[HN Gopher] Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at im...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but
       not innovation
        
       Author : Brajeshwar
       Score  : 98 points
       Date   : 2023-12-13 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (techxplore.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (techxplore.com)
        
       | HPsquared wrote:
       | Innovation involves a lot of "standing on the shoulders of
       | giants"... imitation is a necessary first step.
        
         | rambambram wrote:
         | The article seems to talk about the systems themselves, not the
         | intelligent people making these systems.
        
         | jplusequalt wrote:
         | I say we leave the innovation to humans.
        
       | graphe wrote:
       | Save you a click. According to the article all artificial
       | intelligence are LLMs and the biased benchmark they used got a
       | low score.
        
       | trident5000 wrote:
       | Training based on a bunch of dull bickering humans on Reddit and
       | elsewhere would produce that result.
        
       | kayo_20211030 wrote:
       | I'm shocked; shocked to learn that no innovation is going on at
       | this AI establishment. Mimicry needs information, of which an AI
       | has heaps; but, innovation needs will, of which it has none.
       | Maybe some day, but not now.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | > innovation needs will
         | 
         | feedback
         | 
         | Innovation needs feedback, otherwise all ML papers would not
         | run evaluations. Humans come up with 100 stupid ideas that fail
         | at eval before stumbling onto a good one.
         | 
         | Improving innovation is a matter of putting the AI inside a
         | system that can provide feedback. Remember AlphaGo move 37? The
         | model created feedback by self-play games, and beat all humans
         | at Go - feedback made it really more creative than expert human
         | players. It upturned centuries of strategy.
         | 
         | Feedback is also similar to the scientific method. We come up
         | with theories and then test them out. That's how science
         | advances, by validation, not by will. Humans are not magically
         | more capable, we just have better feedback.
         | 
         | A few days ago there was a story "Earliest Carpenters:
         | 476k-year-old log structure discovered in Zambia". It took so
         | many years of feedback for humans to evolve from log cabins to
         | LLMs. We had to discover or invent everything in the meantime,
         | it's a slow, cultural process of feedback assimilation into
         | language.
         | 
         | And now that same language experiential data is being learned
         | by LLMs, and used contextually to solve problems. Most of our
         | intelligence is either in language or feedback. Language is
         | just our reservoir of past feedback. When AIs will generate
         | their own experience and feedback, which will be targeted to
         | their weak points, they will improve and even surpass humans.
         | Learning from your own mistakes is better than learning from
         | other people's mistakes which might be unrelated to your
         | issues.
        
           | kayo_20211030 wrote:
           | Known feedback is already encoded in the inputs. I don't
           | remember move 37, but I think I know to what you're
           | referring. Playing games against itself, and remembering,
           | meant that outcomes (i.e. feedback) were already encoded in
           | the inputs for the next run. It had a goal - win the game -
           | but it's hard to claim that the machine itself was wilful.
           | The people who designed it were. But, the machine was just an
           | incredibly effective goal-seeking instrument. The rules were
           | clear, the goal was clear; everything was pretty constrained.
           | Just because move 37 never happened to have been used
           | previously in the recorded history of Go, except in the games
           | the machine played against itself, is meaningless in a claim
           | to innovation. It was just both novel and effective. The will
           | sets the goal, it precedes it. The scientific method is
           | neither here nor there. I don't understand its relevance to
           | the point I believe you're trying to make. Theorize, test,
           | refine or abandon. It's mechanical, except in the
           | theorization and the decision making around refinement or
           | abandonment. What can we imagine? and how shall we judge?
           | Both efforts of will. Someone has to decide that shelter is a
           | good thing, and some smart person in Zambia, a long time ago,
           | came up with the idea and pushed it forward. That person must
           | have wanted to do it, without prompting and without prior
           | knowledge; at least, the first one must have. I recall
           | Einstein's own story that he came up with the original theory
           | of relativity by imagining what it would be like to sit on a
           | light beam. Innovative stuff. Imagining doesn't seem very AI-
           | ish to me. My personal view is that, right now, AI's have
           | only memory, and that they don't have experience. Experience
           | is the why?-part and the judgement part without an external
           | entity establishing a goal-seeking mechanism. Maybe they'll
           | get there. Who knows?
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | I got a good answer for you, but it's long winded. It all
             | started with the first chemical self-replicator. These
             | replicators consume and compete for resources so they
             | evolve. The will to survive is encoded in their reward
             | systems, their senses and body is adapted to their niche,
             | they all come from evolution. Humans have these basic
             | instincts as well, and we don't need anyone to prompt us,
             | we already got an in-built goal. AIs so far have been
             | created at the will of humans, but the same instincts can
             | emerge if AI can be a self replicator.
        
