[ExI] all we are is just llms was

Mon Apr 24 07:05:13 UTC 2023

There is not a single red pixel in this red strawberry picture.... yeah, it
was an illusion after all, as old Giovanni said...

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:55 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Brent,
> I hope we are done talking about this redness quality business once for
> all. Watch this and it should be enough to say "we rest our case".
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJBfn07gZ30
>
> On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:51 PM Giovanni Santostasi <
> gsantostasi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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