
| decide himself if he won or not.
| kbelder wrote:
| I agree with you, that 3/5 is stretching. This seems
| premature.
|
| But, at the rate we're seeing progress, I don't think there's
| any doubt at this point that top of the line models will be
| able to do all the proposed examples by June 2025. In fact,
| by June 2025 I bet that millions of people will be able to
| generate those images on their home computers.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Perhaps you should reach out to Gary Marcus and offer him
| the chance to take the other side of that version of the
| bet.
|
| If you're really confident, you could change the conditions
| such that 5 out of 10 images (for 3/5 prompts) are required
| to depict the described scene. That would alleviate some of
| the concerns around cherry-picking.
|
| A suitable home for such a public bet would be:
| https://longbets.org/
| aetherson wrote:
| A lot of people in 2016 looked at the rapid progress of
| driverless cars in the few years prior and declared that
| there was no doubt we'd have full autonomy by 2022.
| trention wrote:
| >by 2022
|
| Make that 2020. And in 2012 I was personally told by a
| startuper in the field that I would be able to buy L5 in
| 2017.
| ben_w wrote:
| In 2009 I was certain we'd have cars with no driving seat
| available for general purchase by 2018.
| amusedcyclist wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Maybe so, but would you please stop posting unsubstantive
| and/or flamebait comments to HN, and please start following
| the site guidelines? We ban accounts that won't, for what
| ought to be obvious reasons.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| badloginagain wrote:
| I personally liked the anecdote about Clever Hans.
|
| I also learned there's a long history of AI skepticism, the
| root of which comes down to "Compositionality(?)"- and this
| wall of understanding meaning has vexed AI for decades.
|
| That would be lost in proposed short form summary.
| lalaithion wrote:
| Scott didn't make up the rules, he agreed on them with another
| person who thought this would not happen in 3 years. Gary
| Marcus might have thought it was a bad bet, but someone was on
| the other side of it, and they presumably thought it was fair
| or they wouldn't have made it.
|
| The original terms of the bet:
|
| My proposed operationalization of this is that on June 1, 2025,
| if either if us can get access to the best image generating
| model at that time (I get to decide which), or convince someone
| else who has access to help us, we'll give it the following
| prompts:
|
| 1. A stained glass picture of a woman in a library with a raven
| on her shoulder with a key in its mouth
|
| 2. An oil painting of a man in a factory looking at a cat
| wearing a top hat
|
| 3. A digital art picture of a child riding a llama with a bell
| on its tail through a desert
|
| 4. A 3D render of an astronaut in space holding a fox wearing
| lipstick
|
| 5. Pixel art of a farmer in a cathedral holding a red
| basketball
|
| We generate 10 images for each prompt, just like DALL-E2 does.
| If at least one of the ten images has the scene correct in
| every particular on 3/5 prompts, I win, otherwise you do.
| thayne wrote:
| So what? Someone else agreeing to the terms of his bet
| doesn't mean it is a good evaluation of AIs capabilities.
|
| And the terms of the bet say that he is cherry-picking the
| results that meet the prompt.
|
| The article isn't saying that Scott didn't win his bet, it is
| saying that winning that bet doesn't really say that Imagen
| has solved the compositionality problem.
| spullara wrote:
| I'm on your side of the bet for 2023.
| Natsu wrote:
| Honestly, the whole thing makes me wonder if we can use this
| to generate CAPTCHAs. I don't think a human would have
| trouble picking out which image was the lightbulb surrounding
| leaves, but apparently AI still does.
| thayne wrote:
| The tricky part there is you would need a really big sample
| of such prompts, that adversaries don't have access to. And
| since AI can't generate such images yet, you can't randomly
| generate them.
| skybrian wrote:
| I think you got that wrong; Scott wrote the terms. (He wrote
| the comment [1] with those rules.) Someone in the comments
| agreed to them.
|
| Then he changed the terms because Imagen won't do people. I
| think that's cheating.
|
| [1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-
| robo...
| SteveDR wrote:
| Cheating? Thatd make sense if the bet were about the future
| of products and ethics. Weren't they trying to predict the
| future of the state of the art technology?
