Ugh, I want this stupid AI trend to end… It’s so tiring hearing about all of this nonsense, plus it seems like every single company wants to cash in on it… I want my normal tech news back…
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The heart of that issue is that, broadly, AI is “something fine by a computer that would normally need to be done by a human.” When I was younger, the main (initial) goal of people developing AI was have a computer read a page of printed text out loud. Them, not too many years later, everyone had OCR and apps that could convert text to speech, so no one considered that AI anymore. Most ML applications would have been considered AI not very many years ago, but now they’re getting common enough that they didn’t meet the “needs to be done by a human” part now.
It’s hard to come up with a crisp definition of AI that doesn’t change over time.
From what I’ve read in different papers and talks on the subject the most concise definition for what a real AI would be is as follows.
The system must be self aware, understand it’s place in an environment, and be able to Reason, Adapt, and work towards internal goals.
If you ever want a good example of a failure of adaptability try playing chess with Chat GPT. Chat GPT is INCREDIBLE at what it does and is like nothing else we have ever seen.sometimes it seems downright spooky how good it can be at responding to normal requests and conversations. However It knows what chess is because it’s been trained on text that has the rules and the names of all the pieces. But because it is just a LLM which is effectively a word probability generator it can’t REASON what the game actually is or remember what pieces have been played or removed.
It’s like asking the deep blue chess computer to hold a conversation with you. It’s not happening.
Right now (to the best of my knowledge) there are no actual AI systems. Everything that is being called AI is just complex programs that are following EXACTLY what the programming has set in stone with no deviations.
The YouTube algorithm interestingly might be the one exception. If the rumors are to be. Believed it has grown so complex that YouTube itself doesn’t actually know how it works.
The system must be self aware That’s a long, long way off. What you’re describing is what is often called “Artificial General Intelligence (AGI),” or sometimes “Strong AI.” That’s not how most people currently define AI.
Right now (to the best of my knowledge) there are no actual AI systems. And that’s part of the reason most people in the field distinguish AGI from AI.
Everything that is being called AI is just complex programs that are following EXACTLY what the programming has set in stone with no deviations.
Hmmm, that’s problematic. All AI are programs, and all programs execute as they were written to do. For there to be flexibility, it has to be written into the code. You could argue than LLMs have a lot of flexibility written into them. If I ask one to tell me a story about an adolescent bee who is embarrassed because she has no stinger, it’s going to do that. It’s not like the LLM authors wrote a bee story into the code in case someone asked for one. But that also doesn’t make them self aware. You might also ask yourself how we’ll know if one is self aware.
LLM’s are a rather fascinating subject with lots of high level stuff that can be very daunting to understand. My laymans understanding is that generative systems such as Chat GPT are almost entirely probability based.
If I gave a LLM the following prompt: “in 2023 the current president of the United states is _____” fill in the blank. It would compare the prompt to its database of text and return Joe Biden with a 95% probability, Donald Trump with 4%, and some other random stuff for the remaining 1. It doesn’t actually KNOW what the prompt is and it doesn’t reason the answer. It’s only comparing what is in its database vs what’s been given to it.
This is why the larger the database it has the better answers it can return. True AI would be able to give you responses to anything having only been fed the contents of the dictionary. It could then reason what each word means and creatively form them into legible responses.
If you are interested in a very cool semi-interactive explanation of how generative systems work check out this website. I found it very fascinating.
It doesn’t actually KNOW what the prompt is and it doesn’t reason the answer.
Right, no AI “knows” anything. To know someone implies understanding and, like we said earlier, AIs are just computer programs; they don’t know anything, they just provide an output based on an input.
Two areas that are fun to play with LLMs in are math and cooking. Math has crisp rules and answers can be shown to be right or wrong. LLMs get a lot of complex math problems wrong. They will give you something that looks right, because their model includes what an answer should look like, but all they’re doing is giving an answer that its model shows looks like satisfies the prompt.
Cooking is similar. There’s no crisp right or wrong, butThe same process is at play. If you ask it for a recipe for something uncommon, it’s going to give you one, and it will likely have the right kind of ingredients, but if you make it there’s a decent chance it will taste terrible.
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