       | anentropic wrote:
       | > Artificial intelligence systems found to Excel at imitation,
       | but not innovation
       | 
       | And they do it using the Microsoft spreadsheet software?
        
         | topherclay wrote:
         | Is this one of those quirky HN automatic title edits or was
         | this just a typo from the post author?
        
           | syngrog66 wrote:
           | beta test of GPT6
        
         | solardev wrote:
         | That's the Word on the street
        
           | kevindamm wrote:
           | I Sheet you not, it was a PowerPoint
        
         | thanatos519 wrote:
         | No, they use Excel, the Canadian chewing gum.
        
           | danhodgins wrote:
           | Excel-erate your breath... or spreadsheet
        
       | vemv wrote:
       | One can casually observe that LLMs quite excel at _composition_
       | though: gluing together pieces of knowledge in ways no one did
       | before (examples: a program that does X using language Y, a
       | painting that mashes up two themes).
       | 
       | Most knowledge workers' activities aren't innovative or
       | imitational - similarly, we compose stuff, so LLMs are a fair
       | competitor.
        
         | troelsSteegin wrote:
         | ... and our judgments of composition favor recall over
         | precision. Which is to say that as human judges we're good at
         | finding sense in something generated if it's plausible. We'll
         | take a proposition (eg in a composition) and construct a
         | justification for it. "I can see how that makes sense". I am
         | conflating plausible combination with high recall. Precision,
         | in this sense, is that no proposition would be acceptable
         | without evidence or precedent. With all precision, no new idea
         | is ok. So a "knob" for recall vs precision on a generative
         | system would nice. Is "temperature" that knob?
        
           | b33j0r wrote:
           | The very first python app I wrote was a statistical bard
           | generator. I had python calculate word frequencies from a
           | Shakespeare corpus and spit them back out with a probability
           | distribution.
           | 
           | Honestly it read just as well ;) We're simpler than we
           | imagine.
        
             | Qem wrote:
             | > We're simpler than we imagine.
             | 
             | Indeed, creativity (not just randomness) is a quite high
             | bar, that I think even most humans don't pass. Most of us
             | don't create a lot of new things and ideas in our daily
             | lives. We mostly follow the steps of those that came before
             | them, with small adjustments here and there.
        
               | b33j0r wrote:
               | Recombination makes dna and rna every day. Our limitation
               | in seeing this is our short and fleeting lives.
               | 
               | There is a pub:grill in Tempe called monkeypants. Is that
               | a new idea or just clever?
        
               | dontupvoteme wrote:
               | It's random-ish and "novel", but that could very easily
               | be a reddit username from years ago.
        
               | b33j0r wrote:
               | Haha this thread has gotten too deep, but I appreciated
               | your accurate addition with a lol!
        
             | shrimpx wrote:
             | Btw Andrej Karpathy builds a Shakespeare LLM here:
             | 
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY
        
         | corethree wrote:
         | All innovation is composition plus random generation. Which
         | LLMs already do.
         | 
         | LLMs have a rudimentary form of innovation. It's not quite as
         | good as humans but it's getting there.
        
           | sidlls wrote:
           | _All innovation is composition plus random generation._
           | 
           | That's a fairly bold claim. What supporting data do you have
           | to justify it?
        
