this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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no, people have discovered. llms were just a tool used to manipulate large sets of data (instructed and trained by people for the specific task) which is something in which computers are obviously better than people. but same as we don't say "keyboard made a discovery", the llm didn't make a discovery either.
that is just intentionally misleading, as is calling the technology "artificial intelligence", because there is absolutely no intelligence whatsoever.
and comparing that to einstein is just laughable. einstein understood the broad context and principles and applied them creatively. llm doesn't understand anything. it is more like a toddler watching its father shave and then moving a lego piece accross its face pretending to shave as well, without really understaning what is shaving.
I didn't say LLMs made these discoveries. They didn't. AI made those discoveries. Yes, it is true that humans made AI, so in a way, humans made the discoveries, but if that is your take, then it is impossible for AI to ever make any discovery. Really, if we take this way of thinking to its natural conclusion, then even humans can never make discoveries, only the universe can make discoveries, since humans are a result of the universe "universing". It is arbitrary to try to credit humans with anything that happens further down their evolution.
Humans tried for a long time to get good at chess, and AI came along and made the absolute best chess players utterly irrelevant even if we give a team of the worlds best chessplayers an endless clock and thr AI a single minute for the entire game. That was 20 years ago. This is happening in more and more fields and showing no sign of stopping. We don't know yet if discoveries will come from future LLMs like theybm have from other forms of AI, but we do know that with each generation more and more complex patterns are being identified and utilized by LLMs. 3 years ago the best LLMs would have scored single digits on IQ test, now they are triple digits, it is laughable to think that anyone knows where the current rapid trajectory will stop for this new technology, and much more laughable to think we are already at the end.
if this is your take, then lot of keyboard made a lot of discovery.
AI could make a discovery if there was one (ai). there is none at the moment, and there won't be any for any foreseeable future.
tool that can generate statistically probable text without really understanding meaning of the words is not an intelligence in any sense of the word.
your other examples, like playing chess, is just applying the computers to brute-force through specific mundane task, which is obviously something computers are good at and being used since we have them, but again, does not constitute a thinking, or intelligence, in any way.
it is also laughable to assume it will just continue indefinitely, because "there is a trajectory". lot of technology have some kind of limit.
and just to clarify, i am not some anti-computer get back to trees type. i am eager to see what machine learning models will bring in the field of evidence based medicine, for example, which is something where humans notoriously suck. but i will still not call it "intelligence" or "thinking", or "making a discovery". i will call it synthetizing so much data that would be humanly impossible and finding a pattern in it, and i will consider it cool result, no matter what we call it.
This is literally my point. It is arbitrary to choose that all the good ideas came from "humans". If we are going to give all credit for anything AI produces to humans, then it only seems fair to give all credit for human things to our common ancestors with chimpanzees, because if it were not for their clever ideas, we would never have been here. But wait, we can't stop there, because we have to give credit to the original single-celled life forms, and eventually, back to the universe itself(like I mentioned before).
Look, I totally get the desire to want to glorify humans and think that we have something special that machines don't/can't have. It kinda sucks to think that we are not so special, and potentially extememly inferior to what is right around the corner. We can't let that primal ego desire cloud our judgement, though. Our brains are physical machines doing calculations. There is not some magical difference between our calculations that make it so we can make discoveries and machines cannot.
Imagine you teach your little brother how to play chess, and then your brother thinks about it a bunch and comes up with a bunch of new strategies and starts to kick your butt every time, and eventually atatts crushing tournaments. Sure, you can cling to the fact that you taught him how to play, and you can go around telling everyone how "you" are winning all these tournaments because your brother is actually winning them, but it doesn't change the fact that your brother is the one with the secret sauce that you simply are unable to comprehend.
Your whole point is that if people do it, then it is some special discovery thing, but if computers do it, then it is just computational brute force. There is actually no difference between the two, it is just two different ways of wording the same process. We made programs that could understand the rules, and then it went further and in the same direction that we were trying to go.
