Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

@lightstream I wouldn’t, because I am not the one making claims about “AGI” being just around the corner.

That’s the thing, OpenAI and others benefiting from the hype make extraordinary claims – along the lines of “human-level AGI is just around the corner” – so they are the ones that need to define their terms.

You are asking all the right questions here (“which human are we talking about”), the point is that these questions should be answered by those who make such extraordinary claims.

@JayDee AI as the wide, specialized field you mention makes no claims about building anything with *actual* human-like intelligence, I feel. People who understand how the math and code work in these systems know better than to do that.

And yes, “AGI” debate is a philosophical one. The problem is it is not recognized as such, because of the AI hype. People seem to think that AGI is “inevitable” and “just around the corner”, because salespeople from companies that benefit from that hype say so.

@JayDee I didn’t say you are, I clarified in my later post. Sorry, should have been clearer.

I am vehemently agreeing with you here, in fact.

The context is the conversation above in the thread, where it was claimed that “AGI” is “pretty inevitable”.

And the point I’ve been making is:

1. we don’t have a good definition of what “intelligence” is, in the sense presumably used above;

2. if we decide to use a somewhat simplistic definition, the whole “AI” issue stops being all that exciting.

@JayDee so two things.

First: sure, we can redefine words in any way we want, but then:

1. talking about “AI” becomes much less interesting if it merely means “walking a decision tree based on data coming from external sensors”

2. the whole talk about “intelligence” becomes a bait-and-switch, as the conversation started with the term “intelligence” being used in the general sense we tend to apply to people and some animals.

@ContrarianTrail

> A chess engine is intelligent in one thing: playing chess

No. That’s not how the adjective “intelligent” works, outside of marketing drivel of course (“intelligent washing machine” etc).

> Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the artificial version of human cognitive capabilities

Can you give a definition of “intelligence” or “human cognitive abilities” that would allow us to somehow unequivocably establish that “X is intelligent” or “X has human cognitive abilities”?

@ContrarianTrail @JRepin well I guess somebody would first need to clearly define what “AGI” is. Currently it’s just “whatever the techbro hypers want it to be”.

And then there’s the matter (ha!) of your assumption that we understand all laws of physics necessary that “matter obeys”, or that we can reasonably understand them. That’s a pretty strong assumption: individual human minds are pretty limited and communication adds overhead, and we might reach a point where we’re stuck.

@Marsupial you might want to read up on Luddites. Here’s a good place to start:
https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/187_the_real_history_of_the_luddites_w_brian_merchant

@MayonnaiseArch

@Mysteriarch @fer0n fool me once, shame on you; but go right ahead and fool me twice or thrice, why not!

@DolphinMath correct. But Vaultwarden is not the official thing. Not saying it’s bad, just something to keep in mind.

@xenspidey @DolphinMath one note though, BitWarden requires MSSQL (you read that right, Microsoft SQL Server).

@Natanael you seem to continue to focus on PDSes even though I explicitly said it doesn’t matter which PDS you’re on, the secondary centralization (and thus control) happens in the “reach” layer, outside of what PDSes do in ATproto.

In other words, changing a PDS gives you way, way less agency in BS, compared to agency you get with changing an instance on Fedi.

BS is designed to make that secondary centralization happen, and to be where the real power in the system is.

@Natanael

> The Mastodon fediverse have stronger network effects because big servers can enforce policies on other servers to stay federated. It’s complicated for users to move servers.

Well, I wrote about this as well, so I think I might not be missing these details:
https://rys.io/en/168.html

@Natanael enshittification is about power, and ATproto is designed to look decentralized but enable secondary centralization where it matters for power dynamics in the network, in a way that the Fediverse very much doesn’t:
https://rys.io/en/167.html

(shameless plug, I wrote that, but it dives somewhat deep into the “why” of what I said above)

tl;dr it doesn’t matter which PDS you use if everyone is still beholden to the same entity that controls the “reach” layer in BS.

@SkepticalButOpenMinded

@Flax_vert or “ex-Twitter”

@Floon

@lloram239 that’s really akin to claiming that a mannequin is a human being because it really really looks alike.

The “predictions about the world” you refer to here are instead predictions about the text. They are not based on a model of the world, they are based on loads and loads of text the model was trained on.

I don’t have to prove ChatGPT is not intelligent. That would be proving a negative. The burden of proof is on those claiming that it is intelligent.

@lloram239 ah, so you’re down to throwing epithets like “idiotic” around. Clearly a mark of thoughtful and well-reasoned argument.

> Predictions about the world are probabilistic by nature, since the future hasn’t happened yet.

Thing is: GPT doesn’t make predictions about the world, it makes predictions about what the next word, phrase, sentence should be in a text, based on the prompt and the corpus it got “trained” on.

@lloram239

> But human sensory inputs aren’t special

It’s not about sensory inputs, it’s about having a model of the world and objects in it and ability to make predictions.

> The important part is that the AI can figure out the pattern in the data it does get and so far AI systems are doing very well.

GPT cannot “figure” anything out. That’s the point. It only probabilistically generates text. That’s what it does, there is no model of the world behind it, no predictions, no"figuring out".

@jalda

> Circular reasoning. “LLMs are different from human brains because they are different”.

LLMs are different than human brains because human brains are biological organs and LLMs are probability distributions over sequences of words. These are two completely different classes of entities. Like, I don’t know how much more different two things *can* even be.

Are you claiming they are literally the same? Are you saying they are functionally the same? What *are* you claiming here, exactly?

@lloram239 great. ChatGPT and other LLMs demonstrably lack the ability to model the world and make predictions based on such models:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90877523/chatgpt-doesnt-know-what-its-saying

Glad we agree they’re not intelligent, then!

@jalda

> We do it routinely. It is called Education System.

That relies on human brains that are trained. LLMs are not human brains. “Training” them is not the same thing as teaching humans about something. Human brains are way more complicated than just a bunch of weighed correlations.

And if you do want to claim it is in fact the same thing, we’re back to square one: please provide proof that it is.