We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
I think we should start by not following this marketing speak. The sentence “AI isn’t intelligent” makes no sense. What we mean is “LLMs aren’t intelligent”.
So couldn’t we say LLM’s aren’t really AI? Cuz that’s what I’ve seen to come to terms with.
can say whatever the fuck we want. This isn’t any kind of real issue. Think about it. If you went the rest of your life calling LLM’s turkey butt fuck sandwhichs, what changes? This article is just shit and people looking to be outraged over something that other articles told them to be outraged about. This is all pure fucking modern yellow journalism. I hope turkey butt sandwiches replace every journalist. I’m so done with their crap
Llms are really good relational databases, not an intelligence, imo
To be fair, the term “AI” has always been used in an extremely vague way.
NPCs in video games, chess computers, or other such tech are not sentient and do not have general intelligence, yet we’ve been referring to those as “AI” for decades without anybody taking an issue with it.
It’s true that the word has always been used loosely, but there was no issue with it because nobody believed what was called AI to have actual intelligence. Now this is no longer the case, and so it becomes important to be more clear with our words.
What is “actual intelligence” then?
I have no idea. For me it’s a “you recognize it when you see it” kinda thing. Normally I’m in favor of just measuring things with a clearly defined test or benchmark, but it is in the nature of large neural networks that they can be great at scoring on any desired benchmark while failing to be good at the underlying ability that the benchmark was supposed to test (overfitting). I know this sounds like a lazy answer, but it’s a very difficult question to define something based around generalizing and reacting to new challenges.
But whether LLMs do have “actual intelligence” or not was not my point. You can definitely make a case for claiming they do, even though I would disagree with that. My point was that calling them AIs instead of LLMs bypasses the entire discussion on their alleged intelligence as if it wasn’t up for debate. Which is misleading, especially to the general public.
Nobody knows for sure.
I’ve heard it said that the difference between Machine Learning and AI, is that if you can explain how the algorithm got its answer it’s ML, and if you can’t then it’s AI.
I don’t think the term AI has been used in a vague way, it’s that there’s a huge disconnect between how the technical fields use it vs general populace and marketing groups heavily abuse that disconnect.
Artificial has two meanings/use cases. One is to indicate something is fake (video game NPC, chess bots, vegan cheese). The end product looks close enough to the real thing that for its intended use case it works well enough. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, treat it like a duck even though we all know it’s a bunny with a costume on. LLMs on a technical level fit this definition.
The other definition is man made. Artificial diamonds are a great example of this, they’re still diamonds at the end of the day, they have all the same chemical makeups, same chemical and physical properties. The only difference is they came from a laboratory made by adult workers vs child slave labor.
My pet theory is science fiction got the general populace to think of artificial intelligence to be using the “man-made” definition instead of the “fake” definition that these companies are using. In the past the subtle nuance never caused a problem so we all just kinda ignored it
Dafuq? Artificial always means man-made.
Nature also makes fake stuff. For example, fish that have an appendix that looks like a worm, to attract prey. It’s a fake worm. Is it “artificial”? Nope. Not man made.
May I present to you:
The Marriam-Webster Dictionary
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial
Definition #3b
Thanks. I stand corrected.
Word roots say they have a point though. Artifice, Artificial etc. I think the main problem with the way both of the people above you are using this terminology is that they’re focusing on the wrong word and how that word is being conflated with something it’s not.
LLM’s are artificial. They are a man made thing that is intended to fool man into believing they are something they aren’t. What we’re meant to be convinced they are is sapiently intelligent.
Mimicry is not sapience and that’s where the argument for LLM’s being real honest to God AI falls apart.
Sapience is missing from Generative LLM’s. They don’t actually think. They don’t actually have motivation. What we’re doing when we anthropomorphize them is we are fooling ourselves into thinking they are a man-made reproduction of us without the meat flavored skin suit. That’s not what’s happening. But some of us are convinced that it is, or that it’s near enough that it doesn’t matter.
LLMs are one of the approximately one metric crap ton of different technologies that fall under the rather broad umbrella of the field of study that is called AI. The definition for what is and isn’t AI can be pretty vague, but I would argue that LLMs are definitely AI because they exist with the express purpose of imitating human behavior.
