Comment by BobbyTables2
1 day ago
You have to realize AI is trained the same way one would train an auto-completer.
Theres no cognition. It’s not taught language, grammar, etc. none of that!
It’s only seen a huge amount of text that allows it to recognize answers to questions. Unfortunately, it appears to work so people see it as the equivalent to sci-fi movie AI.
It’s really just a search engine.
I agree and that's the case I'm trying to make. The machine-learning community expects us to believe that it is somehow comparable to human cognition, yet the way it learns is inherently inhuman. If an LLM was in any way similar to a human I would expect that, like a human, it might require a little bit of guidance as it learns but ultimately it would be capable of understanding concepts well enough that it doesn't need to have memorized every book in the library just to perform simple tasks.
In fact, I would expect it to be able to reproduce past human discoveries it hasn't even been exposed to, and if the AI is actually capable of this then it should be possible for them to set up a controlled experiment wherein it is given a limited "education" and must discover something already known to the researchers but not the machine. That nobody has done this tells me that either they have low confidence in the AI despite their bravado, or that they already have tried it and the machine failed.
There’s a third possible reason which is that they’re taking it as a given that the machine is “intelligent” as a sales tactic, and they’re not academic enough to want to test anything they believe.
> The machine-learning community
Is it? I only see a few individuals, VCs, and tech giants overblowing LLMs capabilities (and still puzzled as to how the latter dragged themselves into a race to the bottom through it). I don't believe the academic field really is that impressed with LLMs.
no it's not I work on AI and what these things do are much much more then a search engine or an autocomplete. If an autocomplete passed the turing test you'd dismiss it because it's still an autocomplete.
The characterization you are regurgitating here is from laymen who do not understand AI. You are not just mildly wrong but wildly uninformed.
Well, I also work on AI, and I completely agree with you. But I've reached the point of thinking it's hopeless to argue with people about this: It seems that as LLMs become ever better people aren't going to change their opinions, as I had expected. If you don't have good awareness of how human cognition actually works, then it's not evidently contradictory to think that even a superintelligent LLM trained on all human knowledge is just pattern matching and that humans are not. Creativity, understanding, originality, intent, etc, can all be placed into a largely self-consistent framework of human specialness.
To be fair, it's not clear human intelligence is much more than search or autocomplete. The only thing that's clear here is that LLMs can't reproduce it.
Yes but colloquially this characterization you see used by laymen is deliberately used to deride AI and dismiss it. It is not honest about the on the ground progress AI has made and it’s not intellectual honest about the capabilities and weaknesses of Ai.
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