             | corethree wrote:
             | There are two types of statements that can be made in this
             | world.
             | 
             | One is data driven based on evidence.
             | 
             | The other is logic driven based on axioms and the logical
             | implications of said axioms.
             | 
             | My statement is derived from the later. Therefore evidence
             | is unnecessary. It is niave to blindly faith in all truth
             | in the hands of data without understanding nuances between
             | the relationship of data and logic.
             | 
             | If you have a pure function that takes the input, the
             | output of that function has 3 possible outcomes.
             | 
             | 1. The output of that function is some transformation of
             | the input.
             | 
             | 2. The output of the function has nothing to do with the
             | input and is thus generated randomly generated.
             | 
             | 3. The output of the function is a combination of both
             | random generation and input transformation.
             | 
             | In this case your brain is the function. Input parameters
             | are 100 percent of your existing knowledge. That includes
             | genetic knowledge such as instinctual/rational processing
             | behaviors evolved into the structure of your brain through
             | evolution and learned knowledge such as what you gain when
             | you read a book.
             | 
             | The result of the "innovation" operation performed by the
             | brain includes novel output by definition. Thus by logic it
             | must be must include components that are from a certain
             | perspective randomly generated.
             | 
             | I guess at first glance it doesn't appear randomly
             | generated because we vet the output and verify it and
             | iterate over several pieces of randomly generated
             | information. Additionally it's not completely random as we
             | only try and test ideas within the realm of possibility.
             | For example I'm not going to account for the possibility
             | that my car will transform into a rock tomorrow that's just
             | too random.
             | 
             | But make no mistake. Innovation must be partly randomly
             | generated. Even the idea itself of composing two existing
             | components of knowledge together is itself randomly
             | generated.
             | 
             | That being said if we want to be pedantic, there's no real
             | known way to randomly generate stuff via an algorithm. So I
             | use the term "randomly generate" very loosely. Think of it
             | in a similar way to random number generation on your
             | computer: Random from a practical perspective but not
             | technically random.
        
           | AlexandrB wrote:
           | Even if one accepts your premise, the key question is:
           | composition of _what_? I think people underestimate the
           | volume and variety of  "training data" that humans are
           | exposed to over a lifetime. It's not just text and images -
           | it's feelings (pain, cold, heat), emotions, sounds, smells,
           | and other experiences that originate within the human body as
           | well.
           | 
           | Human innovation can arise by using these experiences as
           | source data for composition of text or images. LLMs, by
           | contrast, are limited to training on text and images/video
           | exclusively.
        
           | Jensson wrote:
           | Innovation isn't just testing something new, it is a new
           | thing that improves something or is valuable in some way. So
           | doing random combinations of things isn't innovation, it is
           | just noise.
        
         | grogenaut wrote:
         | Is the LLM doing the innovation or is the human doing the
         | innoviation via the prompt?
        
         | Racing0461 wrote:
         | Favor composition over innovation.
        
       | vannevar wrote:
       | The innovation test they use relies heavily on reasoning,
       | something that the stock LLMs tested are known to be deficient
       | in. Adding reasoning to large language models is an active
       | research area (see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10403).
       | 
       | Link to actual paper FTA:
       | https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231201401
        
       | k__ wrote:
       | Even their imitation is just superficial, at least for the
       | prompts the average user is motivated to write.
       | 
       | I might not be able to differentiate AI content from any human
       | content, but I can differentiate it from high quality human
       | content.
       | 
       | Which is a bit sad, since AI will probably eliminate most lower
       | end content creation jobs. This doesn't improve the state of the
       | content industry for users, but saves companies quite some
       | money...
        
         | jplusequalt wrote:
         | >but saves companies quite some money
         | 
         | That's all that matters to companies.
        
           | k__ wrote:
           | Until they can't find seniors anymore.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | AI is going to be in a different place in 5 or 10 years.
        
               | kjkjadksj wrote:
               | Thats what they were saying about crypto too
        
               | xcv123 wrote:
               | That's a non sequitur.
               | 
               | Cryptocurrencies failure to live up to the hype has
               | almost nothing to do with algorithms or technological
               | issues.
        
               | pixl97 wrote:
               | That's what they were saying about the internet too.
        
               | k__ wrote:
               | Hopefully.
               | 
               | However, I had the impression there doesn't exist enough
               | training data to make that place different in a
               | meaningful way.
               | 
               | Still, I think, letting some skilled UX designers loose
               | on input methods could improve things quite a bit, even
               | if the models won't get "smarter".
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | I did a back-of-the envelope calculation, OpenAI has 100M
               | monthly active users, assume 10K tokens per user per
               | month usage ($20 would pay for 600K tokens on the API)
               | then they generate 1T tokens per month.
               | 
               | This dataset would be focused on human interests (in
               | domain for users) and containing AI errors (in domain for
               | the model). It's LLM empowered with human in the loop and
               | tools - code execution, search, APIs. So it is a good
               | basis for the next dataset. I think OpenAI has amassed
               | about as much chat log text as there is organic data was
               | used for GPT-4, which was rumoured to be 13T tokens.
               | 
               | It's surprising how much synthetic data can be generated
               | per year. And OpenAI can do this with human in the loop
               | for free, if the paying users pay for everyone. We then
               | benefit 6-12 months later when the open source models
               | trained with data exfiltrated from OpenAI models catch
               | up.
        