So far as continuing indefinitely because we are on a trajectory goes, sure, we will eventually hit some intelligence plateaus, but we are nowhere near this point. Why can I say this with such certainty? Because we have things that we know will work that we haven't gotten around to combining yet. Some of this gets a bit technical, but a nice way to think of it is this. Right now, we are mainly using hardware designed to generate general graphics that we have hijacked to use for machine learning. The usual speedup when we go from using generalized hardware to specialized is about 5 orders of magnitude(10,000x). That kind of a gain has huge implications in the AI/ML world. This is just one out of many known improvements on the horizon, but it is one of the simplest to wrap your head around. I don't know how familiar you are with things like crewAI or autogen, but they are phenomenal, they absolutely crush all of the greatest base LLMs, but they are still a bit slow due to how many LLM calls they take. When we have a 10,000x speedup(which is pretty much guarenteed), then everyone will be able to instantly use enormous agent frameworks like this in an instant.
I understand wanting to see humans as having a monopoly on "intelligence", but quite frankly that era is coming to an end. It may be a bumpy ride, but the sooner humans learn to adjust to this new world, the better. I don't think it is something that someone can really make someone else see, but once you do see it, it is very obvious. I suggest you check out the cutting-edge agent stuff out there and then imagine that the most impressive stuff will be routinely done from a single prompt in an instant. Then, on top of that, consider that the base LLMs that we have now are the worst there will ever be. We are in for a very wild ride.
no, it is not. ALL ideas come from humans. period. machines don't have an idea. they are tool aimed by a person with the idea. go there, sift through this pile of data and find a pattern in it.
we generally don't give a credit to tools. we don't give a credit to keyboard, microscope, centrifuge, a car, or any other tool we use in our lives. we give credit to people with ideas using these tools.
no, it doesn't seem fair to give them all credit for human things, but it seems fair to give them credit for their own actions.
it seems that extending an argument to stupid proportion so you can attack it is your favorite logical fallacy.
oh, the good old "lets be reasonable" approach 😆
got tired of arguing, so you decided to just present your position as a fact? there is lot of things "right around the corner", but general artificial intelligence is not one of them. that doesn't mean it is never coming, but it is absolutely not "just around the corner".
yes, there is, and it is the very difference between GAI, which we have no idea how to approach today, and single purpose tool to sift through some data, which we have today.
so far we have no idea what that missing peace is, when we find out, that is going the be the breakthrough.
i like how you argue against yourself.
your brother trying to beat the chess is not making any kind of discovery, is not "having ideas".
he is trying to brute force best way through rigid set of rules,, which is indeed something that machines are better than us, because they are faster than us.
when some day a machine wakes up and gets an idea (be it inventing new game other than chess, composing a song to express its feelings, or "i wonder what happens if i do this") let me know.
when i teach a dog to run through agility course, it will run through it faster then i ever will. there is still difference between me and the dog.
i would be interested in reading something about this, if you have a link, because from what i have been able to google, that statement is gross exaggeration.
but no matter what - even if this hardware will exist, and will exist for affordable monetary and energetic price - that is still just speed. it is not going to help chatgpt to pretend to be better chatbot, when it already learned on all written sum of human knowledge, but can't differentiate between trustworthy source and the onion.
it will for sure help lot of single purpose tools used for scientific research and i wish it to scientist as much as better microscopes, but the speed in itself does not constitute intelligence.
i see you are big fan of the industry, but i would give you your own advice: don't let your ego stand in the way of your judgement 😆
The 5 orders of magnitude gained from general computers to asics is standard knowledge, you learn it in the first year of any comp sci class. You can find it all over, for example.
The main thing that you are missing is that the human mind also brute forces to come up with ideas. There isn't a difference. We don't have some super magical mystical human thing that sets us apart.