Huh? Since when an AI’s purpose is to “imitate human behavior”? AI is about solving problems.
It is and it isn’t. Again, the whole thing is super vague. Machine vision or pattern seeking algorithms do not try to imitate any human behavior, but they fall under AI.
Let me put it this way: Things that try to imitate human behavior or intelligence are AI, but not all AI is about trying to imitate human behavior or intelligence.
I can agree with “things that try to imitate human intelligence” but not “human behavior”. An Elmo doll laughs when you tickle it. That doesn’t mean it exhibits artificial intelligence.
From a programming pov, a definition of AI could be an algorithm or construct that can solve problems or perform tasks without the programmer specifically solving that problem or programming the steps of the task but rather building something that can figure it out on its own.
Though a lot of game AIs don’t fit that description.
I make the point to allways refer to it as LLM exactly to make the point that it’s not an Inteligence.
The machinery needed for human thought is certainly a part of AI. At most you can only claim its not intelligent because intelligence is a specifically human trait.
We don’t even have a clear definition of what “intelligence” even is. Yet a lot of people art claiming that they themselves are intelligent and AI models are not.
Even if we did if it’s human it can’t live on this planet and claim it’s intelligent. Just look around and you will know why.
Tell that to the crows and chimps that know how to solve novel problems.
Thats the point
I know it doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous, but this article made me feel better.
I’ve never been fooled by their claims of it being intelligent.
Its basically an overly complicated series of if/then statements that try to guess the next series of inputs.
It very much isn’t and that’s extremely technically wrong on many, many levels.
Yet still one of the higher up voted comments here.
Which says a lot.
I’ll be pedantic, but yeah. It’s all transistors all the way down, and transistors are pretty much chained if/then switches.
Calling these new LLM’s just if statements is quite a over simplification. These are technically something that has not existed before, they do enable use cases that previously were impossible to implement.
This is far from General Intelligence, but there are solutions now to few coding issues that were near impossible 5 years ago
5 years ago I would have laughed in your face if you came to suggest that can you code a code that summarizes this description that was inputed by user. Now I laugh that give me your wallet because I need to call API or buy few GPU’s.
I think the point is that this is not the path to general intelligence. This is more like cheating on the Turing test.
Given that the weights in a model are transformed into a set of conditional if statements (GPU or CPU JMP machine code), he’s not technically wrong. Of course, it’s more than just JMP and JMP represents the entire class of jump commands like JE and JZ. Something needs to act on the results of the TMULs.
That is not really true. Yes, there are jump instructions being executed when you run interference on a model, but they are in no way related to the model itself. There’s no translation of weights to jumps in transformers and the underlying attention mechanisms.
I suggest reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_architecture)
That is not really true. Yes, there are jump instructions being executed when you run interference on a model, but they are in no way related to the model itself.
The model is data. It needs to be operated on to get information out. That means lots of JMPs.
If someone said viewing a gif is just a bunch of if-else’s, that’s also true. That the data in the gif isn’t itself a bunch of if-else’s isn’t relevant.
Executing LLM’S is particularly JMP heavy. It’s why you need massive fast ram because caching doesn’t help them.
You’re correct, but that’s like saying along the lines of manufacturing a car is just bolting and soldering a bunch of stuff. It’s technically true to some degree, but it’s very disingenuous to make such a statement without being ironic. If you’re making these claims, you’re either incompetent or acting in bad faith.
I think there is a lot wrong with LLMs and how the public at large uses them, and even more so with how companies are developing and promoting them. But to spread misinformation and polute an already overcrowded space with junk is irresponsible at best.
ChatGPT 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet.
I guesstimate that it’s effectively a supermassive autocomplete algo that uses some TOTP-like factor to help it produce “unique” output every time.
And they’re running into issues due to increasingly ingesting AI-generated data.
Get your popcorn out! 🍿
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I really hate the current AI bubble but that article you linked about “chatgpt 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet” isn’t what the article is saying at all.
Fine, *could literally be.
The thing is, because Excel is Turing Complete, you can say this about literally anything that’s capable of running on a computer.
And they’re running into issues due to increasingly ingesting AI-generated data.
