We don’t know what we’re doing, and we should really sort that out.
True. But the bigger problem is not the mythical and hypothetical "AGI/ASI" stuff that maybe will happen one day, but very real harms already being caused by misuse and misapplication of algorithmic and "AI"-based systems.
So that's what I think we should be focusing on instead.
@lightstream I wouldn't, because I am not the one making claims about "AGI" being just around the corner.
That's the thing, OpenAI and others benefiting from the hype make extraordinary claims – along the lines of "human-level AGI is just around the corner" – so they are the ones that need to define their terms.
You are asking all the right questions here ("which human are we talking about"), the point is that these questions should be answered by those who make such extraordinary claims.
@JayDee AI as the wide, specialized field you mention makes no claims about building anything with actual human-like intelligence, I feel. People who understand how the math and code work in these systems know better than to do that.
And yes, "AGI" debate is a philosophical one. The problem is it is not recognized as such, because of the AI hype. People seem to think that AGI is "inevitable" and "just around the corner", because salespeople from companies that benefit from that hype say so.
First: sure, we can redefine words in any way we want, but then:
talking about "AI" becomes much less interesting if it merely means "walking a decision tree based on data coming from external sensors"
the whole talk about "intelligence" becomes a bait-and-switch, as the conversation started with the term "intelligence" being used in the general sense we tend to apply to people and some animals.
A chess engine is intelligent in one thing: playing chess
No. That's not how the adjective "intelligent" works, outside of marketing drivel of course ("intelligent washing machine" etc).
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the artificial version of human cognitive capabilities
Can you give a definition of "intelligence" or "human cognitive abilities" that would allow us to somehow unequivocably establish that "X is intelligent" or "X has human cognitive abilities"?
@ContrarianTrail@JRepin and finally, there's a question of whether we actually decide to pursue it.
Nuclear power was supposed to be the "inevitable" power source for all of humanity mere 50 years ago. But at some point we decided not to pursue that goal.
Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be "inevitable" replacement for the banking system.
And we have cryptocurrencies and nuclear power. These exist. As opposed to whatever nebulous concept hides beneath "AGI".
@ContrarianTrail@JRepin well I guess somebody would first need to clearly define what "AGI" is. Currently it's just "whatever the techbro hypers want it to be".
And then there's the matter (ha!) of your assumption that we understand all laws of physics necessary that "matter obeys", or that we can reasonably understand them. That's a pretty strong assumption: individual human minds are pretty limited and communication adds overhead, and we might reach a point where we're stuck.
@Natanael you seem to continue to focus on PDSes even though I explicitly said it doesn't matter which PDS you're on, the secondary centralization (and thus control) happens in the "reach" layer, outside of what PDSes do in ATproto.
In other words, changing a PDS gives you way, way less agency in BS, compared to agency you get with changing an instance on Fedi.
BS is designed to make that secondary centralization happen, and to be where the real power in the system is.
The Mastodon fediverse have stronger network effects because big servers can enforce policies on other servers to stay federated. It’s complicated for users to move servers.
Well, I wrote about this as well, so I think I might not be missing these details: https://rys.io/en/168.html
@Natanael enshittification is about power, and ATproto is designed to look decentralized but enable secondary centralization where it matters for power dynamics in the network, in a way that the Fediverse very much doesn't: https://rys.io/en/167.html
(shameless plug, I wrote that, but it dives somewhat deep into the "why" of what I said above)
tl;dr it doesn't matter which PDS you use if everyone is still beholden to the same entity that controls the "reach" layer in BS.
@lloram239 that's really akin to claiming that a mannequin is a human being because it really really looks alike.
The "predictions about the world" you refer to here are instead predictions about the text. They are not based on a model of the world, they are based on loads and loads of text the model was trained on.
I don't have to prove ChatGPT is not intelligent. That would be proving a negative. The burden of proof is on those claiming that it is intelligent.
@lloram239 ah, so you're down to throwing epithets like "idiotic" around. Clearly a mark of thoughtful and well-reasoned argument.
Predictions about the world are probabilistic by nature, since the future hasn’t happened yet.
Thing is: GPT doesn't make predictions about the world, it makes predictions about what the next word, phrase, sentence should be in a text, based on the prompt and the corpus it got "trained" on.
It's not about sensory inputs, it's about having a model of the world and objects in it and ability to make predictions.
The important part is that the AI can figure out the pattern in the data it does get and so far AI systems are doing very well.
GPT cannot "figure" anything out. That's the point. It only probabilistically generates text. That's what it does, there is no model of the world behind it, no predictions, no"figuring out".
@JayDee
We don’t know what we’re doing, and we should really sort that out.
True. But the bigger problem is not the mythical and hypothetical "AGI/ASI" stuff that maybe will happen one day, but very real harms already being caused by misuse and misapplication of algorithmic and "AI"-based systems.
So that's what I think we should be focusing on instead.