[HN Gopher] Stone Soup AI (2024)
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Stone Soup AI (2024)
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 74 points
Date : 2025-02-25 07:02 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (simons.berkeley.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (simons.berkeley.edu)
| hansonkd wrote:
| In the soup story the villagers freely gave up their carrots and
| onions and the travelers didn't give any guarantees that they
| wouldn't be consumed.
|
| In the AI analogy, it is a bit closer in my mind if the travelers
| would say "Don't worry your onions and carrots and garnishes
| won't be consumed by us! Put them in the pot and we will strain
| them out, they are still yours to keep!"
|
| We, the villagers, are dumping our data into the AI soup with a
| promise that it won't be used when we are using the API or check
| a little "private mode" box.
| dfltr wrote:
| And to top it all off, they're charging us for the soup, and
| it's getting more expensive every time we give them another
| ingredient.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| It would be more accurate to imagine a version of the tale
| where the stone soup chef rifles through people's houses to
| collect ingredients without permission (if they were against it
| surely they would've opted out of his services and obtained
| guard dogs?), and then opened a stand to sell the soup in the
| town square at premium prices while tainting the wares of his
| fellow vendors with his leftover slop.
| jpadkins wrote:
| The analogy breaks down because physical property and
| intellectual property are different. When we input creative
| works into training sets, we do not withhold those works from
| someone else! Digital copies are different than scarce
| resources. *
|
| Also, all the AI ToS I've read have stated they will use my
| inputs to improve their services. I haven't seen an AI service
| state they won't use my inputs.
|
| * Against Intellectual Property is a good book that explores
| this idea https://cdn.mises.org/15_2_1.pdf
| TZubiri wrote:
| Huh. I wouldn't have expected free software and
| libertarianism to converge on this one.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
|
| It's either a horseshoe or a bipartisan line
| rezmason wrote:
| I think that if we tried, we could come up with a pretty large
| cookbook of stone soups.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Every soup is a Stone soup if you consider the metal pot as a
| stone.
| lsy wrote:
| Adopting this perspective would improve the quality of efforts
| around this technology. Instead of thinking of it as somehow
| creating an "intelligence", seeing it as a complex lens on the
| training data that is controlled by the prompt helps you
| understand that the output isn't generated by the model, but by
| people. And various existing pieces of human effort are brought
| into focus and collimated by nudging the lens in different
| directions with a "prompt". The user then gives those pieces
| meaning and determines whether the result is useful or not.
|
| This makes certain things more clear: notions of "truth" are not
| in play beyond statistical happenstance, certain efforts to make
| outputs uniform are more trouble than they're worth, and valuable
| use cases are strongly correlated with the ability and
| convenience of the user to confirm the usefulness of the result.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I see the models as oracular seeing-stones like a wizard might
| use.
|
| Ponder the orb! Probe its secrets!
|
| Holographically, all our text is encoded in there. If you know
| how to query.
| eMPee584 wrote:
| oh so wonderous times ahead may they converge towards peace
| and prosperity for the whole galaxy
| xpe wrote:
| Using various metaphors carefully and fluidly is key. No one is
| sufficient. Not this one, nor any other.
|
| I say: go back to basics. One good foundational point is
| dispelling confusion and conflation around "intelligence". So
| many people have woefully narrow and unexamined notions of
| "intelligence". It wouldn't be unfair to say many people have
| broken definitions. Broken because they just aren't good enough
| to make meaningful progress in a modern world where many kinds
| of agents display many different kinds of intelligence. Such
| broken definitions are often too specific; too arbitrary; too
| rooted in binary thinking.
|
| Many of our current language patterns are liabilities. Not to
| mention corporate and organizational cultures where hazy
| definitions slide around and few people will admit that they
| don't really know what others mean by the term. Sometimes it
| feels like a big charade where no one wants to hurt anyone's
| feelings nor appear uninformed. And so it goes, some kind of
| elaborate mystical ritual where the confused participants lead
| each other further into madness.