There we go. Who coulda seen that coming! While that’s going to be a fun ride, at the same time companies all but mandate AS* to their employees.
I love this resource, https://thebullshitmachines.com/ (i.e. see lesson 1)…
In a series of five- to ten-minute lessons, we will explain what these machines are, how they work, and how to thrive in a world where they are everywhere.
You will learn when these systems can save you a lot of time and effort. You will learn when they are likely to steer you wrong. And you will discover how to see through the hype to tell the difference. …
Also, Anthropic (ironically) has some nice paper(s) about the limits of “reasoning” in AI.
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The idea that RAGs “extend their memory” is also complete bullshit. We literally just finally build working search engine, but instead of using a nice interface for it we only let chatbots use them.
That headline is a straw man, and the article really argues on General AI, which also has consciousness.
The current state of AI is definitely intelligent, but it’s not GAI.
Bullshit headline.I think you’re misunderstanding the point the author is making. He is arguing that even the current state is not intelligent, it is merely a fancy autocorrect, it doesn’t know or understand anything about the prompts it receives. As the author stated, it can only guess at the next statistically most likely piece of information based on the data that has been fed into it. That’s not intelligence.
Predicting sequences of things is foundational to intelligence. In fact, it is the whole point.
it doesn’t know or understand
But that’s not what intelligence is, that’s what consciousness is.
Intelligence is not understanding shit, it’s the ability to for instance solve a problem, so a frigging calculator has a tiny degree of intelligence, but not enough for us to call it AI.
There is simply zero doubt an AI is intelligent, claiming otherwise just shows people don’t know the difference between intelligence and consciousness.Passing an exam is a form of intelligence.
Can a good AI pass a basic exam?
YES.
Does passing an exam require consciousness?
NO.
Because an exam tests abilities of intelligence, not level of consciousness.it can only guess at the next statistically most likely piece of information based on the data that has been fed into it. That’s not intelligence.
Except we do the exact same thing! Based on prior experience (learning) we choose what we find to be the most likely answer. And that is indeed intelligence.
Current AI does not have the reasoning abilities we have yet, but they are not completely without it, and it’s a subject that is currently worked on and improved. So current AI is actually a pretty high form of intelligence. And can sometimes out compete average humans in certain areas.
Intelligence is not understanding shit, it’s the ability to for instance solve a problem, so a frigging calculator has a tiny degree of intelligence, but not enough for us to call it AI.
I have to disagree that a calculator has intelligence. The calculator has the mathematical functions programmed into it, but it couldn’t use those on its own. The intelligence in your example is that of the operator of the calculator and the programmer who designed the calculator’s software.
Can a good AI pass a basic exam?
YESI agree with you that the ability to pass an exam isn’t a great test for this situation. In my opinion, the major factor that would point to current state AI not being intelligent is that it doesn’t know why a given answer is correct, beyond that it is statistically likely to be correct.
Except we do the exact same thing! Based on prior experience (learning) we choose what we find to be the most likely answer.
Again, I think this points to the idea that knowing why an answer is correct is important. A person can know something by rote, which is what current AI does, but that doesn’t mean that person knows why that is the correct answer. The ability to extrapolate from existing knowledge and apply that to other situations that may not seem directly applicable is an important aspect of intelligence.
As an example, image generation AI knows that a lot of the artwork that it has been fed contains watermarks or artist signatures, so it would often include things that look like those in the generated piece. It knew that it was statistically likely for that object to be there in a piece of art, but not why it was there, so it could not make a decision not to include them. Maybe that issue has been removed from the code of image generation AI by now, it has been a long time since I’ve messed around with that kind of tool, but even if it has been fixed, it is not because the AI knew it was wrong and self-corrected, it is because a programmer had to fix a bug in the code that the AI model had no awareness of.
I think this points to the idea that knowing why an answer is correct is important.
If by knowing you mean understanding, that’s consciousness like General AI or Strong AI, way beyond ordinary AI.
Otherwise of course it knows, in the sense of having learned everything by heart, but not understanding it.
Todays AI is clippy on steroids. It’s not intelligent or creative. You can’t feed it physics and astronomy books without the equation for C and tell it to create the equation for C. It’s fancy autocorrect, and it’s a waste of compute and energy.