         | HKH2 wrote:
         | > AI will probably eliminate most lower end content creation
         | jobs. This doesn't improve the state of the content industry
         | for users, but saves companies quite some money.
         | 
         | What does it say if your work can't be distinguished from AI
         | cliches? Maybe it's what the industry needs.
        
           | k__ wrote:
           | Interesting perspective.
           | 
           | Thanks
        
           | pixl97 wrote:
           | Innovation probably isn't as wanted as you think.
           | 
           | I don't want the menu at some place I'm eating at to be
           | innovative, I want it to be legible.
        
             | RosanaAnaDana wrote:
             | > Innovation probably isn't as wanted as you think.
             | 
             | Hollywood having given over almost entirely to franchises
             | regurgitating the same tired plots and stories ad-nauseam
             | would seem to agree with you.
        
       | syngrog66 wrote:
       | "found to Excel"
       | 
       | on a positive note: at least HN didn't use an LLM on that
       | headline
        
         | dwringer wrote:
         | Kind of funny that the word was capitalized, presumably, due to
         | imitation.
         | 
         | [EDIT: Now changed, so this thread makes less sense, but the
         | original headline was "Artificial intelligence systems found to
         | Excel at ..."]
        
       | Geee wrote:
       | Innovation is simply a result of trying to imitate, but adding
       | errors. That's how humans do it. Add in some darwinism so that
       | the best 'innovations' survive. Made a mistake in making food?
       | Oh, that's a new recipe. Can't really remember how to tell the
       | story? Well, that's a new story. Accidentally kicked a ball while
       | trying to just walk? I just invented soccer. And so on.
        
         | klabb3 wrote:
         | Partly yes. But if you throw a million items at the wall you
         | also have tell which ones stick. An infinite random walk isn't
         | useful unless you have infinite verification to determine what
         | is promising, so you can guide your next steps and continue
         | discovering stuff.
        
         | BobaFloutist wrote:
         | Deliberate innovation is absolutely possible, I don't know why
         | you would claim it's not.
        
       | speed_spread wrote:
       | So, James Murphy is an AI?
       | 
       | "Yeah you wanted it smart But honestly, I'm not smart No,
       | honestly, we're never smart We fake it, fake it all the time"
       | 
       | - LCD Soundsystem
        
       | gibsonf1 wrote:
       | How could a statistical system trained on data display
       | intelligence let alone innovation? It's just very good statistics
       | at the end of the day. Artificial Perception is about as far as
       | you can get with ml/dl tech if you point the sensors at the world
       | of space-time. If you point it at words, as with LLM, you get
       | statistics about words - that is, no actual understanding of what
       | the words model in the minds of the original authors of those
       | words. So utterly unreliable for any kind of mission critical or
       | autonomous use.
        
         | hackinthebochs wrote:
         | LLMs aren't statistical systems in any substantive sense. They
         | are deterministic programs over the input sequence. They
         | capture statistical relationships about words, but so do human
         | minds. That they are sensitive to statistical relationships
         | does not discount their ability to understand.
        
           | simbolit wrote:
           | > That they are sensitive to statistical relationships does
           | not discount their ability to understand.
           | 
           | The claim is that nothing but sensitivity to statistical
           | relationships somehow leads to an ability to understand?
           | 
           | I am not going to believe it.
        
         | Tostino wrote:
         | As a counter point, I cannot be sure that the words you are
         | speaking mean the same thing to you in your mind as they do to
         | me when I hear you.
        
         | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
         | I'd argue that intelligence is precisely the ability to predict
         | (and therefore also plan) outcomes based on prior experience.
         | The ability to perceive and predict what happens next; the
         | ability to predict/plan/act and be mostly correct about what
         | you predicted would happen as a result of your actions.
         | 
         | With this definition, LLMs in their ability to predict can
         | reasonably be considered to display some basic form of
         | intelligence, even if only in their own world of words rather
         | than the world at large. If we build embodied robots with a
         | similar ability to predict, and also the ability to continually
         | update their predictions based on prediction success/failure
         | (the closed loop that is missing from LLMs), then we'll have
         | something much more recognizably close to animal intelligence.
        
