We’re all just elementary particles being clumped together in energy gradients, therefore my little computer project is sentient—this is getting absurd.
Well you can say it doesn't understand, but then you don't have a very useful definition of the word.
You can say this is not 'real' understanding but you like many others will be unable to clearly distinguish this 'fake' understanding from 'real' understanding in a verifiable fashion, so you are just playing a game of meaningless semantics.
You really should think about what kind of difference is supposedly so important yet will not manifest itself in any testable way - an invented one.
Sorry, this is more about the discussion of this article than the article itself. The moving goal posts that acolytes use to declare consciousness are becoming increasingly cult-y.
We spent 40 years moving the goal posts on what constitutes AI. Now we seem to have found an AI worthy of that title and instead start moving the goal posts on "consciousness", "understanding" and "intelligence".
Just as long as we continue to recognize that it is a tool that humans can use, and don't start trying to treat it as a human, or as a life, and I won't complain
I'm saving my anger for when idiots start to argue that LLMs are alive and deserve human rights
We don’t even have a good way to quantify human ability. The idea that we could suddenly develop a technique to quantify human ability because we now have a piece of technology that would benefit from that quantification is absurd.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to measure the ability of an LLM. But it does mean that the techniques used to quantify an LLMs ability are not something that can be applied to humans outside of narrow focus areas.
Indeed, science is a process of discovery and adjusting goals and expectations. It is not a mountain to be summited. It is highly telling that the LLM boosters do not understand this. Those with a genuine interest in pushing forward our understanding of cognition do.
They believe that once they reach this summit everything else will be trivial problems that can be posed to the almighty AI. It's not that they don't understand the process, it's that they think AI is going to disrupt that process.
They literally believe that the AI will supersede the scientific process. It's crypto shit all over again.
The mechanical Turk did something truly magical. Everyone stopped moaning that automation was impossible because most machines (while some absurdly complex) were many orders of magnitude simpler than chess.
The initial LLMs simply lied about everything. If you happened to know something it was rather shocking but for topics you knew nothing about you got a rather convincing answer. Then the arms race begun and now the lies are so convincing we are at viable robot overlords.
> We spent 40 years moving the goal posts on what constitutes AI.
Who is "we"?
I think of "AI" as a pretty all-encompassing term. ChatGPT is AI, but so is the computer player in the 1995 game Command and Conquer, among thousands of other games. Heck, I might even call the ghosts in Pac-man "AI", even if their behavior is extremely simple, predictable, and even exploitable once you understand it.
Look I’m no stranger to love. you know the rules and so do I… you can’t find this conversation with any other guy.
But since the parent was making a meta commentary on this conversation I’d like to introduce everyone here as Kettle to a friend of mine known as #000000
You can say this is not 'real' understanding but you like many others will be unable to clearly distinguish this 'fake' understanding from 'real' understanding in a verifiable fashion, so you are just playing a game of meaningless semantics.
You really should think about what kind of difference is supposedly so important yet will not manifest itself in any testable way - an invented one.