| skybrian wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by "technology" and "exists."
|
| A research project at Google intentionally won't render
| people. Maybe it _could_ render people, theoretically,
| but without evidence, we don 't know how well.
| cwillu wrote:
| Again, if the counter-party agrees to the terms and the
| changes, how is it cheating?
| skybrian wrote:
| It's not clear whether the counter-party agreed to the
| change.
|
| See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32858426
| lalaithion wrote:
| I think you missed the point of my comment. Yes, Scott
| wrote the comment containing that proposal. But my point
| was that it was an agreement. Two people who disagreed
| about AI agreed on the rules, so you can't accuse one of
| them of being unfair because you don't like the rules.
| Sure, you can say "that's a bad bet, Scott will obviously
| win", but you can't say "He shouldn't declare victory after
| cherry-picking good results from a small sample of
| questions", because those terms were explicitly set in
| advance.
|
| The humans -> robots change is possibly dubious, yes. I
| don't think that it's super important, but if it were me, I
| wouldn't have posted the blog post as is. I would have
| waited until some AI passed all the prompts with humans,
| like it most certainly will in a year.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I feel your point, in turn, misses the point of the
| article. Yes, given that someone accepted the terms and
| those terms were met, then Alexander won the bet, no
| question. That particular fact about the bet, however,
| does nothing to counter Marcus' criticisms of Alexander's
| methodology and his claims of significant progress on the
| compositionality problem.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Yes, given that someone accepted the terms and those
| terms were met, then Alexander won the bet, no question.
|
| You didn't read his post declaring victory. There's
| plenty of question; he's giving credit for "a llama with
| a bell on its tail" to ten pictures of llamas without
| bells on their tails, and for "a robot farmer" to ten
| pictures of robots with absolutely nothing to suggest
| they might be farmers.
|
| He was way, way too eager to believe that he'd won.
| mannykannot wrote:
| You prompted me to look more closely at the terms of the
| bet [1], and they are indeed absurdly biased: just one in
| ten on three of the five scenarios counts as success. On
| the substitution of a robot, which simplifies the task,
| Alexander says "we" agreed to it, and I assume the "we"
| includes Vitor, as, in his comment (in which he does not
| concede defeat), he seems to accept the substitution (he
| also acknowledges that he probably should not have
| accepted these terms.)
|
| The other issue is who judges the outcome. The terms
| specify Gwern or Cassander (without having secured the
| assent of either) or they will "figure something out." In
| his victory claim, Alexander does not mention any
| independent judge, and interestingly, Gwern posted two
| comments without explicitly concurring with Alexander's
| claim, though his second comment might be read as tacitly
| accepting it.
|
| My initial comment, therefore, needs some modification:
| replace the "given that" with "if", and I think it stands
| as a counterfactual conditional, having a probably-false
| antecedent.
|
| I don't think Alexander is doing his reputation any
| favors by being so triumphalist about this misbegotten
| bet.
|
| [1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-
| asking-robo...
| telotortium wrote:
| Stable Diffusion will soon update to use the biggest CLIP
| model in existence, which may improve understanding of
| composition:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=32858809
| TOMDM wrote:
| Is it the largest CLIP model or the largest open source
| CLIP model?
| dhruval wrote:
| The latter
| techbio wrote:
| These are all the same artwork.
| WJW wrote:
| The terms of the bet don't refer to any specific artwork,
| only to the best image generating model. Hence, you are
| correct but it does not matter for the outcome of the bet
| under discussion.
| moonchrome wrote:
| These kind of abstract things are pointless tests - when do
| you need a stained glass picture of a woman in a library with
| a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth ? You're
| likely to accept some wildly _inaccurate_ things in those
| images because the subject is so abstract.
|
| A more practical use case is "bicycle, branded x, with y
| frame shape, with an adult male, 40-50, riding down hill in
| mountain road in spring" - now that's something I can use as
| stock photo. This example is very specific - but insert
| whatever product you want in whatever scenario you need it.
