[ExI] all we are is just llms was

Mon Apr 24 06:51:17 UTC 2023

Brent,
Watch this is and tell me what you think and the relevance to your
understanding of yellowness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GInwvIsH-I

Giovanni

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:48 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> How language influences the color we see:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZJflerLZ4
>
> On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:01 PM Giovanni Santostasi <
> gsantostasi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Let say something provocatory, but I want really to drive the point. It
>> is childish to think that
>> [image: image.png] is not a symbol or a "word" that the brain invented
>> for itself. It is a nonverbal symbol but it is a symbol, it is a "word". It
>> is so obvious to me, not sure why it is not obvious to everybody else.
>> Would it be less mysterious if we heard a melody when we see a
>> strawberry (we hear a pitch when we hit a glass with a fork), if we heard a
>> little voice in our head that says "red", in fact we do when we learn to
>> associate [image: image.png] with "red". There are neuroscientists who
>> invented a vest with actuators that react when a magnetic field is present.
>> It is interesting but not something that should case endless debate about
>> the incommunicability of qualia. What is really interesting in an
>> experiment like that is how the brain rewires to adapt to this new sensory
>> information.
>>  The brain had to invent a way to alert us of the presence of objects
>> that reflect a certain range of light frequencies and it came up with [image:
>> image.png]. Great, what is the fuss about?
>> The communication issue is not an issue. Here I tell you what red means
>> to me, this: [image: image.png]. Do you agree that this is what you
>> "mainly" see when you see a strawberry or a firetruck? Yes, great, time to
>> move on. Can I robot learn what color a firetruck is? Yes, it is already
>> done, the word red suffices for all purposes necessary in terms of what
>> a conversational AI needs.
>> It is a different business for an AI that needs to move in the real world
>> and it is trivial to  teach an AI how to recognize
>> [image: image.png] if given optical sensors.
>> Nothing else is interesting or fascinating about this, not at least from
>> a scientific perspective. If silly philosophers want to debate this let
>> them, this why they are irrelevant in the modern world.
>>
>> Giovanni
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 10:42 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:16 PM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 4:17 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 3:06 AM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 5:44 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
>>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 21/04/2023 12:18, Gordon Swobe wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> > Yes, still, and sorry no, I haven't watched that video yet, but I
>>>>>>> will
>>>>>>> > if you send me the link again.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=xoVJKj8lcNQ&t=854s
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thank you to you and Keith. I watched the entire presentation. I
>>>>>> think the Center for Human Technology is behind the movement to pause AI
>>>>>> development. Yes? In any case, I found it interesting.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The thing (one of the things!) that struck me particularly was the
>>>>>>> remark about what constitutes 'language' for these systems, and that
>>>>>>> make me realise we've been arguing based on a false premise.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Near the beginning of the presentation, they talk of how, for
>>>>>> example, digital images can be converted into language and then processed
>>>>>> by the language model like any other language. Is that what you mean?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Converting digital images into language is exactly how I might also
>>>>>> describe it to someone unfamiliar with computer programming. The LLM is
>>>>>> then only processing more text similar in principle to English text that
>>>>>> describes the colors and shapes in the image. Each pixel in the image is
>>>>>> described in symbolic language as "red" or "blue" and so on. The LLM then
>>>>>> goes on to do what might be amazing things with that symbolic information,
>>>>>> but the problem remains that these language models have no access to the
>>>>>> referents. In the case of colors, it can process whatever
>>>>>> symbolic representation it uses for "red" in whatever programming language
>>>>>> in which it is written, but it cannot actually see the color red to ground
>>>>>> the symbol "red."
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> That was not my interpretation of his description. LLMs aren't used to
>>>>> process other types of signals (sound, video, etc.), it's the "transformer
>>>>> model" i.e. the 'T' in GPT.
>>>>>
>>>>> The transformer model is a recent discovery (2017) found to be adept
>>>>> at learning any stream of data containing discernable patterns: video,
>>>>> pictures, sounds, music, text, etc. This is why it has all these broad
>>>>> applications across various fields of machine learning.
>>>>>
>>>>> When the transformer model is applied to text (e.g., human language)
>>>>> you get a LLM like ChatGPT. When you give it images and text you get
>>>>> something not quite a pure LLM, but a hybrid model like GPT-4. If you give
>>>>> it just music audio files, you get something able to generate music. If you
>>>>> give it speech-text pairs you get something able to generate and clone
>>>>> speech (has anyone here checked out ElevenLabs?).
>>>>>
>>>>> This is the magic that AI researchers don't quite fully understand. It
>>>>> is a general purpose learning algorithm that manifests all kinds of
>>>>> emergent properties. It's able to extract and learn temporal or positional
>>>>> patterns all on its own, and then it can be used to take a short sample of
>>>>> input, and continue generation from that point arbitrarily onward.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think when the Google CEO said it learned translation despite not
>>>>> being trained for that purpose, this is what he was referring to: the
>>>>> unexpected emergent capacity of the model to translate Bengali text when
>>>>> promoted to do so. This is quite unlike how Google translate (GNMT) was
>>>>> trained, which required giving it many samples of explicit language
>>>>> translations between one language and another (much of the data was taken
>>>>> from the U.N. records).
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> That is all fine and good, but nowhere do I see any reason to think the
>>>> AI has any conscious understanding of its inputs or outputs.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Nor would I expect that you would when you define conscious
>>> understanding as "the kind of understanding that only human and some animal
>>> brains are capable of."
>>> It all comes down to definitions. If we can't agree on those, we will
>>> reach different conclusions.
>>>
>>>
>>>> You write in terms of the transformer, but to me all this is covered in
>>>> my phrase "the LLM then goes on to do what might be amazing things with
>>>> that symbolic information, but..."
>>>>
>>>
>>> Is there any information which isn't at its core "symbolic"? Or do you,
>>> like Brent, believe the brain communicates with other parts of itself using
>>> direct meaning, like with "��" such that no interpretation is needed?
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> >  (has anyone here checked out ElevenLabs?).
>>>>
>>>> Yes. About a week ago, I used GPT-4, ElevenLabs and D-ID.com in
>>>> combination. I asked GPT-4 to write a short speech about AI, then converted
>>>> it to speech, then created an animated version of my mugshot giving the
>>>> speech, then uploaded the resulting video to facebook where it amazed my
>>>> friends.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Nice.
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> These are impressive feats in software engineering, interesting and
>>>> amazing to be sure, but it's just code.
>>>>
>>>
>>> "Just code."
>>> You and I also do amazing things, and we're "just atoms."
>>>
>>> Do you see the problem with this sentence? Cannot everything be reduced
>>> in this way (in a manner that dismisses, trivializes, or ignores the
>>> emergent properties)?
>>>
>>> Jason
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> extropy-chat mailing list
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>>
>>
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