Comment by jnwatson
20 hours ago
The cure for HER2- metastatic breast cancer is a simple matter of ...
Please predict the next word.
Intelligence is implicit in language understanding. The best possible next-word-predictor is omniscient.
20 hours ago
The cure for HER2- metastatic breast cancer is a simple matter of ...
Please predict the next word.
Intelligence is implicit in language understanding. The best possible next-word-predictor is omniscient.
This whole thing is an example of why the philosophy of this stuff is so fun. The trick here is buried in the word "is".
Just for kicks, I actually put your sentence into an LLM. The response was along the lines of, "Your query was incomplete and about medical knowledge, so I need to be careful. There is currently no cure..." and then goes on to do a decent job of summarizing existing treatment approaches for metastatic breast cancer.
What's so interesting about this is your notion of prediction here is divining the answer in reality, i.e. finding a cure for breast cancer. But its notion of prediction is determining the next logical sequence of words given its training set, so it produced a block of useful and context-relevant text, but not what you actually care about. This leads into the much broader question of what do we mean by "intelligence," which forms do these things have and not have, etc. etc. If nothing else it's all very fun to think about and debate.
> The best possible next-word-predictor is omniscient.
Omniscient for the set of "meaning" embedded into it's training set. It's not broadly omniscient, big difference.
Sure, but same for any intelligence. The "training set" is just "the environment of adaptation".
Careful, you're dangerously close to an argument for the necessity of embodiment /s
1 reply →
Right, but what's the limit of what you can deduce computationally from truly vast training sets? How much structure is there in the subtext of what's written down? It looks like there's rather a lot.
The cure for HER2- metastatic breast cancer is a simple matter of [intensive well-funded research]
That wasn't too hard, maybe I'm superintelligent?
What does omniscience have to do with reasoning? If you know everything, you don’t have to reason. But these next-word-predictors aren’t omniscient.
Omniscience doesn’t imply that you have to store all the information, but that you can retrieve/reconstruct it, and reasoning allows it. In fact would be impossible for any physical intelligence to store all the information as plain as it is infinite.