Can we say that AI has the potential for “intelligence”, just like some people do? There are clearly some very intelligent people and the world, and very clearly some that aren’t.
Hey AI helped me stick it to the insurance man the other day. I was futzing around with coverage amounts on one of the major insurance companies websites pre-renewal to try to get the best rate and it spit up a NaN renewal amount for our most expensive vehicle. It let me go through with the renewal less that $700 and now says I’m paid in full for the six month period. It’s been days now with no follow-up . . . I’m pretty sure AI snuck that one through for me.
Be careful… If you get in an accident I guaran-god-damn-tee you they will use it as an excuse not to pay out. Maybe after a lawsuit you’d see some money but at that point half of it goes to the lawyer and you’re still screwed.
Oh I’m aware of the potential pitfalls but it’s something I’m willing to risk to stick it to insurance. I wouldn’t even carry it if it wasn’t required by law. I have the funds to cover what they would cover.
If you have the funds you could self insure. You’d need to look up the details for your jurisdiction, but the gist of it is you keep the amount required coverage in an account that you never touch until you need to pay out.
Hmm I have daydreamed about this scenario. I didn’t realize it was a thing. Thanks, I’ll check into it, though I wouldn’t doubt if it’s not a thing in my dystopian red flyover state.
Edit: Yeah, you have to be the registered owner of 25 or more vehicles to qualify for self insurance in my state. So, dealers and rich people only, unfortunately.
AI didn’t write the insurance policy. It only helped him search for the best deal. That’s like saying your insurance company will cancel you because you used a phone to comparison shop.
As someone who’s had two kids since AI really vaulted onto the scene, I am enormously confused as to why people think AI isn’t or, particularly, can’t be sentient. I hate to be that guy who pretend to be the parenting expert online, but most of the people I know personally who take the non-sentient view on AI don’t have kids. The other side usually does.
When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
People love to tout this as some sort of smoking gun. That feels like a trap. Obviously, we can argue about the age children gain sentience, but my year and a half old daughter is building an LLM with pattern recognition, tests, feedback, hallucinations. My son is almost 5, and he was and is the same. He told me the other day that a petting zoo came to the school. He was adamant it happened that day. I know for a fact it happened the week before, but he insisted. He told me later that day his friend’s dad was in jail for threatening her mom. That was true, but looked to me like another hallucination or more likely a misunderstanding.
And as funny as it would be to argue that they’re both sapient, but not sentient, I don’t think that’s the case. I think you can make the case that without true volition, AI is sentient but not sapient. I’d love to talk to someone in the middle of the computer science and developmental psychology Venn diagram.
You’re drawing wrong conclusions. Intelligent beings have concepts to validate knowledge. When converting days to seconds, we have a formula that we apply. An LLM just guesses and has no way to verify it. And it’s like that for everything.
An example: Perplexity tells me that 9876543210 Seconds are 114,305.12 days. A calculator tells me it’s 114,311.84. Perplexity even tells me how to calculate it, but it does neither have the ability to calculate or to verify it.
Same goes for everything. It guesses without being able to grasp the underlying concepts.
I’d love to talk to someone in the middle of the computer science and developmental psychology Venn diagram.
Not that person, but an Interesting lecture on that topic
Not to get philosophical but to answer you we need to answer what is sentient.
Is it just observable behavior? If so then wouldn’t Kermit the frog be sentient?
Or does sentience require something more, maybe qualia or some othet subjective.
If your son says “dad i got to go potty” is that him just using a llm to learn those words equals going to tge bathroom? Or is he doing something more?
I’m a computer scientist that has a child and I don’t think AI is sentient at all. Even before learning a language, children have their own personality and willpower which is something that I don’t see in AI.
I left a well paid job in the AI industry because the mental gymnastics required to maintain the illusion was too exhausting. I think most people in the industry are aware at some level that they have to participate in maintaining the hype to secure their own jobs.
The core of your claim is basically that “people who don’t think AI is sentient don’t really understand sentience”. I think that’s both reductionist and, frankly, a bit arrogant.
Couldn’t agree more - there are some wonderful insights to gain from seeing your own kids grow up, but I don’t think this is one of them.
