this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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This is a growing pet peeve of mine. If and when actual AI becomes a thing, it'll be a major turning point for humanity comparable to things like harnessing fire or electricity.
...and most people will be confused as fuck. "We've had this for years, what's the big deal?" -_-
I also believe that will happen! We will not be prepared since many don't understand the differences between what current models do and what an actual general AI could potentially do.
It also saddens me that many don't know or ignore how fundamental abstract reasoning is to our understanding of how human intelligence works. And that LLMs simply aren't intelligent in that sense (or at all, if you take a tight definition of intelligence).
I don’t get how recognizing a pattern is not AI. It recognizes patterns in data, and patterns in side of patterns, and does so at a massive scale. Humans are no different, we find patterns and make predictions on what to do next.
The human brain does not simply recognise patterns, though. Abstract reasoning means that humans are able to find solutions for problems they did not encounter before. That's what makes a thing intelligent. It is not fully understood yet what exactly gives the brain these capabilities, btw. Like, we also do not understand yet how it is possible that we can recognize our own thinking processes.
The most competent current AI models mimic one aspect of the brain which is neural pathways. In our brain it's an activity threshold and in a neural network AI it's statistics which decide whether a certain path is active or not and then it crosses with other paths, etc. Like a very complex decision tree.
So that is quite similar between AI and brains. But we actually get something like an understanding of concepts that goes beyond the decision tree but isn't fully understood yet, as described above.
For an AI to be actually intelligent it would probably need to at least get this ability, to trace back it's own way through the decision tree. Maybe it even turns out that you in fact do need a consciousness to have reason.
This abstract thinking… is pattern recognition. Patterns of behavior, patterns of series of actions, patterns of photons, patterns of patterns.
And there is one, I think only, concept of consciousness. And it is that it’s another layer of pattern recognition. A pattern recognizer that looks into the patterns of your own mind.
I’m unfortunately unsure how else to convey this because it seems so obvious to me. I’d need to take quite some time to figure out how to explain it any better.
Please do, but I don't understand why you believe that it changes things? Pattern recognition is the modus operandi of a brain, or rather the connection between your senses and your brain. So perhaps could be seen more like the way "brain data" is stored, its data type.The peculiarity is how the data type is used.
This may turn philosophical, but consider you would have the perfect pattern recognition apparatus. It would see one pattern, the ultimate pattern how everything is exactly connected. Does that make it intelligent?
To be called intelligent, you would want to be able to ask the apparatus about specific problems (much smaller chunks of the whole thing). While it may still be confined to the data type throughout the whole process, the scope of its intelligence would be defined by the way it uses the data.
See, I like this question, “what is intelligence?”
I feel way too many people are so happy to make claims about what is or isn’t intelligent without ever attempting to define intelligence.
Honestly, I’m not sure what constitutes “intelligence”, the best I can come up with is the human brain. But when I try to differentiate the brain from a computer, I just keep seeing all the similarities. The differences that are there, seem reasonable to expect a computer to replicate… eventually.
Anyway, I’ve been working off of the idea that all that reacts to stimulus is intelligent. It’s all a matter of degree and type. I’m talking bacteria, bugs, humans, plants, maybe even planets.
I've had exactly this discussion with a friend recently. I share your opinion, he shared what seems to be the view of the majority here. I just don't see what the qualitative difference between the brain and a data-based AI would be. It almost seems to me like people have problems accepting the fact that they're not more than biological machines. Like there must be something that makes them special, that gives them some sort of "soul" even when it's in a non-religious and non-spiritual way. Some qualitative difference between them and the computer. I don't think there necessarily is one. Look at how many things people get wrong. Look at how bad we are at simple logic sometimes. We have a better sense of some things like plausibility because we have a different set of experiences that is rooted in our physical life. I think it's entirely possible that we will be able to create robots that are more similar to human beings than we'd like them to be. I even think it's possible that they would have qualia. I just don't see why not.
I know that there is a debate about machine learning AI and symbolic AI. I'm not an expert to be fair, but I have not seen any possible explanation as to why only symbolic AI would be "true" AI, even though many people seem to believe that.
As in AGI?
No, INT.
What is that?
A dump stat for STR characters.
I've seen it refered to as AGI bit I think itns wrong. Chat GPT isnt intelligent in the slightest, it only makes guesses on what word is statistically more likely to come up next. There is no thikinking or problem solving involved.
A while ago I saw an article that with a tittle along the lines of "spark of AGI in ChatGPT 4" because it chose to use a calculator tool when facing a problme that required one. That would be AI (and not AGI). It has a problem, it learns and uses available tools to solve it.
AGI would be on a whole other level.
Edit: Grammar
The argument "it just predicts the most likely next word" while true massively under values what it even means to predict the next word or token. Largely these predictions are based on sentences and ideas the model has trained on from its data sets. It's pretty intelligent if you think about it. You read a text book then when you apply the knowledge or take a test you use what you read to form a new sentence in relation to the context of the question or problem. For the models "text prediction" to be correct it has to understand certain relationships between complex ideas and objects to some capacity. Yes it absolutely is not as good as human intelligence. But what it's doing is much more advanced then text to type on your phone keyboard. It's a step in the right direction, over hyped right now but the hype is funneling cash into research. The models are already getting more advanced. Right now half of what it says is hot garbage but it can be pretty accurate.
Right? Like, I, too, predict the next word in my sentence to properly respond to inputs with desired output. Sure I have personality (usually) and interests, but that's an emergent behavior of my intelligence, not a prerequisite.
It might not formulate thoughts the way we do, but it absolutely emulates some level of intelligence, artificially.
I think so many people overrate human intelligence, thus causing them to underrate AI. Don’t get me wrong, our brains are amazing, but they’re also so amazing that they can make crazy cool AI that is also really amazing.
People just hate the idea of being meat robots, I don’t blame em.