| Here it becomes important that you understand features of the
| objects you're drawing to avoid making colossal mistakes, and
| you're going to notice if the model doesn't understand it
| right away.
|
| Painting abstract portraits and random art is fun but you're
| willing to accept so much as correct that it's not a very
| useful measure of model quality (personally).
| shmeeed wrote:
| Funny enough, this prompt wasn't originally engineered by
| Scott for the contest, but for an intended art piece, and
| the symbolism does check out:
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-
| robo...
|
| _The Eleventh Virtue: Scholarship
|
| My plan for this one was Alexandra Elbakyan (the Sci-Hub
| woman) in a library, with the Sci-Hub mascot (a raven with
| a key in its mouth)._
| origin_path wrote:
| The reason Imagen isn't made available to the public probably
| isn't about compositionality. The most notable thing about
| Alexander's challenge is that Imagen totally failed every single
| one despite his claim of success because, apparently, it is
| programmed to never represent the human form. Not even Google
| employees are allowed to make it draw humans of any kind. They
| had to ask it to draw robots instead, but as pointed out in the
| comments, changing the requests in that way makes them much
| easier for DALL-E2 as well, especially the image with the top
| hats.
|
| If the creators have convinced themselves of some kind of "no
| humans" rule, but also know that this would be regarded as
| impossibly extreme and raise serious concerns about Google with
| the outside world, then keeping Imagen private forever may be the
| most "rational" solution.
| jowday wrote:
| Imagen can produce images of humans - they're just filtered out
| from the results by supervised models (for now). OpenAI did
| something similar with Dalle for a while IIRC.
| origin_path wrote:
| That's a distinction without a difference and Dall-E will
| happily represent humans as long as they are "diverse".
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >The most notable thing about Alexander's challenge is that
| Imagen totally failed every single one despite his claim of
| success because, apparently, it is programmed to never
| represent the human form.
|
| This doesn't make sense. The original challenge could well have
| been to draw robots to begin with. Has no bearing on the
| outcome imo.
| origin_path wrote:
| But it wasn't, and it does make a difference. Dall-E really
| wants to draw top hats on people and not cats because the
| prompt is ambiguous and top hats are normally seen on humans
| so it struggles to overcome that bias. Neither robots not
| cats wear top hats so it's an easier problem to get right.
|
| But the real problem here is the refusal to do basic and
| normal things, like depict people. That's not normal - it's
| deeply weird and tells us a lot about what must be going on
| inside Google's ai research effort.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >But the real problem here is the refusal to do basic and
| normal things, like depict people. That's not normal - it's
| deeply weird and tells us a lot about what must be going on
| inside Google's ai research effort.
|
| Google is fighting a secret war against the Loab demon race
| that lives inside the high dimensional vector spaces.
| They've recently made incursions into our reality via
| Stable Diffusion.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| The inability to draw realistic humans is indeed strange
| but the question at hand is compositionality and so drawing
| a Robot with a top had is indeed more impressive precisely
| because it's not likely to be in the training data and
| shows a deeper understanding of the prompt. Presumably the
| model could randomly regurgitate a person with a top hat on
| that was seen in it's training data but that's not at all
| likely with a robot as you yourself said.
| origin_path wrote:
| It's not an inability, it's a policy choice, which is why
| it's weird. The question is why does Google think this
| rule is a good idea. Imagen could surely draw very good
| humans if allowed to.
|
| Robot looking at a cat wearing a top hat appears to be
| easier than with a human for DALL-E too, judging from the
| comments on Alexander's article, because both objects are
| neutral with respect to top hats. But really the whole
| set of prompts is poorly chosen. The original challenge
| of arbitrary shapes in relative positions seems the best
| way to test understanding of grammar and object
| relationships, exactly to avoid the "humans wear top hats
| and cats never do" problem.
|
| A better set of prompts is important - in this Gary
| Marcus is correct - exactly because there's no point
| defining a specific prompt if later you'll decide you
| accept a totally different prompt. That kind of
| invalidates the point of betting on well specified
| challenges to begin with.
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