Kids are certainly building a vocabulary and learning about the world, but LLMs don’t learn.
LLMs don’t learn because we don’t let them, not because they can’t. It would be too expensive to re-train them on every interaction.
I know it’s part of the AI jargon, but using the word “learning” to describe the slow adaptation of massive arrays of single precision numbers to some loss function, is a very generous interpretation of that word, IMO.
But that’s exactly how we learn stuff, as well. Artificial neural networks are modelled after how our neuron affect each other while we learn and store memories.
Neural networks are about as much a model of a brain as a stick man is a model of human anatomy.
I don’t think anybody knows how we actually, really learn. I’m not a neuro scientist (I’m a computer scientist specialised in AI) but I don’t think the mechanism of learning is that well understood.
AI hype-people will say that it’s “like a neural network” but I really doubt that. There is no loss-function in reality and certainly no way for the brain to perform gradient descent.
Your son and daughter will continue to learn new things as they grow up, a LLM cannot learn new things on its own. Sure, they can repeat things back to you that are within the context window (and even then, a context window isn’t really inherent to a LLM - its just a window of prior information being fed back to them with each request/response, or “turn” as I believe is the term) and what is in the context window can even influence their responses. But in order for a LLM to “learn” something, it needs to be retrained with that information included in the dataset.
Whereas if your kids were to say, touch a sharp object that caused them even slight discomfort, they would eventually learn to stop doing that because they’ll know what the outcome is after repetition. You could argue that this looks similar to the training process of a LLM, but the difference is that a LLM cannot do this on its own (and I would not consider wiring up a LLM via an MCP to a script that can trigger a re-train + reload to be it doing it on its own volition). At least, not in our current day. If anything, I think this is more of a “smoking gun” than the argument of “LLMs are just guessing the next best letter/word in a given sequence”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not someone who completely hates LLMs / “modern day AI” (though I do hate a lot of the ways it is used, and agree with a lot of the moral problems behind it), I find the tech to be intriguing but it’s a (“very fancy”) simulation. It is designed to imitate sentience and other human-like behavior. That, along with human nature’s tendency to anthropomorphize things around us (which is really the biggest part of this IMO), is why it tends to be very convincing at times.
That is my take on it, at least. I’m not a psychologist/psychiatrist or philosopher.
You might consider reading Turing or Searle. They did a great job of addressing the concerns you’re trying to raise here. And rebutting the obvious ones, too.
Anyway, you’ve just shifted the definitional question from “AI” to “sentience”. Not only might that be unreasonable, because perhaps a thing can be intelligent without being sentient, it’s also no closer to a solid answer to the original issue.
Humans are also LLMs.
We also speak words in succession that have a high probability of following each other. We don’t say “Let’s go eat a car at McDonalds” unless we’re specifically instructed to say so.
What does consciousness even mean? If you can’t quantify it, how can you prove humans have it and LLMs don’t? Maybe consciousness is just one thought following the next, one word after the other, one neural connection determined on previous. Then we’re not so different from LLMs afterall.
My thing is that I don’t think most humans are much more than this. We too regurgitate what we have absorbed in the past. Our brains are not hard logic engines but “best guess” boxes and they base those guesses on past experience and probability of success. We make choices before we are aware of them and then apply rationalizations after the fact to back them up - is that true “reasoning?”
It’s similar to the debate about self driving cars. Are they perfectly safe? No, but have you seen human drivers???
Self Driving is only safer than people in absolutely pristine road conditions with no inclement weather and no construction. As soon as anything disrupts “normal” road conditions, self driving becomes significantly more dangerous than a human driving.
Yes of course edge and corner cases are going to take much longer to train on because they don’t occur as often. But as soon as one self-driving car learns how to handle one of them, they ALL know. Meanwhile humans continue to be born and must be trained up individually and they continue to make stupid mistakes like not using their signal and checking their mirrors.
Humans CAN handle cases that AI doesn’t know how to, yet, but humans often fail in inclement weather, around construction, etc etc.
Human drivers are only safe when they’re not distracted, emotionally disturbed, intoxicated, and physically challenged (vision, muscle control, etc.) 1% of the population has epilepsy, and a large number of them are in denial or simply don’t realize that they have periodic seizures - until they wake up after their crash.
