/u/outwrangle before everything went to shit in 2020, /u/emma_lazarus for a while after that, now I’m all queermunist!
Beijing is right to see exporting AI hardware and models as leverage. Each Nvidia chip sent abroad is a new point on the board for American software and values. Every U.S.-branded LLM shapes AI norms globally.
Who was it that said you need read business press if you want to know what’s really going on in the world?
This just gives the game away. Imperialism is invisible in the rest of the media, but wsj just come out and say it.
You have to check it every single time, though, erasing any time savings. You’re saving effort, maybe, but not time.
But doesn’t the LLM sometimes churn out tedious garbage that you have to fix, thus not actually saving time?
It’s very relevant, because this is the reason they hallucinate. They’re just completing the pattern, no matter how nonsensical it is, because they don’t even know what they’re doing. They don’t reason, they just regurgitate whatever fits the pattern. There’s no awareness of what they’re saying, there’s just a logic chain that says “if I say this, then I say this next” without concern about context or reality. No reason, no awareness, no thought.
It does not think it’s human. It’s just mindlessly regurgitating words to fit a pattern. That’s it.
No it doesn’t, it doesn’t even think.
What is the reason you think philosophy of the mind exists as a field of study?
In part, so we don’t assign intelligence to mindless, unaware, unthinking things like slime mold - it’s so we keep our definitions clear and useful, so we can communicate about and understand what intelligence even is.
What you’re doing actually creates an unclear and useless definition that makes communication harder and spreads misunderstanding. Your definition of intelligence, which is what the AI companies use, has made people more confused than ever about “intelligence” and only serves the interests of the companies for generating hype and attracting investor cash.
Let me rephrase. If your definition of intelligence includes slime mold then the term is not very useful.
There’s a reason philosophy of the mind exists as a field of study. If we just assign intelligence to anything that can solve problems, which is what you seem to be doing, we are forced to assign intelligence to things which clearly don’t have minds and aren’t aware and can’t think. That’s a problem.
If your definition of intelligence doesn’t include awareness it’s not very useful.
My understanding is that the reason LLMs struggle with solving math and logic problems is that those have certain answers, not probabilistic ones. That seems pretty fundamentally different from humans! In fact, we have a tendency to assign too much certainty to things which are actually probabilistic, which leads to its own reasoning errors. But we can also correctly identify actual truth, prove it through induction and deduction, and then hold onto that truth forever and use it to learn even more things.
We certainly do probabilistic reasoning, but we also do axiomatic reasoning i.e. more than probability engines.
Slime mold can solve mazes.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
What? No.
Chatbots can’t think because they literally aren’t designed to think. If you somehow gave a chatbot a body it would be just as mindless because it’s just a probability engine.
Right, that’s the point of the “taxpayer” dog whistle. It trains people to think that poor people don’t pay taxes, and implies they’re lesser members of society because of it.
They certainly pay sales taxes, possibly property taxes too, they probably have to pay fines because the cops love to prey on the poor, and there’s also fees to use government services. That’s all taxes.
But there’s this concentrated attempt to denigrate people with lower income as useless eaters that don’t contribute to society, and so they don’t think any of that counts.
They don’t believe anyone under a certain income pays taxes. “Taxpayer” just means “upper income tax bracket” in their mind.
My definition of artificial is a system that was consciously engineered by humans.
And humans consciously decided what data to include, consciously created most of the data themselves, and consciously annotated the data for training. Conscious decisions are all over the dataset, even if they didn’t design the neural network directly from the ground up. The system still evolved from conscious inputs, you can’t erase its roots and call it natural.
Human-like object concept representations emerge from datasets made by humans, because humans made them.
I’m saying that the terms “natural” and “artificial” are in a dialectical relationship, they define each other by their contradictions. Those words don’t mean anything once you include everything humans do as natural; you’ve effectively defined “artificial” out of existence and as a result also defined “natural” out of existence.
If we define human inputs as “natural” then the word basically ceases to mean anything.
It’s the equivalent of saying that paintings and sculptures emerge naturally because artists are human and humans are natural.
LLMs create a useful representation of the world that is similar to our own when we feed them our human created+human curated+human annotated data. This doesn’t tell us much about the nature of large language models nor the nature of object concept representations, what it tells us is that human inputs result in human-like outputs.
Claims about “nature” are much broader than the findings warrant. We’d need to see LLMs fed entirely non-human datasets (no human creation, no human curation, no human annotation) before we could make claims about what emerges naturally.
Well, yeah, government contracts are going to be the only way any of them make money once the AI bubble pops/deflates.