>LLMs do not "reason"; they do not "learn" or "develop" anything of their own volition. They are (advanced) statistical models.
As a non-expert in the field I was hesitant at the time to disagree with the legions of experts who last year denounced Blake Lemoine and his claims. I know enough to know, though, of the AI effect <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect>, a longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 many people would have in their homes, and carry around in their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on a variety of topics.
To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and sentience—and what it takes for them to emerge—as the experts who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs have made me more so.
I didn't say it's "not real AI", but of course whether I meant that or not comes down to a definition of "AI".
In academia (where I am, though my specialty is a step removed), "AI" is exactly the region of research concerned with statistical problem-solving. Machine learning is sometimes synonymous, though I haven't been able to determine whether this is consistent among all self-described AI researchers or just some of them.
Systems like GPTs are not capable of "thought", full stop. There is no ambiguity. If this is hard for you to accept, I'm sorry, but it is a fact. They have no agency.
I saw someone sketch a good explanation. They were responding to a claim that Chat GPT could "pass the Harvard admissions process". While it is true that the system can access sufficient data to respond accurately to questions on an exam, and it could be prompted to generate an essay, it cannot of its own volition choose to submit an application. It doesn't even "know" that Harvard is a real place to which it can apply, nor does it "understand" how it could go about "learning" how to find out about these things it does not know. It simply isn't capable of these things. (And even if it were that wouldn't necessarily be evidence of intelligence, but for now it's a sufficient distinguisher.)
> Wat
Can you explain what about my last point was "wat"-worthy? Do you disagree that it is morally problematic to pretend a thing is sentient when it is in fact not?
As a non-expert in the field I was hesitant at the time to disagree with the legions of experts who last year denounced Blake Lemoine and his claims. I know enough to know, though, of the AI effect <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect>, a longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 many people would have in their homes, and carry around in their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on a variety of topics.
To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and sentience—and what it takes for them to emerge—as the experts who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs have made me more so.
I found this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0>
>Anthropomorphizing them is not just technically incorrect, but morally disingenuous.
Wat