I think the comparison to brown rat brains is a huge mistake. It seems pretty apparent (at least from my personal usage of LLMs in different contexts) that modern AI is much smarter than a brown rat at some things (I don't think brown rats can pass the bar exam), but in other cases it becomes apparent that it isn't "intelligent" at all in the sense that it becomes clear that it's just regurgitating training data, albeit in a highly variable manner.
I think LLMs and modern AI are incredibly amazing and useful tools, but even with the top SOA models today it becomes clearer to me the more I use them that they are fundamentally lacking crucial components of what average people consider "intelligence". I'm using quotes deliberately because the debate about "what is intelligence" feels like it can go in circles endlessly - I'd just say that the core concept of what we consider understanding, especially as it applies to creating and exploring novel concepts that aren't just a mashup of previous training examples, appears to be sorely missing from LLMs.
> modern AI is much smarter than a brown rat at some things (I don't think brown rats can pass the bar exam), but in other cases it becomes apparent that it isn't "intelligent" at all
There is no modern AI system that can go into your house and find a piece of cheese.
The whole notion that modern AI is somehow "intelligent", yet can't tell me where the dishwasher is in my house is hilarious. My 3 year old son can tell me where the dishwasher is. A well trained dog could do so.
It's the result of a nerdy definition of "intelligence" which excludes anything to do with common sense, street smarts, emotional intelligence, or creativity (last one might be debatable but I've found it extremely difficult to prompt AI to write amazingly unique and creative stories reliably)
The AI systems need bodies to actually learn these things.
If you upload pictures of every room in your house to an LLM it can definitely tell you where the dishwasher is. If your argument is just that they cant walk around your house so they cant be intelligent I think thats pretty clearly wrong.
Could it tell the difference between a dishwasher and a picture of a dishwasher on a wall? Or one painted onto a wall? Or a toy dishwasher?
There is an essential idea of what makes something a dishwasher that LLM's will never be able to grasp no matter how many models you throw at them. They would have to fundamentally understand that what they are "seeing" is an electronic appliance connected to the plumbing that washes dishes. The sound of a running dishwasher, the heat you feel when you open one, and the wet, clean dishes is also part of that understanding.
If I am limited to looking at pictures, then I am at the same disadvantage as the LLM, sure. The point is that people can experience and understand objects from a multitude of perspectives, both with our senses and the mental models we utilize to understand the object. Can LLMs do the same?
That's not a disadvantage of LLM. You can start sending images from a camera moving around and you'll get many views as well. The capabilities here are the same as the eye-brain system - it can't move independently either.
You really need to define what you mean by generally intelligent in that case. Otherwise, if you require free movement for generally intelligent organisms, you may be making interesting claims about bedridden people.
A trained image recognition model could probably recognize a dishwasher from an image.
But that won't be the same model that writes bad poetry or tries to autocomplete your next line of code. Or control the legs of a robot to move towards the dishwasher while holding a dirty plate. And each has a fair bit of manual tuning and preprocessing based on its function which may simply not be applicable to other areas even with scale. The best performing models aren't just taking in unstructured untyped data.
Even the most flexible models are only tackling a small slice of what "intelligence" is.
Technically yes they can run functions. There were experiments of Claude used to run a robot around a house. So technically, we are not far at all and current models may even be able to do it.
So are you saying people who have CIPA are less intelligent for never having experienced a hot shower? By that same logic, does its ability to experience more colors increase the intelligence of a mantis shrimp?
Perhaps your own internal definition of intelligence simply deviates significantly from the common, "median" definition.
It's the totality of experiences that make an individual. Most humans that I'm aware of have a greater totality of experiences that make them far smarter than any modern AI system.
Greater totality of experiences than having read the whole internet? Obviously they are very different kind of experiences, but a greater totality? I'm not so sure.
Here is what we know: The Pile web scrape is 800GB. 20 years of human experience at 1kB/sec is 600GB. Maybe 1kB/sec is bad estimate. Maybe sensory input is more valuable than written text. You can convince me. But next challenge, some 10^15 seconds of currently existing youtube video, that's 2 million years of audiovisual experience, or 10^9GB at the same 1kB/sec.