A way to imagine how it can be possible for a computer to have thoughts and ideas just like humans is this: Imagine you take a human brain and you switch out one neuron for an electrical part, and you leave the rest of the brain as it is. Can that brain have thoughts and ideas like a human? Obviously, yes. What if you switch out another one? And another. If each electrical neuron is doing the same thing as the original one, then eventually you could switch out the entire brain and have an entirely computer brain doing exactly what a human does. At what point would you say that this machine is no longer doing what a human does and just "Brute forcing" ideas?
I totally get that right now, with lots of jobs at risk, many people are really concerned with holding onto the idea that hunans have a monopoly on thinking and thoughts. I think it's important to now let what we want to be true to interfere with our analysis of what is true.
so, it is just your wishful thinking. you have no proof that this is going to be true, you just blindly extrapolate from the past... wait, that is how this discussion started... 😂
yes, there is, i have already answered that.
just imagine this thing that is at the moment impossible and we have no idea how to do it or whether it will ever be possible.
and see, once you imagine this impossible thing becoming true, this other impossible thing also becomes true.
q.e.d.
how easy, huh 😂
if only you would take your own medicine.
The past is where we get all of our information from. To pretend like we can't use the past to predict the future makes us unable to do anything. We don't have a time machine to go see exactly how the future plays out.
It is more common than you realise for their to be predictable trends in computing. Just go look at Moore's law and how long it has held up(with just minor adjustments). What would be way more surprising is if we are all of a sudden at a massive turning point where we can no longer anticipate what is next. You don't have to take my word for this. Find anyone with a background in computing to independently verify it. Even chatgpt could really help you understand this.
The specialized hardware efficiency gain isn't even a mystery at all. It is simply the consequence of designing hardware that does a specific task very well. It isn't nearly as much of a guess as you think it is. To help you picture it, imagine a vehicle that works on land, sea, and sky. It is not such a leap to say that a vehicle made to work for just the land would be much more efficient at being on land. This really isn't anything that anyone in the computing world disagrees with. It is just your outsider point of view that is making it seem like magic to you. Again, don't take my word. This is comp science 101 stuff that really isn't disputed.
So far as the thought experiment with replacing neurons. The technology to do so doesn't need to exist for the point to hold true. That simply isn't a logical requirement for thought experiments. This has nothing to do with computing or anything. This is just true of logical arguments. In order to make points, we can use thought experiments. This is something that Einstein was famous for, and not many people question his ability to form solid arguments.
I understand that you feel passionate about this, and you really want this idea that humans are somehow magical and fundamentally different from machines. It really is understandable. I've given plenty of solid arguments that you really haven't responded to at all. It has never been true that people can't use thought experiments or past trends to help make conclusions about the future. It is very telling that these are things that you feel like you must discard in order to defend your stance. These are both things that have been reliably used for hundreds and even thousands of years.
I would really encourage you to get ahold of some logical reasoning material and try to take a step back to some basics if this is something that you are interested in digging a bit deeper into this. It is almost never the case that initial hunches turn out to be kept after thurough investigation.
jesus fucking christ, are you using some chatbot to drown me in a wall of text? just stop...
if you think you know exactly how the future plays out, you are just insane. i am not reading the rest of it. bye.
You've completely misunderstood. I specifically said we don't have a time machine to see how the future plays out. All we can do is make our best guesses based on the past.
You've had to throw away basic reasoning tools that have been used for ages in order for your stance to remain "safe." I understand your fear, but honestly, you are better off embracing and understanding instead of putting your head in the sand and saying that we shouldn't use the past to make predictions of the future.
I do just want to add that my conclusion is that I, as a human, am not uniquely special for having the ability to have thoughts, ideas, and come up with new things. This point of view is inherently a massive blow to the human ego. It simply doesn't make any sense to hold such a view if one's ego is what is controlling the judgment. The same can not be said about the opposite viewpoint.
of course not. monkeys can do same thing, we have already established that.
machines, however, do not.
Is this something that you think can be proven, or is it just something that we get to know deep down in our souls without any evidence for it?