Posted by jalev 2 days ago
Consciousness though might be fully illusory and meaningless as many philosophical concepts before ultimately turned out to be.
Cells are intelligent. Organs have intelligence on top of that, that cells do not have. Plants and animals have intelligence that their organs do not.
This is the real problem of intelligence, the definition one uses. It can cause them to be blind of all the things intelligence is capable of.
:)
what do intelligence tests measure?
It's not an exact analogy, rather something to consider ...
How much momentum does a body have? You can measure it easily, just measure the velocity and the mass and multiply.
What exactly did you measure? What is the meaning of this? Nobody really knows. But we know we can measure this and it's a thing and it's conserved.
test X measures I(x) I(x) is defined as the thing test X measures. Therefore test X measures the pre-existing psychological trait intelligence.
this is absurd
The was just a vague idea that some people might have a bit more of some underspecified general quality but there never was any good idea what exactly that might be. So making a test that measures something correlated with outcomes that people associate with this nebulous pre-existing idea of intelligence is honest and fair stab at something that eluded our grasp for millennia.
Intelligence as people were talking about it before we created intelligence tests is something like atoms of Democritus. And IQs are atoms as we mesured them today.
It's hard for me to imagine a stateless operation as intelligence per se, though perhaps the chaining of such operations starts looking more like it?
That's an interesting point. My take would be to say that we shouldn't think of the AI as being just the model, but should include the harness. At that level, clearly we can keep state / context and that is probably a more natural mapping to our intuitive understanding of "intelligence".
Lots of comments talking about how recent accomplishments disprove the article but I think this bit holds up pretty well.
LLMs are very good at tricking people into thinking they have capabilities that they don’t.
Heh. A lot of anti-ai hucksters I see posting on LinkedIn just LOVE to use the phrase "next token prediction" and the word "autoregressive". They've almost become shibboleths that identify members of that camp. That and the classic rallying cry of "Linear Algebra isn't intelligent!"
The best take I've seen on that recently, was somebody who made the point "just think of the next token prediction part as the output layer". Which makes perfect sense.. if you're replying in natural language, at some point in the flow, you have to construct a sentence and starting at the head and predicting next tokens is perfectly reasonable. I'm doing it literally as I'm typing these characters, for crying out loud!
But the mistake is to think that LLM's only "predict next tokens" with no consideration of the possibility that they are actually constructing richer representations, building concepts, making analogies, doing abduction, induction, etc. My own (admittedly anecdotal) take on working with LLM's suggests to me that they do do those things, albeit probably not the same way humans do.
I think a lot of folks are missing the point by being overly reductive when they start talking about "next token prediction" and "autoregressive". It's like, can we say "Phil (me) isn't intelligent because there's nothing going on but some electrical impulses and chemistry happening inside his brain. Everybody knows electricity and chemistry aren't intelligent!"
I say that because the word "reason" originates from the Latin word "ratio," which means "calculation".
LLMs do calculations to produce their answers -- thus, they reason.
The author is also correct that LLM evangelicals and believers in the occult speak about it similarly.
The more I've learned about intelligence and intelligent behavior the more I realize I don't know and this rabbit hole goes deep.
Its ultimate conclusion:
“I’ve come to the conclusion that a language model is almost always the wrong tool for the job.
I strongly advise against integrating an LLM or chatbot into your product, website, or organisational processes.”
Seems so obviously biased that I can only understand it with the context that the writer is trying to sell their book for €35
It's also the case that some things remain true. If someone says "don't use them for X because their quality isn't good enough", that's a recommendation with an expiration date. But if someone says "don't use them for X" for any number of other good reasons, that recommendation is often timeless.
"Can it" is changing rapidly. Much more rapidly than "Should it".
Are the good reasons timeless? I guess it's hard to parse what you're saying without some concrete examples. Is there any advice about what to use them for from 2022 or 2023 that you feel is true today, and you expect will be timeless? You said "often", so I'm assuming there are a handful of examples.
Ultimately though, this is not an objective discussion, since we're talking about "should", so I'm mainly asking out of curiosity on your view of things. The main example I can think of today is that you shouldn't do professional prose writing with LLMs. Obviously the models have gotten better, but writing is one of those areas where it produces middling output, though even here I hesitate because with a 21% illiteracy rate, it writes better than many adults in the US.
Also, definitely not AI written if the date is accurate.
Which is hilarious.
> Many AI critics, including myself, are firmly in the second camp.
How can you reconcile this with the fact that AI can solve a real, intelligence bound problem for me (with zero intelligent effort on my part) that you can't?
Is the solution also illusory?
I think that might be the solution to consciousness illusion.
The consciousness might be purely in the mind of someone that believes some other entity to be conscious.