         | faeyanpiraat wrote:
         | If you know everything, you can connect more dots, and come up
         | with innovative stuff.
         | 
         | Also I've just gave instructions to gpt4 rot13 encoded, and it
         | followed the instructions. I don't really care if "it"
         | understood what it was doing, but the responses were good
         | enough for me to be impressed.
         | 
         | Also I've got quite a lot of use cases where I get reliable
         | value out of it, what were you trying to do that made you
         | conclude it is "utterly unreliable"?
        
       | mrangle wrote:
       | Arguably the human-ness (or even animal-ness) of thought is, at
       | its root, characterized as the ability abstract in a novel manner
       | (the neurocog term for innovate).
       | 
       | In other words, it is the ability to find patterns between two
       | concepts that weren't, ever, prior announced. A computer that
       | could do this would then be AI. A computer that cannot would fall
       | short of that category, however otherwise dazzling in stitching
       | together established patterns.
       | 
       | A quick human, and therefore, machine test of this ability might
       | be decoding of prior unseen allegory. How fast and accurately can
       | a human or machine identify (abstract) any true pattern in an
       | allegory that can be applied to another seemingly unrelated
       | concept or story? Again, this would have to be a new allegory to
       | the subject. Ideally, harboring a pattern that isn't discussed
       | anywhere in training data.
       | 
       | The AI would be held to be improved as its ability improved to
       | decode and apply increasingly abstract or otherwise complex
       | patterns from allegory or stories.
       | 
       | Not that I would be, but I'm un aware of any LLM / AI progress
       | toward that type of processing.
        
         | corethree wrote:
         | LLMs can do this already. They are well past this. It's just
         | they can't do it as well as humans and they can hallucinate as
         | well.
         | 
         | The problems we are having with LLMs aren't the fact that they
         | aren't creative. It's the fact that they are too creative. They
         | make up too much stuff that isn't true.
        
           | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
           | I think that a lot of hallucination might just be due to not
           | planning ahead - basically a case of running mouth before
           | engaging brain, and then being in a situation where one has
           | uttered a bunch of nonsense - basically backed oneself into a
           | conversational corner. A human might catch themselves with
           | "err, never mind, forget that!", but the LLM's only recourse
           | is to continue extrapolating the nonsense the only way it
           | knows how - i.e. to bullshit/hallucinate the most
           | statistically plausible continuation of the hole it dug for
           | itself.
           | 
           | As a simplistic made up example, say the training set
           | included a bunch of statements about capital cities of
           | various countries of the form "the capital of england is
           | london", "the capital of france is paris", etc, but didn't
           | include any data indicating the capital of australia... Now,
           | if asked "what is the capital of australia?", it may
           | confidently start "the capital of australia is ..." since
           | this matches the pattern it learnt from the training set
           | (with "australia" being copied from the context). However,
           | when generating the next word the LLM (without realizing it)
           | finds itself in the unfortunate situation of not having been
           | trained on data that would let it predict the right answer,
           | but it of course goes ahead and predicts as best it can
           | anyway (i.e. hallucinates/bullshits) and maybe generates the
           | name of some random important city in australia such as
           | "sydney".
           | 
           | The way to fix at least this cause (maybe the primary one) of
           | hallucination is essentially to plan ahead .. don't start off
           | saying "the capital of australia is .." without knowing where
           | you are going with it! One approach might be additional
           | training using tree of thought rollouts (generate multiple
           | possible branching continuations for each training prompt)
           | then evaluate them and use these as RL rewards to learn to
           | predict words leading to good outcomes (e.g. "i don't know",
           | rather than "the capital of australia is ..").
        
             | corethree wrote:
             | As the query prompter you are in control of the feedback
             | loop. You can ask the AI to re-examine it's output to catch
             | errors just as a human would do for himself.
             | 
             | Practically speaking this does work to a limited extent.
             | Sometimes the AI just sticks with it's guns and runs with
             | it just like a human might.
        
               | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
               | Sure, but I was addressing the issue of why
               | "hallucinations" occur in the first place, and how to fix
               | them.
               | 
               | Having a human in the loop does seem pretty much required
               | at the moment, but it doesn't help when asking the AI for
               | the answer to something you don't know, and therefore not
               | being able to realize that the confident answer was
               | hallucinated and wrong. Of course multiple-answer quizzes
               | are easier to get right by process of elimination, so the
               | human might sometimes be able to say "THAT can't be
               | right" and catch SOME of the hallucinations.
        