So, yeah, AI isn’t perfect either - and it’s not as good as an “ideal” human driver, but at what point will AI be better than a typical/average human driver? Not today, I’d say, but soon…
The thing about self driving is that it has been like 90-95% of the way there for a long time now. It made dramatic progress then plateaued, as approaches have failed to close the gap, with exponentially more and more input thrown at it for less and less incremental subjective improvement.
But your point is accurate, that humans have lapses and AI have lapses. The nature of those lapses is largely disjoint, so that makes an opportunity for AI systems to augment a human driver to get the best of both worlds. A constantly consistently vigilant computer driving monitoring and tending the steering, acceleration, and braking to be the ‘right’ thing in a neutral behavior, with the human looking for more anomolous situations that the AI tends to get confounded about, and making the calls on navigating certain intersections that the AI FSD still can’t figure out. At least for me the worst part of driving is the long haul monotony on freeway where nothing happens, and AI excels at not caring about how monotonous it is and just handling it, so I can pay a bit more attention to what other things on the freeway are doing that might cause me problems.
I don’t have a Tesla, but have a competitor system and have found it useful, though not trustworthy. It’s enough to greatly reduce the drain of driving, but I have to be always looking around, and have to assert control if there’s a traffic jam coming up (it might stop in time, but it certainly doesn’t slow down soon enough) or if I have to do a lane change in some traffic (if traffic conditions are light, it can change langes nicely, but without a whole lot of breathing room, it won’t do it, which is nice when I can afford to be stupidly cautious).
The one “driving aid” that I find actually useful is the following distance maintenance cruise control. I set that to the maximum distance it can reliably handle and it removes that “dimension” of driving problem from needing my constant attention - giving me back that attention to focus on other things (also driving / safety related.) “Dumb” cruise control works similarly when there’s no traffic around at all, but having the following distance control makes it useful in traffic. Both kinds of cruise control have certain situations that you need to be aware of and ready to take control back at a moment’s notice - preferably anticipating the situation and disengaging cruise control before it has a problem - but those exceptions are pretty rare / easily handled in practice.
Things like lane keeping seem to be more trouble than they’re worth, to me in the situations I drive in.
Not “AI” but a driving tech that does help a lot is parking cameras. Having those additional perspectives from the camera(s) at different points on the vehicle is a big benefit during close-space maneuvers. Not too surprising that “AI” with access to those tools does better than normal drivers without.
At least in my car, the lane following (not keeping system) is handy because the steering wheel naturally tends to go where it should and less often am I “fighting” the tendency to center. The keeping system is at least for me largely nothing. If I turn signal, it ignores me crossing a lane. If circumstances demand an evasive maneuver that crosses a line, it’s resistance isn’t enough to cause an issue. At least mine has fared surprisingly well in areas where the lane markings are all kind of jacked up due to temporary changes for construction. If it is off, then my arms are just having to generally assert more effort to be in the same place I was going to be with the system. Generally no passenger notices when the system engages/disengages in the car except for the chiming it does when it switches over to unaided operation.
So at least my experience has been a positive one, but it hits things just right with intervention versus human attention, including monitoring gaze to make sure I am looking where I should. However there are people who test “how long can I keep my hands off the steering wheel”, which is a more dangerous mode of thinking.
And yes, having cameras everywhere makes fine maneuvering so much nicer, even with the limited visualization possible in the synthesized ‘overhead’ view of your car.
The rental cars I have driven with lane keeper functions have all been too aggressive / easily fooled by visual anomalies on the road for me to feel like I’m getting any help. My wife comments on how jerky the car is driving when we have those systems. I don’t feel like it’s dangerous, and if I were falling asleep or something it could be helpful, but in 40+ years of driving I’ve had “falling asleep at the wheel” problems maybe 3 times - not something I need constant help for.
Not going to happen soon. It’s the 90 10 problem.
With Teslas, Self Driving isn’t even safer in pristine road conditions.
I think the self driving is likely to be safer in the most boring scenarios, the sort of situations where a human driver can get complacent because things have been going so well for the past hour of freeway driving. The self driving is kind of dumb, but it’s at least consistently paying attention, and literally has eyes in the back of it’s head.