I feel the jump from "reading the internet" to experience has a gap in reasoning. I'm not experienced in philosophy or* logic enough(no matter how much I read, heh) to articulate it, but seems to get at the person's idea of lacking street smarts, common sense. An adult with basic common sense could probably filter out false information quicker since I can get Claude to tell me false info regularly(I still like em, pretty entertaining) which has not only factual but contradictory flaws any person wouldn't make. Like recently I had two pieces of data, then when comparing them it was blatently incorrectly(they were very close, but claude said one was 8x bigger for... idk why.)
Another commenter also mentioned sensory input when talking about the brown rat. As someone who is constantly fascinated at the brains ability to reason/process stuff before I'm even conscious of it, I feel this Stat is Underrated. I'm taking in and monitoring like 15 sensations of touch at all time. Something entering my visual field coming towards me can be deflected in half a second all while still understanding the rest of my surroundings, and where it might be safe to deflect an object. The brain is constantly calculating depth perception and stereo location on every image and sound we hear - also with the ability to screen out the junk or alter our perception accurately(knowing the correct color of items regardless of diff in color temp).
I do concede that's a heck of a lot of video data. It does have similar issues to what I said(lacks touch, often no real stereo location, good greenscreen might convince an AI of something a person intuitively knows is impossible) but the scale alone certainly adds a lot. That could potentially make up for what I see as a hugely overlooked thing as far as stimulus. I am monitoring and adjusting like, hundreds of parameters a second subconsciously. Like everything in my visual field. I don't think it can be quantified accurately how many things we consciously and subconsciously process, but I have the feeling it's a staggering amount.
The people that have have barely used the internet are often far better conversation (and often more useful in the economy) than people who are addicted to the internet.
While interesting, this is a separate thought experiment with its own quirks. Sort of a strawman, since my argument is formulated differently and simply argues that AIs need to be more than brains in jars for them to be considered generally intelligent.
And that the only reason we think AIs can just be brains in jars is because many of the people developing them consider themselves as simply brains in jars.
Not really. The point of it is considering whether physical experience creates knowledge that is impossible to get otherwise. Thats the argument you are making no? If Mary learns nothing new when seeing red for the first time an AI would also learn nothing new when seeing red for the first time.
> Do they know what a hot shower feels like?
They can describe it. But do they actually know? Have they experienced it
Mary in that thought experiment is not an LLM that has learned via text. She's acquired "all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes". This does not actually describe modern LLMs. It actually better describes a robot that has transcribed the location, temperature, and velocity of water drops from a hot shower to its memory. Again, this thought experiment has its own quirks.
Also, it is an argument against physicalism, which I have no interest in debating. While it's tangentially related, my point is not for/against physicalism.
My argument is about modern AI and it's ability to learn. If we put touch sensors, eyes, nose, a mechanism to collect physical data (legs) and even sex organs on an AI system, then it is more generally intelligent than before. It will have learned in a better fashion what a hot shower feels like and will be smarter for it.
> While it's tangentially related, my point is not for/against physicalism.
I really disagree. Your entire point is about physicalism. If physicalism is true than an AI does not necessarily learn in a better fashion what a hot shower feels like by being embodied. In a physicalist world it is conceivable to experience that synthetically.
There isn't a serious proof that 1+1=2, because it's near enough axiomatic. In the last 150 years or so, we've been trying to find very general logical systems in which we can encode "1", "2" and "+" and for which 1+1=2 is a theorem, and the derivations are sometimes non-trivial, but they are ultimately mere sanity checks that the logical system can capture basic arithmetic.
If this is new, then you're one of today's luck 10,000![2] Serious logical foundations take a lot of time and exposition to start from fundamentals. Dismissing them as non-serious because GP's argument failed to consider them is misguided, IMHO.
Yes, as I said: systems such as Russell's encoded "1", "2" and "+" in such a way that the theorem "1 + 1 = 2" is non-trivial to prove. This doesn't say anything about the difficulty of proving that 1 + 1 = 2, but merely the difficulty of proving it in a particular logical encoding. Poincare ridiculed the Principia on this point almost immediately.
And had Russell failed to prove that 1 + 1 = 2 in his system, it would not have cast one jot of doubt on the fact that 1 + 1 = 2. It would only have pointed to the inadequacy of the Principia.