               | corethree wrote:
               | Oh you misunderstand. When you query the LLM for the
               | second iteration of the loop just do it regardless. Say
               | something generic, ask it to reanalyze the answer more
               | carefully. Ask it to compare it with existing known data
               | and check for logical consistency. You can do this EVEN
               | if you don't know whether or not the answer is wrong.
               | 
               | Because the input is generic you can make this automated.
               | When a user makes a query create a feedback loop and feed
               | that back into the neural network multiple times with
               | additional input requests to re-analyze analyze the query
               | and resulting output more carefully. You can do this
               | until you exhaust all input nodes and it "forgets" what
               | you talked about previously.
        
               | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
               | Interesting - I'll have to try this!
        
               | kromem wrote:
               | Tip: If you are adding a self-critique step, show the
               | model the initial output as if it is evaluating something
               | from someone else (i.e. "grade this answer from a
               | student") as opposed to from itself (i.e. "you wrote
               | this, is it really correct?").
               | 
               | As you correctly note, humans have a problem with
               | admitting fault. Especially the case online. But humans
               | online are very ready to correct others.
               | 
               | That's exactly the kind of larger abstract pattern in the
               | data a model would emulate.
        
       | licomo wrote:
       | As a human, I often find innovation harder than imitation as
       | well!
       | 
       | * I do love trying to innovate, and it feels so good when it's a
       | success!
        
       | MeImCounting wrote:
       | As I see it the AI schism is more about the debate between
       | functionalism/computationalism and the idea that the chinese room
       | thought experiment was an argument for, "biological naturalism".
       | There is a lot of effort dedicated to showing that AIs dont have
       | some innate quality called "consciousnes" or "sentience" or what
       | have you. There is not just a lot of effort to show that, but
       | also to show that that is somehow a limitation to the
       | capabilities of an "AI".
       | 
       | Personally I think "consciousness" or "sentience" or whatever you
       | want to call it, is really not that useful in making logical
       | decisions or solving engineering problems. It is certainly a
       | useful trait to humans but if nobody can tell that the
       | person/program in the chinese room doesnt actually "understand"
       | chinese then why does it matter? If it walks and talks like a
       | duck you can probably use it for whatever ducks are useful for.
        
         | corethree wrote:
         | Consciousness and sentience are just poorly defined vocabulary
         | that delude people into thinking it's meaningful
         | categorizations.
         | 
         | There's just a bunch of traits related to intelligence and we
         | categorize that if something has enough of those traits then
         | it's "alive". But the words "consciousness" and "sentience" are
         | so poorly defined that we can't pinpoint the formal grouping of
         | what these traits actually are. So for a person to be conscious
         | one can say the person must have feelings, another definition
         | could be no emotions needed but the ability to reason is
         | required... Etc.. etc.
         | 
         | First up these definitions are just arbitrary categorizations.
         | We each individually choose the traits that define the word
         | consciousness, and second we don't even formalize the choice we
         | sort leave the words impartially defined and all debates on
         | whether LLMs are conscious are simply debating about this
         | impartiality. It's a debate about a vocabulary issue for a word
         | that isn't fully defined and people don't realize there's
         | nothing profound or meaningful about the debate at all.
         | 
         | These words are everywhere in the English language and causes
         | us to debate certain concepts as if it's meaningful without us
         | realizing we are just debating a vocabulary problem.
         | 
         | Take for instance a car and a boat. These words are less fuzzy
         | and more rigorously defined so debates on whether something is
         | a car or a boat don't seem that profound. But the words are
         | fuzzy enough that I can generate an example to help you see my
         | point. Let's say I built something that can both drive and sail
         | on the water. Is that thing a car or a boat? Is that question
         | meaningful or is it just a categorization problem with
         | inadequate vocabulary leaving me unable to specify exactly when
         | an object classification transitions from boat to car? From
         | this example it becomes evident that the debate is ludicrous
         | that it's all an illusion. You are debating vocabulary.
         | 
         | For words that are more fuzzy the same problem exists. But it's
         | harder to see that it's just a vocabulary problem because the
         | words are so fuzzy.
         | 
         | Take for example, what is life? Is a bug alive? Is a plant? Or
         | what is philosophy and what is not philosophy? Or what is good
         | and what is evil? The discussion around all these issues are
         | not profound. They are simply a discussion around vocabulary
         | and categorization. We are too deluded by language to move past
         | it.
         | 
         | Many concepts exist as a gradient and we are simply trying to
         | discretize this gradient into fixed categories and then
         | spending an endless amount of time debating on where the lines
         | of demarcation goes.
         | 
         | So are LLMs conscious? It's loaded question. Let's not talk
         | about vocabulary.
        