|
| With this in mind, I find tremendous value in Stuart Russell's
| definition of intelligence: the ability of an agent to solve
| some task. An agent is anything that makes a decision: a human,
| an animal, a system of any kind. This definition intentionally
| leaves out any notion of (a) humans; (b) consciousness; (c)
| some arbitrary quality line. This usage cuts through so much
| bullsh*t. I highly recommend finding a way to shift
| conversations towards it wherever possible. This isn't easy in
| my experience. We have so much baggage and crufty thinking,
| even we're able to put aside our baser instincts.
|
| One might say that Russell's definition just "kicks the can
| down the road". I don't think so. It encourages people to
| define their metrics a bit more clearly -- hopefully out loud
| or on paper -- for a particular context. It is one step closer
| to clarifying things. One step in the right direction -- to
| stop pretending like we all know each other means -- and
| instead actually pose an answerable question.
|
| Now, what about "general" intelligence you say? Well, one step
| at a time. Wait until a group of people have demonstrated some
| ability to find some kind of consensus on particular tasks. It
| is hard work to socialize these ideas. Defining general
| intelligence in meaningful ways is really hard and contentious.
| It often becomes a lightning rod for all number of other
| disagreements.
|
| As one example, look at the shitstorm around various
| sociological attempts to measure the general aspects of
| intelligence in humans. Without attempting to summarize it in
| any detail, there has been a huge dumpster fire involving: poor
| statistical understanding, shoddy research, tone-deaf
| communication, willful misinterpretation, accusations of
| racism, and so on. There are pockets of truth in there, but
| even trying finding the core nuggets of useful truth something
| makes everything radioactive, depending on the context. A
| typical person in modern culture is usually unable to calmly
| make sense of these issues, and who can blame them? Statistical
| understanding doesn't grow on trees. The same goes for
| understanding machine learning theory.
| K0balt wrote:
| I think this is relevant and adjacent at least:
| https://open.substack.com/pub/ctsmyth/p/the-generative-ai-re...
| pzh wrote:
| This comparison overlooks the fact that, in the original
| folktale, the stone soup remains a soup --- it never turns into a
| ribeye steak. Similarly, in the AI version, an LLM will always
| remain an LLM.
| doitLP wrote:
| But everyone benefits by eating the soup and has a good time
| partying together.
|
| The last page of the soldiers running away before the town
| realizes they were tricked is interesting though.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| The thesis appears to be that the CEOs are hoodwinking the
| populace in to giving up their cultural wealth to build
| proprietary systems.
|
| But TFA also mentioned Wikipedia. Crowd-RLHF trained models are
| the same. The people know they are volunteering their own labor
| and information to improve the model because the model gives them
| value and they want to share the value with humankind.
|
| Everybody enjoys the soup.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| We gave Wiki the info. AI took the info. These things are not
| the same.
| debo_ wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about the NPC/monster AI in
| Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
| card_zero wrote:
| It made me search to see if an actual AI has been trained to
| play DCSS, and inevitably yes.
|
| https://github.com/dtdannen/dcss-ai-wrapper
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I assumed the same
| aamar wrote:
| I would ask anyone making these kinds of deflationary arguments
| to explain if the same argument can be applied to the best of
| human creative work. Humans also use the raw materials of others,
| whether that's words, musical scales, genres, idioms, or
| anecdotes.
|
| Where is the line between recapitulation and innovation? Is it a
| line that we think current LLMs are definitely not crossing, and
| definitely will not cross in the near future? If so, make that
| argument.
| sdwr wrote:
| > Good artists copy, great artists steal
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > To be fair, although the story is intended to be debunking,
| the folktale also has a positive moral that applies to AI. The
| collective resources of many humans can make something that no
| individual could, and that really is magical.
|
| Its not deflationary, its just about reframing, reattributing
| what is so impressive about LLMs. We get so caught up in the
| tech itself, _that_ it exists at all, understandably
| considering the way the discourse goes, we don 't stop to
| appreciate _how_ its even possible at all; that is, all of us
| (broadly).
