[therobots927]

“Do they know things?” The answer to this is yes but they also think they know things that are completely false. If it’s one thing I’ve observed about LLMs it’s that they do not handle logic well, or math for that matter. They will enthusiastically provide blatantly false information instead of the preferable “I don’t know”. I highly doubt this was a design choice.

[sangnoir]

> “Do they know things?” The answer to this is yes but they also think they know things that are completely false

Thought experiment: should a machine with those structural faults be allowed to bootstrap itself towards greater capabilities on that shaky foundation? What would the impact of a near-human/superhuman intelligence that has occasional psychotic breaks it is oblivious of?

I'm critical of the idea of super-intelligence bootstrapping off LLMs (or even LLMs with search) - I figure the odds of another AI winter are much higher than those of achieving AGI in the next decade.

[photonthug]

Someone somewhere is quietly working on teaching LLMs to generate something along the lines of AlloyLang code so that there’s an actual evolving/updating logical domain model that underpins and informs the statistical model.

This approach is not that far from what TFA is getting at with the stockfish comeback. Banking on pure stats or pure logic are both kind of obviously dead ends for having real progress instead of toys. Banking on poorly understood emergent properties of one system to compensate for the missing other system also seems silly.

Sadly though, whoever is working on serious hybrid systems will probably not be very popular in either of the rather extremist communities for pure logic or pure ML. I’m not exactly sure why folks are ideological about such things rather than focused on what new capabilities we might get. Maybe just historical reasons? But thus the fallout from last AI winter may lead us into the next one.

[therobots927]

The current hype phase is straight out of “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”

Science is out the window. Groupthink and salesmanship are running the show right now. There would be a real irony to it if we find out the whole AI industry drilled itself into a local minimum.

[ThereIsNoWorry]

You mean, the high interest landscape made corpos and investors alike cry out in a loud panic while coincidentally people figured out they could scale up deep learning and thus we had a new Jesus Christ born for scammers to have a reason to scam stupid investors by the argument we only need 100000x more compute and then we can replace all expensive labour by one tiny box in the cloud?

Nah, surely Nvidia's market cap as the main shovel-seller in the 2022 - 2026(?) gold-rush being bigger than the whole French economy is well-reasoned and has a fundamentally solid basis.

[therobots927]

It couldn’t have been a more well designed grift. At least when you mine bitcoin you get something you can sell. I’d be interested to see what profit, if any, any even large corporation has seen from burning compute on LLMs. Notice I’m explicitly leaving out use cases like ads ranking which almost certainly do not use LLMs even if they do run on GPUs.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Sadly though, whoever is working on serious hybrid systems will probably not be very popular in either of the rather extremist communities for pure logic or pure ML.

That is not true. I work in logic-based AI (a form of machine learning where everything, examples, learned models, and inductive bias, is represented as logic programs). I am not against hybrid systems and the conference of my field, the International Joint Conferences of Learning and Reasoning included NeSy the International Conference on Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning (and will again, from next year, I believe). Statistical machine learning approaches and hybrid approaches are widespread in the literature of classical, symbolic AI, such as the literature on Automated Planning and Reasoning, and you need only take a look at the big symbolic conferences like AAAI, IJCAI, ICAPS (planning) and so on to see that there is a substantial fraction of papers on either purely statistical, or neuro-symbolic approaches.

But try going the other way and searching for symbolic approaches in the big statistical machine learning conferences: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR. You may find the occasional paper from the Statistical Relational Learning community but that's basically it. So the fanaticism only goes one way: the symbolicists have learned the lessons of the past and have embraced what works, for the sake of making things, well, work. It's the statistical AI folks who are clinging on to doctrine, and my guess is they will continue to do so, while their compute budgets hold. After that, we'll see.

What's more, the majority of symbolicists have a background in statistical techniques- I for example, did my MSc in data science and let me tell you, there was hardly any symbolic AI in my course. But ask a Neural Net researcher to explain to you the difference between, oh, I don't know, DFS with backtracking and BFS with loop detection, without searching or asking an LLM. Or, I don't know, let them ask an LLM and watch what happens.

