[d--b]

> he work is a proof of principle that neurons in a dish can learn and exhibit basic signs of intelligence

Absolutely not. This shows that you can teach neurons to exhibit a reflex behavior adapted to the given stimuli - which shouldn’t come as a surprise. At best this is jellyfish-like level of intelligence.

[tiborsaas]

Have you seen magic tricks revealed? It's such a let down. After that you can't unsee how it's done and it becomes a regular guy concealing some information. Before that there was a mystery how the heck it was done. It's the same thing going on here, both with AI and the understanding of the wetware mind.

[rhn_mk1]

Except with AI and wetware there's still a mystery remaining. Not all cases have a rigorous description of what's going on in the middle level of abstraction.

Low level: proteins/matrices.

Middle level: ???

High level: it thinks!

[nazgul17]

Every new AI gets demoted pretty quickly. Playing pong would have been once called AI.

[bowsamic]

That’s because once we understand it and achieve it it’s no longer considered intelligence. The same will happen when we have actual human robots that are indistinguishable from real humans. People will say “obviously not intelligence or anything related to it, just doing x, y, and z”

[rhn_mk1]

Clearly, the sheep they dream of are electric.

[tiborsaas]

And then one looks into the mirror :)

[lern_too_spel]

Transformers have shown that language development can also be explained by what you derisively call reflex behavior, with no need for specialized Chomskyan recursion circuitry, as the same mechanism with slight modification (decision transformers) also plays Pong.

[rryan]

There's a huge difference between fitting a probabilistic model to a data distribution then sampling from it (what GPT-3 is) and agents that invent language and use it to communicate.

[lern_too_spel]

Not much. A transformer trained on multiple senses can learn the sound that an animal makes and associate it with seeing that animal. It can also learn how another agent reacts after it says a word.

The huge difference is actually between animal reflexes and learned behavior. Reflex is built-in. I didn't learn to kick my leg in response to a tap on the patellar tendon.

[rryan]

I agree that a Transformer is an example of a "reflexive" behavior because it learns to react in a context (via gradient descent rather than evolution as the learning algorithm). It's a conditional categorical distribution on steroids.

I also agree it's not much different than what's going on in this petri dish with pong.

But I don't think that's a profound statement.

What I'm saying is that calling what a Transformer does "language development" isn't accurate. A Transformer can't "develop" language in that sense, it can only learn "reflexive" behavior from the data distribution it's trained on (it could never have produced that data distribution itself without the data existing in the first place).

[lern_too_spel]

> I agree that a Transformer is an example of a "reflexive"

I said that it is not reflexive. It is learned. Just because after you learn something, it becomes easy does not mean that it is a reflex. I explained why language development can be done with little more than a transformer learning from how others behave when you make an utterance and from how you behave when you hear something, like a decision transformer learning what happens after it takes certain actions in Pong.

[mattlondon]

Agreed....but! This opens some interesting thoughts about various things.

Sure this Petri dish is not intelligent and conscious. But it's just a load of neurons right, just like the Petri dish in our head. Are we intelligent and conscious in that case? Or are we just a scaled up Petri dish that reacts to more varied stimuli?

[austinjp]

This leads to a circular problem: if we resist the notion that we're just scaled-up Petri dish brains (perhaps because we "feel conscious") how can we be sure the Petri dish mini-brains are so different from us? In which case, are they conscious after all, to some degree?