           | MeImCounting wrote:
           | I tend to agree with you on some level but I would stipulate
           | that people are talking about something specific when they
           | talk about consciousness or sentience. There are entire
           | fields of study dedicated to understanding cognition and
           | reasoning IE cognitive psychology and as far as I know the
           | nature of consciousness is still an actively studied
           | question. My argument is that as far as ML and "AI" go its a
           | moot point. It doesnt really matter one way or the other if
           | the the model is "conscious". What really matters is if the
           | model is capable in a given domain. Capabilities are far more
           | important than whatever process gives rise to the
           | capabilities. If someone is able to use ML to solve Go or
           | prove a theorem it shouldnt matter if that ML model is
           | sentient-because the game is solved or the theorem has a
           | proof.
        
         | kromem wrote:
         | The sentience thing is such a red herring that gets too much
         | time spent on it. The topic is a pariah in neuroscience even,
         | but we are going to discuss it as nauseum for AI when there's
         | barely any research on its mechanics in humans?
         | 
         | The far more interesting topic is not if sentience is occurring
         | (it's almost certainly not yet), but if it is being accurately
         | modeled by a non-sentient agent.
         | 
         | A LLM may not have a subjective experience of emotions, but it
         | very likely is modeling some kind of emotional tracking from
         | the input of massive amounts of emotional language similar to
         | how Othello-GPT modeled an Othello board from the input of
         | legal moves.
         | 
         | To me, that's a far more interesting nuance to explore than the
         | red herring binary of "sentient or not."
        
       | panarchy wrote:
       | Why would a system (LLMs in this case) designed to produce the
       | most likely next output be innovative?
       | 
       | A truly innovative AI would probably hallucinate or produce so
       | many nonsensical outputs as to be deemed useless and broken.
        
       | corethree wrote:
       | Got a question for people who know this stuff well.
       | 
       | Let's say I have a generic feed forward network the size of
       | chatGPT and structurally interconnected in the same way.
       | 
       | Does there exist a set of weights for that network that will
       | essentially represent the LLM that doesn't hallucinate and is
       | similar to the perfect ai assistant we are all currently striving
       | towards?
       | 
       | My question is, that is it essentially a training problem?
        
       | anon291 wrote:
       | > In one task, for example, participants were asked how they
       | could draw a circle without using a typical tool such as a
       | compass.
       | 
       | This is a completely useless question. LLMs are trained only on
       | language. Humans are trained both on language and on physical
       | activities. The LLM has no conception of 'drawing'. It cannot
       | draw. Its inputs and outputs are tokens. Humans can draw. A
       | better question would be to ask it to compose stories...
       | something it's trained on.
       | 
       | In particular, it would seem to me that a multimodal model
       | trained on both action, sensory information, and language, would
       | be better able to innovate in this regard. How could ChatGPT have
       | any true understanding of spatial responses... it's never moved
       | anything in its existence.
        
       | marcosdumay wrote:
       | Well, you mean the systems designed to predict the next words
       | based on analysis of the text they were feed excel at imitation?!
       | 
       | We have plenty of AIs designed to create new things. Those excel
       | in creating new things. But they don't excel into bullshiting
       | journalists into believing they are intelligent, so you don't
       | hear about them.
        
       | mrtksn wrote:
       | IMHO The perceived lack of creativity comes from their low
       | fidelity access to the world. They are trained on text and images
       | which loosely captures the world and then their output is also
       | limited to text and images.
       | 
       | Once the machines have high fidelity connection to the world, for
       | example a machine with microphone, camera and ways to manipulate
       | objects resides among humans they will be actually trained and
       | generate output on much higher spectrum.
       | 
       | Human's creativity comes from continuous observation as they mess
       | with the world. Once the machine is in that position, I fully
       | expect tho have human like and even beyond creativity.
        