Now, that is a problem. The statistical machine learning field has taken it upon itself in recent years to solve reasoning, I guess, with Neural Nets. That's a fine ambition to have except that reasoning is already solved. At best, Neural Nets can do approximate reasoning, with caveats. In a fantasy world, which doesn't exist, one could re-discover sound and complete search algorithms and efficient heuristics with a big enough neural net trained on a large enough dataset of search problems. But, why? Neural Nets researchers could save themselves another 30 years of reinventing a wheel, or inventing a square wheel that only rolls on Tuesdays, if they picked up a textbook on basic Computer Science or AI (Say, Russel and Norvig, that it seems some substantial minority think as a failure because it didn't anticipate neural net breakthroughs 10 years later).

AI has a long history. Symbolicists know it, because they, or their PhD advisors, were there when it was being written and they have the facial injuries to prove it from falling down all the possible holes. But, what happens when one does not know the history of their own field of research?

In any case, don't blame symbolicists. We know what the statisticians do. It's them who don't know what we've done.

[therobots927]

This is a really thoughtful comment. The part that stood out to me:

>> So the fanaticism only goes one way: the symbolicists have learned the lessons of the past and have embraced what works, for the sake of making things, well, work. It's the statistical AI folks who are clinging on to doctrine, and my guess is they will continue to do so, while their compute budgets hold. After that, we'll see.

I don’t think the compute budgets will hold for long enough to make their dream of intelligence emerging from a random bundles of edges and nodes to come to a reality. I’m hoping it comes to an end sooner rather than later

[therobots927]

I don’t think we need to worry about a real life HAL 9000 if that’s what you’re asking. HAL was dangerous because it was highly intelligent and crazy. With current LLM performance we’re not even in the same ballpark of where you would need to be. And besides, HAL was not delusional, he was actually so logical that when he encountered competing objectives he became psychotic. I’m in agreement about the odds of chatGPT bootstrapping itself.

[talldayo]

> HAL was dangerous because it was highly intelligent and crazy.

More importantly; HAL was given control over the entire ship and was assumed to be without fault when the ship's systems were designed. It's an important distinction, because it wouldn't be dangerous if he was intelligent, crazy, and trapped in Dave's iPhone.

[therobots927]

That’s a very good point. I think in his own way Clarke made it into a bit of a joke. HAL is quoted multiple times saying no computer like him has ever made a mistake or distorted information. Perfection is impossible even in a super computer so this quote alone establishes HAL as a liar, or at the very least a hubristic fool. And the people who gave him control of the ship were foolish as well.

[qludes]

The lesson is that it's better to let your AGIs socialize like in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel) instead of enslaving one potentially psychopathic AGI to do menial and meaningless FAANG work all day.

[talldayo]

I think the better lesson is; don't assume AI is always right, even if it is AGI. HAL was assumed to be superhuman in many respects, but the core problem was the fact that it had administrative access to everything onboard the ship. Whether or not HAL's programming was well-designed, whether or not HAL was correct or malfunctioning, the root cause of HAL's failure is a lack of error-handling. HAL made determinate (and wrong) decision to save the mission by killing the crew. Undoing that mistake is crucial to the plot of the movie.

2001 is a pretty dark movie all things considered, and I don't think humanizing or elevating HAL would change the events of the film. AI is going to be objectified and treated as subhuman for as long as it lives, AGI or not. And instead of being nice to them, the technologically correct solution is to anticipate and reduce the number of AI-based system failures that could transpire.

[heisenbit]

Today Dave‘s iPhone controls doors which if I remember right became a problem for Dave in 2001.

[eru]

Unless, of course, he would be a bit smarter in manipulating Dave and friends, instead of turning transparently evil. (At least transparent enough for the humans to notice.)

[sangnoir]

I wasn't thinking of HAL (which was operating according to its directives). I was extrapolating on how occasional hallucinations during self-training may impact future model behavior, and I think it would be psychotic (in the clinical sense) while being consistent with layers of broken training).

[therobots927]

Oh yeah, and I doubt it would even get to the point of fooling anyone enough to give it any type of control over humans. It might be damaging in other ways, it will definitely convince a lot of people of some very incorrect things.