visarga

visarga t1_isqa867 wrote

> Does the chatbot imagined something in their head before describing it to me as a prompt?

You're attributing to the model what is the merit of the training data. It's culture that knows what would be a great answer to your task, of course, when culture is loaded up into a brain or an AI.

What I mean is that it doesn't matter the substrate - as long as it learned the distribution, then it can imagine coherent and amazing things. That's all the merit of the training data though. The brain or the model just dutifully carry that in a compact form that can be unfolded in new ways on demand.

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visarga t1_isq80ci wrote

It might surprise you that GPT-3 like models don't have just one bias, one point of view - that of its builders, as often accused.

The model learns all personality types, and emulates their biases to a very fine degree. It is in fact so good that researchers can run simulations of polls on GPT-3. In order to replicate the target population they prompt the model with a collection of personality profiles with the right distribution.

So you, as the user of the model, are in charge. You can make it assume any bias you want, just specify your preferred poison. There is no "absolutely unbiased" mode unless you got that kind of training data. That means the model is a synthesis of all personalities. It's more like humanity than a single person.

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visarga t1_isq5mvf wrote

I believe there is no substantial difference. Both the AI and the brain transform noise into some conditional output. AIs can be original in the way they recombine things - there's space for adding a bit of originality there, and humans can be pretty reliant themselves on reusing other styles and concepts - so not as original as we like to imagine. Both humans and AIs are standing on the shoulders of giants. Intelligence was in the culture, not in the brain or AI.

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visarga t1_is0fpyb wrote

I became aware of AI in 2007 when Hinton came out with Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs, a dead end today). I've been following it and started learning ML in 2010. I am a ML engineer now, and I read lots of papers every day.

Ok, so my evaluation - I am surprised with the current batch of text and image generators. The game playing agents and the protein folding stuff are also impressive. I didn't expect any of them even though I was following closely. Two other surprises along the way were residual networks, which put the deep into deep learning, and the impact of scaling up to billions of parameters.

I think we still need 10,000x scaling to reach human level both in intelligence and efficiency, but we'll have expensive to use AGI in a lab sooner.

I predict the next big thing will be large video models, not the ones we see today but really large like GPT-3. They will be great for robotics and automation, games and of course video generation. They have "procedural" knowledge - how we do things step by step - that is missing in text and images. They align video/images with audio and language. Unfortunately videos are very long, so hard to train on.

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visarga t1_is0cb6i wrote

> Which will make it easy for people to write off the truth.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a place where Truth was written so we can all check things up. But unfortunately that is not possible, so we're left with a continually evolving social truth.

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visarga t1_irzdrho wrote

> if LSTMs would have received the amount of engineering attention that went into making transformers better and faster

There was a short period when people were trying to improve LSTMs using genetic algorithms or RL.

The conclusion was that the LSTM cell is somewhat arbitrary and many other architectures work just as well, but none much better. So people stuck with classic LSTMs.

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visarga t1_irta9lz wrote

It's not just a matter of different substrate. Yes, a neural net can approximate any continuous function, but not always in a practical or efficient way. The result has been proven on networks of infinite width, not on the finite networks we are using in practice.

But the major difference comes from the environment of the agent. Humans have the human society, our cities and nature as environment. An AI agent, the kind we have today, would have access to a few games and maybe a simulation of a robotic body. We are billions of complex agents, more complex than the largest neural net, they are small and alone, and their environment is not real but an approximation. We can do causal investigations by intervention in the environment and apply the scientific method, they can't do much of that as they don't have access.

The more fundamental difference comes from the fact that biological agents are self replicators and artificial agents are usually not (AlphaGo had an evolutionary thing going). Self replication leads to competition leads to evolution and goals aligned with survival. An AI agent would need something similar to be guided to evolve its own instincts, it needs to have "skin in the game" so to speak.

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visarga t1_irt7w5u wrote

> Have you heard of Integrated Information Theory?

That was a wasted opportunity. It didn't lead anywhere, it's missing essential pieces, and it has been proven that "systems that do nothing but apply a low-density parity-check code, or other simple transformations of their input data" have high IIT (link).

A theory of consciousness should explain why consciousness exists in order to explain how it evolved. Consciousness has a purpose - to keep itself alive, and to spread its genes. This purpose explains how it evolved, as part of the competition for resources of agents sharing the same environment. It also explains what it does, why, and what's the cost of failing to do so.

I see consciousness and evolution as a two part system of which consciousness is the inner loop and evolution the outer loop. There is no purpose here except that agents who don't fight for survival disappear and are replaced by agents that do. So in time only agents aligned with survival can exist and purpose is "learned" by natural selection, each species fit specifically to their own niche.

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visarga t1_irt4m6q wrote

An important observation to make is that it's only been demonstrated on images sized 32x32 and 64x64. A long way away from 512x512. Papers that only test on small datasets are usually avoiding a deficiency.

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