[mjburgess]

Distinguish a rock rolling down a hill from a brain: a rock rolling down a hill finds the best path by having its route supervised by the surface of the hill, etc.

Everything is everything if your level of abstraction is "thing".

The relevant characteristics of "biological intelligence" and of the functioning of the brain do not exist at the "try and try again" level of abstraction. (At this level, as above, we couldn't distinguish and animal from a rock; nor, I imagine, basically any physical process from any other.)

Organic systems grow in response to interaction with their environments, acquiring novel physical structure and causal properties. Neurological intelligence allows for theory-formulation on single-example cases (eg., a child burning their hand once is sufficient to build a theory of their immediate environment).

The list goes on.

The capacities of these systems do not obtain in the machine case, and likewise, the machine cases has no functional analogues at the relevant level of distinction.

This dumb form of statistics called, "approximate associative modelling over 1tn cases", ie., Machine Learning, has nothing new to say about intelligence, biology or neurology.

We have been doing non-linear regression and optimisation since the victorian era.

[stickfigure]

Sure, you can find arbitrary similarities in everything. You can also find arbitrary differences in everything.

Experiments like GPT3 do seem to point in the direction of "scale" as the dominant factor. Until we can reach the same level of scale as a real brain, the question of whether "meat is special" is undecided. Everything that is you may just be a non-linear regression on a chemical computer.

[mjburgess]

GPT3 isn't even in the same domain as intelligence.

Statistical patterns in trillions of examples is a sideshow.

Words in natural language refer to the world; that is their point. Communication is the coordination of that reference between speakers in a shared environment.

You cannot take GPT3 to new york and ask it what it thinks of the city: it cannot be anywhere (it isnt causally connected to an evnironment); and it cannot coordinate with any listener (it has nothing to say).

Text generation is certainly reaching new heights. This isn't a form of communication, however, and isnt even relevant to it.

[stickfigure]

I think you're falling into the Chinese Room fallacy. I agree that GPT3 isn't sophisticated enough to be considered AGI.

On the other hand, based on the progression of GPT -> GPT2 -> GPT3, remarkable things happen when you add orders of magnitude more nodes to the network.

You might try to argue that no matter how convincing GPT50 passes the Turing test, it's still not intelligent. How is that different from saying the Chinese Room doesn't speak Chinese? Why is your meat-based Chinese Room special?

[mjburgess]

It isn't meat-based, it's in the world.

It's a distinction in kind, not degree. You're presuming that we are just bleak repositories of trillions of sentences stiched together: we arent a meat version of any ML program; not GPT or any other.

We do not learn the meaning of "Green", or "Tree" nor any basic concept via examples in language.

An infinite amount of complexity considering an infinite amount of text cannot refer to the world; it has never been in it.

We aren't statistical patterns in trillions of books. You already presume that GPT is something that it isn't when you presume it is even capable of communicating anything.

[stickfigure]

> You're presuming that we are just bleak repositories of trillions of sentences stiched together

...and you are presuming we aren't. Yes yes, we input from more sources than books, but electronic NNs can too. And it's not clear which inputs are or aren't important. Humans that are blind from birth are still intelligent.

The only thing we know for certain right now is that order-of-magnitude increases in the complexity of NNs produces dramatic results. And we're still quite a few orders of magnitude away from the complexity in a human brain.

[mjburgess]

It's not a presumption. When I say, "I like the wine I'm drinking" I mean the wine I am drinking.

I am not using a term "wine" in some sentence constructed from fragments of prior text. I mean to refer to the object in my hand.

And likewise, if i ask a friend to "pass me the wine", i mean a particular part of our shared environment.

Text reassembly can appear to refer, but it is genuinely proto-schizoprhenic to attribute to this system reference. It isn't saying anything.

It isn't with me expressing an attitude to our shared environment. It's generating text. It will generate inconsistent text fragments on each generation run. It isn't talking about anything, there isnt any intention to express anything behind the generation of text.

There is in fact no mechanism by which it can speak about an enviroment. It's fragaments of prerecorded text reassembled on every run which appears to say something, but only because the people it steals from said somehting at the time. Now it it just a bad rehersal.