Comment by besterman23
6 hours ago
I just don’t know enough to agree with you, but I would argue, probably poorly, that an AI or collection of agents could “invent things” simply by virtue of trying essentially everything in a reasonable bound and stumbling into a solution.
Call that brute force perhaps, but I would consider it technically inventing something on the merit that it would at least be an abstraction above naively throwing everything against a wall to only throwing things that would most likely be sticky.
Nature brute forces a ton of problems. Hell, humans also do it by having 1 to 8 billion copies of ourselves around too. Even then we are the most guilty species of "copying someone else's work" right behind viruses. We copy things nature has figured out by brute force, then use slightly more targeted methods of forcing to see if it creates new things.
"AI" is a token generator, it does not think while the human brain is a lot more complex with a lot more sensory inputs.
> "AI" is a token generator, it does not think
2024 called, it wants its talking points back. I don't think claims like these are defensible after all the progress we have witnessed in the last year alone.
Okay, please educate me on this progress and how LLMs are different to generating the next most statistically probable token.
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That's quite literally how an LLM works though? That's like scoffing at people calling computers binary generators. Or am I not getting with the programme enough and it emits pixie dust and rainbows?
Lol
> the human brain is a lot more complex with a lot more sensory inputs
How are you measuring complexity here? How are you measuring inputs? Your average llm is trained on a corpus that vastly exceeds the amount of data I could read in my lifetime.
>How are you measuring complexity here?
In terms of how it functions, because no matter how much data you feed an LLM it's still predicting tokens. That makes it incapable of any thought.
>Your average llm is trained on a corpus that vastly exceeds the amount of data I could read in my lifetime.
But that doesn't mean they are useless, they are good at consuming large amounts of data and collating it.
I don't know how correct I am but that's my understanding and it won't change, I feel pretty confident in my simplified view of things because the basics are still there.
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Complexity != breadth. The human brain is MASSIVELY more complex than any LLM!
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> that an AI or collection of agents could “invent things” simply by virtue of trying essentially everything in a reasonable bound and stumbling into a solution
on a surface level a human solving an (unsolved) math problem can look like this, and of course the tree of all possible symbols you can send to a proving assistant is much wider than what the human samples, and the same goes true for an LLM in a proving loop. It isn't "truly random", it can't possibly be (and solve the problem). Both humans and LLMs solving unsolved math problems are aggressively pruning mathematical syntax and logical strategy trees.
a human has motivation and agency.
An "AI" is a box which lies dormant until a human, with motivation and agency, enters a prompt into it.
A person or company can use it in a way where it might invent something. but at the end of the day, its a tool, and its actually not doing anything on its own.
Its not solving math problems, a mathetmatician is using it to solve math problems. Just cus OpenAI is acting like its AI is solving stuff, its really not. They're just paying people to use AI to hammer problems.