|
| So many people just cant get past Sci-Fi mentality, they make
| the current AI into a kind of weird but promising baby, but we
| can also, much more easily and nicely, consider it a beautiful
| reflection of human writing at large.
|
| And whats even with all this constant pressure for it be more
| than that? All the arguments, philosophical gotchas, weird
| Skinnerism... Its like you're given a perfectly good hamburger
| and all you can say is "this is _pretty much_ a steak if you
| squint ".
| Hasu wrote:
| A couple of thoughts:
|
| 1) The story of stone soup is the story of how some grifters got
| a free meal. I don't think it's moral instruction, or an example
| to be learned from, unless you are a grifter.
|
| 2) In the stone soup example and in cases like Wikipedia, the
| soup is freely shared with everyone, regardless of their
| contributions. Is AI like that, or in the AI stone soup story,
| are the travelers charging everyone for a bowl of soup? Doesn't
| that change the story quite a bit?
| sdwr wrote:
| If you take off your cynicism-tinted glasses, it's the story of
| how community is more than the sum of its parts, and how it
| sometimes needs a "beautiful lie" as a catalyst (like justice,
| or freedom!)
| Hasu wrote:
| If you think that community needs a group of strangers to con
| them into coming together and being more than the sum of its
| parts, you are more cynical than I am.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Society at large depends on the collective belief in
| society. It would stop existing tomorrow if everyone
| stopped pretending it existed. Laws, court rulings, road
| signs, it's all imaginary, but the collective illusion
| allows us to accomplish a lot more than than the
| alternative.
| Terr_ wrote:
| While I can see how it can be retold that way, the core plot-
| mechanic is still (A) fraud by pot-stirrers and (B) greed by
| participants.
|
| At each step, the participant (especially the first) is
| deliberately misled to believe that they can secure valuable
| soup for less-valuable ingredients.
|
| It is not an appeal to their better nature--in many tellings
| the travelers have already tried that--but an appeal to their
| _baser_ nature. For it to be a positive story, one must
| accept that the ends have somehow justified the means.
| wbakst wrote:
| i like this so much
|
| "stone soup" could be seen as a trick (to get the villagers to
| provide that which they were previously unwilling), but i like
| that it's multiple different villagers who provide individual
| ingredients -- it's the coming together of everyone and their
| individual contributions that ultimately makes the soup so good
| scrumper wrote:
| I first read this story in the back of the manual for a DOS
| program called Fractint in the very early '90s. It was a super-
| fast fractal generator made by a collective called the Stone
| Soup Group. It's still around but the SSG disappeared years
| ago.
|
| The story stuck with me, I told it to my kids only a few weeks
| ago.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| AI is only stone soup if a) you get charged for the soup after
| adding your carrots and b) they heat the water by burning your
| house down
| htrp wrote:
| This was one of the talks at Neurips 24 in Dec, highly recommend
| tehjoker wrote:
| I think the tension about AI is that yea, it is a reflection of
| all of our contributions, but the benefits are privatized and
| potentially used to deprive people of sustenance via automating
| their jobs. The problem is capitalism, not the technology itself.
|
| Science and technology can be used for social good. They are the
| product of all of our efforts and knowledge combined with labor,
| yet companies make big bucks selling them back to us while also
| depriving people of things that they need, unless they are
| fortunate enough to pay, and then they provide them in the most
| blood sucking way possible.
| topherjaynes wrote:
| Gopnik is a great writer, and this is a very good take. She has a
| great sense of how to bring psychology to tech. Also fun fact:
| She's married to Alvy Ray Smith for all the computer
| graphics/pixar fans out there. I'd love to here them debate tech
| takes!
| n4michael wrote:
| > To be fair, although the story is intended to be debunking, the
| folktale also has a positive moral that applies to AI.
|
| So maybe in this story, LLMs are not so much the stones
| (trickery) but rather the pot (the unlocking technology).
| rcpt wrote:
| > We have a magic algorithm that will make artificial general
| intelligence from just gradient descent, next-token prediction,
| and transformers
|
| Which exec is this?
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