However, there’s so much data about how it fails in stupidly obvious ways that it shouldn’t, so you still need the human attention to cover the more anomalous scenarios that foul self driving.
Anomalous scenarios like a giant flashing school bus? :D
Yes, as common as that is, in the scheme of driving it is relatively anomolous.
By hours in car, most of the time is spent on a freeway driving between two lines either at cruising speed or in a traffic jam. The most mind numbing things for a human, pretty comfortably in the wheel house of driving.
Once you are dealing with pedestrians, signs, intersections, etc, all those despite ‘common’ are anomolous enough to be dramatically more tricky for these systems.
Get a self driven ng car to drive in a snow storm or a torrential downpour. People are really downplaying humans abilities.
Ai models are trained on basically the entirety of the internet, and more. Humans learn to speak on much less info. So, there’s likely a huge difference in how human brains and LLMs work.
It doesn’t take the entirety of the internet just for an LLM to respond in English. It could do so with far less. But it also has the entirety of the internet which arguably makes it superior to a human in breadth of information.
If an IQ of 100 is average, I’d rate AI at 80 and down for most tasks (and of course it’s more complex than that, but as a starting point…)
So, if you’re dealing with a filing clerk with a functional IQ of 75 in their role - AI might be a better experience for you.
Some of the crap that has been published on the internet in the past 20 years comes to an IQ level below 70 IMO - not saying I want more AI because it’s better, just that - relatively speaking - AI is better than some of the pay-for-clickbait garbage that came before it.
Human brains are much more complex than a mirroring script xD The amount of neurons in your brain, AI and supercomputers only have a fraction of that. But you’re right, for you its not much different than AI probably
The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons, while ChatGPT, a large language model, has 175 billion parameters (often referred to as “artificial neurons” in the context of neural networks). While ChatGPT has more “neurons” in this sense, it’s important to note that these are not the same as biological neurons, and the comparison is not straightforward.
86 billion neurons in the human brain isn’t that much compared to some of the larger 1.7 trillion neuron neural networks though.
Keep thinking the human brain is as stupid as AI hahaaha
have you seen the American Republican party recently? it brings a new perspective on how stupid humans can be.
Nah, I went to public high school - I got to see “the average” citizen who is now voting. While it is distressing that my ex-classmates now seem to control the White House, Congress and Supreme Court, what they’re doing with it is not surprising at all - they’ve been talking this shit since the 1980s.
Lmao true
But, are these 1.7 trillion neuron networks available to drive YOUR car? Or are they time-shared among thousands or millions of users?
It’s when you start including structures within cells that the complexity moves beyond anything we’re currently capable of computing.
I’m pretty sure an AI could throw out a lazy straw man and ad hominem as quickly as you did.
I’ve been thinking this for awhile. When people say “AI isn’t really that smart, it’s just doing pattern recognition” all I can help but think is “don’t you realize that is one of the most commonly brought up traits concerning the human mind?” Pareidolia is literally the tendency to see faces in things because the human mind is constantly looking for the “face pattern”. Humans are at least 90% regurgitating previous data. It’s literally why you’re supposed to read and interact with babies so much. It’s how you learn “red glowy thing is hot”. It’s why education and access to knowledge is so important. It’s every annoying person who has endless “did you know?” facts. Science is literally “look at previous data, iterate a little bit, look at new data”.
None of what AI is doing is truly novel or different. But we’ve placed the human mind on this pedestal despite all the evidence to the contrary. Eyewitness testimony, optical illusions, magic tricks, the hundreds of common fallacies we fall prey to… our minds are incredibly fallible and are really just a hodgepodge of processes masquerading as “intelligence”. We’re a bunch of instincts in a trenchcoat. To think AI isn’t or can’t reach our level is just hubris. A trait that probably is more unique to humans.
Yep we are on the same page. At our best, we can reach higher than regurgitating patterns. I’m talking about things like the scientific method and everything we’ve learned by it. But still, that’s a 5% minority, at best, of what’s going on between human ears.
Humans can be more than this. We do actively repress our most important intellectual capacuties.
That’s how we get llm bros.
The other thing that most people don’t focus on is how we train LLMs.