Am I the only one that always felt like that xkcd post came from a place of insane intellectual elitism?
I teach multiple things online and in person... language like that seems like a great to lose a student. I'd quit as a student, it's so condescending sounding. It's only lucky because you get to flex ur knowledge!(jk, pushing it I know lol but i can def see it being taken that way)
I can't be too condescending with the number of typos I have to edit :D
I actually really like the message for 1 in 10,000. As a social outsider for much of my life, it helped me to learn that the way people dismissed my questions about common (to them) topics was more about their empathy and less about me.
But, these sorts of things are difficult to communicate via text media, so we thus persist.
Yeah I guess I've had only a few people be the other person that treated me right as the 1 - I feel ya on being an outsider having things dismissed. Does make sense. Another person gave me a good alternate view as well.
On a side note my couple of times I thought I was treating someone to some great knowledge they should already know I'm pretty sure I came across as condescending. Not bc they didn't know it - i always aim to be super polite - just being young, stupid, and bad at communicating, heh.
The key thing to focus on with XKCD 1053, is that the alternative before that comic was to make fun of the person who didn't know there's a proof for, eg 1 + 1 = 2. "Oh, you didn't know there's a proof for that? are you an idiot? who doesn't know the proof for 1 + 1 = 2 by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell?", to which I think you could agree would put possible students off more by that than being told they're in luck today.
Ah okay that's a good read. I'm just always on edge about my language and sometimes view the worst possible interpretation rather than what most would read. I'm not a negative person... just goes back to some "protecting myself" instincts I unfortunately had to develop. Thanks for that view.
The subject has been debated ad nauseam by everyone like Descartes, Hume, Kant, and so on. If there were no one around to state 1 + 1 = 2, there would be no such statement. Hence, it does rely on at least 1 person's experience. Yours in fact, since everyone else could be an illusion.
That really makes no sense.. would you say someone who is disabled bellow the neck is not intellegent / has no common sense, street smaets, creativity, etc...?
Or would you say that you cannot judge the intellegence of someone by reading their books / exchanging emails with them?
Where do you think common sense, emotional intelligence, creativity, etc. come from? The spirit? Some magic brain juice? No, it comes from neurons, synapses, signals, chemicals, etc.
It doesn’t. Actually, quite a few of the early stages of evolution wouldn’t have any analogue to “care,” right? It just happened in this one environment, the most successful self-reproducing processes happened to be get more complex over time and eventually hit the point where they could do, and then even later define, things like “care.”
Find a piece of cheese pretty much anywhere in my home?
Or if we're comparing to a three year old, also find the dishwasher?
Closest I'm aware of is something by Boston Dynamics or Tesla, but neither would be as simple as asking it- wheres the dishwasher in my home?
And then if we compare it to a ten year old, find the woodstove in my home, tell me the temperature, and adjust the air intake appropriately.
And so on.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying there's no AI system that has this physical intelligence yet, because the robot technology isn't well developed/integrated yet.
For AI to be something more than a nerd it needs a body and I'm aware there are people working on it. Ironically, not the people claiming to be in search of AGI.
Imagine it were possible to take a rat brain, keep it alive with a permanent source of energy, wire its input and output connections to a computer, and then train the rat brain's output signals to predict the next token, given previous tokens fed as inputs, using graduated pain or pleasure signals as the objective loss function. All the neuron-neuron connections in that rain brain would eventually serve one, and only one, goal: predicting an accurate probability distribution over the next possible token, given previous tokens. The number of neuron-neuron connections in this "rat-brain-powered LLM" would be comparable to that of today's state-of-the-art LLMs.
This is less far-fetched than it sounds. Search for "organic deep neural networks" online.
Networks of rat neurons have in fact been trained to fly planes, in simulators, among other things.
I think LLMs and modern AI are incredibly amazing and useful tools, but even with the top SOA models today it becomes clearer to me the more I use them that they are fundamentally lacking crucial components of what average people consider "intelligence". I'm using quotes deliberately because the debate about "what is intelligence" feels like it can go in circles endlessly - I'd just say that the core concept of what we consider understanding, especially as it applies to creating and exploring novel concepts that aren't just a mashup of previous training examples, appears to be sorely missing from LLMs.