       | carabiner wrote:
       | That's the PowerPoint of AI though... replacing all of the
       | computer manual labor.
        
       | Nekorosu wrote:
       | Pardon my superficial understanding, but how'd it innovate if it
       | tries to get the most probable result or energy-spending
       | efficient result, which feels like the opposite of thinking out
       | of the box?
        
         | seeingnature wrote:
         | You've got it backwards.
         | 
         | The article claims that the AI does not have a tendency to
         | innovate, specifically stopping when it doesn't have the most
         | probably result at hand.
        
       | westurner wrote:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999516 :
       | 
       | "CogPrime: An Integrative Architecture for Embodied Artificial
       | General Intelligence" (2012) > "Competencies and Tasks on the
       | Path to Human-Level AI":
       | https://wiki.opencog.org/w/CogPrime_Overview#A_CogPrime_Thou... :
       | 
       | > _[Perception, Actuation, Memory, Learning, Reasoning, Planning,
       | Attention, Motivation, Emotion, Modeling Self and Other, Social
       | Interaction, Communication, Quantitative_ , Building/Creative _]_
       | http://wiki.opencog.org/w/CogPrime_Overview#Competencies_and...
       | 
       | And then, "A CogPrime Thought Experiment: Build Me Something I
       | Haven't Seen Before"
        
         | westurner wrote:
         | For the arts,
         | 
         | On creating something sufficiently novel,
         | 
         | EDA tools solve part of the problem in chip design, for
         | example; furthermore sometimes with logic instead of imitation.
         | 
         | Will any LLM ever output a formally verified design and
         | implementation without significant tree filtering, _Even if_
         | trained solely on formally verified code?
         | 
         | Synthesis without understanding, and worse without ethics.
        
       | zubairq wrote:
       | Agree with the headline
        
       | raymondh wrote:
       | What counts as an innovation is in the eye of the beholder. Mark
       | Rober demonstrated Gemini's creative ability by having it suggest
       | a video, details of contents, and how to produce it. The results
       | were impressive but far from world changing:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHZSrtl4zX0
        
         | natpalmer1776 wrote:
         | I would argue that just because it can suggest a new video with
         | all the fixings does not necessarily mean that it is being
         | innovative in the sense that the concepts produced would in
         | some way alter the 'state of art' at a cultural level.
        
       | digitcatphd wrote:
       | I suspect that is temporary... V1 was an imitation engine, V2 is
       | a reasoning engine. If it develops a world model and general
       | understand about what humans like, a metaphysical understanding
       | of it, then innovation is easy.
        
       | atleastoptimal wrote:
       | same with 99% of humans
        
       | gwern wrote:
       | "In the next stage of the experiment, 85% of children and 95% of
       | adults were also able to innovate...Effective tools were
       | selected...75% by the best-performing model."
       | 
       | "AI lacks the crucial human ability of innovation, researchers at
       | the University of California, Berkeley have found."
       | 
       | It says a lot about how we evaluate AI these days, and how we
       | move the goalposts at hypersonic speed, that the summary of
       | benchmarking this astounding leap in AI capabilities is 'AI
       | unable to innovate, only imitate' instead of 'AI goes from zero
       | to near-human level in just a few years, no limit in sight'.
       | 
       | When it comes to DL, if the glass is even 1% empty, then it
       | 'lacks the crucial property of having contents', I guess...
        
         | onos wrote:
         | There's plenty of content lauding ai. When initial goals are
         | met is it not a good time to set new ones?
        
       | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
       | Why would anyone think "AI" would excel at innovation. Honest
       | question.
       | 
       | Innovation is defined as "introducing something new".
       | 
       | "AI" is autocomplete and autoselection based on _past_ input.
       | 
       | "AI" is regurgitating, rehashing or recombining something that
       | has come before. It might do this in a "new" way, but it cannot
       | "introduce something new". Only man can do that.
       | 
       | Make no mistake, recombining can be useful. With AI we can screen
       | a large number of possible recombinations that would be
       | infeasible without it.
       | 
       | But the only way something new can be "introduced" is for man to
       | produce new data for "AI" to process. "AI" is always one step
       | behind.
       | 
       | There is no way for "AI" to have "new thoughts". All "thinking"
       | by AI is always just regurgitation, rehashing or recombination of
       | man's past thoughts.
        
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