We’re basically building something like a spider tailed viper. A spider tailed viper is a kind of snake that has a growth on its tail that looks a lot like a spider. It wiggles it around so it looks like a spider, convincing birds they’ve found a snack, and when the bird gets close enough the snake strikes and eats the bird.
Now, I’m not saying we’re building something that is designed to kill us. But, I am saying that we’re putting enormous effort into building something that can fool us into thinking it’s intelligent. We’re not trying to build something that can do something intelligent. We’re instead trying to build something that mimics intelligence.
What we’re effectively doing is looking at this thing that mimics a spider, and trying harder and harder to tweak its design so that it looks more and more realistic. What’s crazy about that is that we’re not building this to fool a predator so that we’re not in danger. We’re not doing it to fool prey, so we can catch and eat them more easily. We’re doing it so we can fool ourselves.
It’s like if, instead of a spider-tailed snake, a snake evolved a bird-like tail, and evolution kept tweaking the design so that the tail was more and more likely to fool the snake so it would bite its own tail. Except, evolution doesn’t work like that because a snake that ignored actual prey and instead insisted on attacking its own tail would be an evolutionary dead end. Only a truly stupid species like humans would intentionally design something that wasn’t intelligent but mimicked intelligence well enough that other humans preferred it to actual information and knowledge.
To the extent it is people trying to fool people, it’s rich people looking to fool poorer people for the most part.
To the extent it’s actually useful, it’s to replace certain systems.
Think of the humble phone tree, designed to make it so humans aren’t having to respond, triage, and route calls. So you can have an AI system that can significantly shorten that role, instead of navigating a tedious long maze of options, a couple of sentences back and forth and you either get the portion of automated information that would suffice or routed to a human to take care of it. Same analogy for a lot of online interactions where you have to input way too much and if automated data, you get a wall of text of which you’d like something to distill the relevant 3 or 4 sentences according to your query.
So there are useful interactions.
However it’s also true that it’s dangerous because the “make user approve of the interaction” can bring out the worst in people when they feel like something is just always agreeing with them. Social media has been bad enough, but chatbots that by design want to please the enduser and look almost legitimate really can inflame the worst in our minds.
What I never understood about this argument is…why are we fighting over whether something that speaks like us, knows more than us, bullshits and gets shit wrong like us, loses its mind like us, seemingly sometimes seeks self-preservation like us…why all of this isn’t enough to fit the very self-explanatory term “artificial…intelligence”. That name does not describe whether the entity is having a valid experiencing of the world as other living beings, it does not proclaim absolute excellence in all things done by said entity, it doesn’t even really say what kind of intelligence this intelligence would be. It simply says something has an intelligence of some sort, and it’s artificial. We’ve had AI in games for decades, it’s not the sci-fi AI, but it’s still code taking in multiple inputs and producing a behavior as an outcome of those inputs alongside other historical data it may or may not have. This fits LLMs perfectly. As far as I seem to understand, LLMs are essentially at least part of the algorithm we ourselves use in our brains to interpret written or spoken inputs, and produce an output. They bullshit all the time and don’t know when they’re lying, so what? Has nobody here run into a compulsive liar or a sociopath? People sometimes have no idea where a random factoid they’re saying came from or that it’s even a factoid, why is it so crazy when the machine does it?
I keep hearing the word “anthropomorphize” being thrown around a lot, as if we cant be bringing up others into our domain, all the while refusing to even consider that maybe the underlying mechanisms that make hs tick are not that special, certainly not special enough to grant us a whole degree of separation from other beings and entities, and maybe we should instead bring ourselves down to the same domain as the rest of reality. Cold hard truth is, we don’t know if consciousness isn’t just an emerging property of varios different large models working together to show a cohesive image. If it is, would that be so bad? Hell, we don’t really even know if we actually have free will or if we live in a superdeterministic world, where every single particle moves with a predetermined path given to it since the very beginning of everything. What makes us think we’re so much better than other beings, to the point where we decide whether their existence is even recognizable?
Amen! When I say the same things this author is saying I get, “It’S NoT StAtIsTiCs! LeArN aBoUt AI bEfOrE yOu CoMmEnT, dUmBaSs!”
