> What explains the emergent abilities of generative pre-trained transformers at massive-scale?
I don't see why the abilities couldn't be an encoded modelling of enough of the world to produce those abilities. It seems like a simple enough explanation. Less data, less room to build a model of how things work. More data, sufficient room to build a model.
Conway's Game of Life is then not conscious in and of itself, because there's not enough in its encoded data to result in emergent behaviour beyond what we see.
If we expand it to also include a vast amount of data such as a Turing machine running an LLM then we can reasonably say we are closer to saying that that configuration of it is conscious.
It's not the firing-of-neurons mechanism and its relevant complexity or simplicity that make us conscious or not.
It's not the GoL algorithm that would make the machine conscious either.
It's the emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system.
I personally think we'll need a few more feedback loops before you have more human-like intelligence. For example, a flock of LLM agent loops coming to consensus using short-term and long-term memory, and controlling realtime mechanical, visual and audio feedback systems, and potentially many other systems that don't mimic biological systems.
I also think people will still be debating this way beyond the singularity and never conceding special status to intelligence outside the animal kingdom or biological life.
It's quite a push for many people to even concede animals have intelligence.
For the extraordinary claims/evidence, it's also the case that almost any statement about what consciousness is in terms of biological intelligence is an extraordinary claim that goes beyond any evidence. All evidence comes from within the conscious experience of the individual themselves.
We can't know beyond our own senses whether perception exists outside of our own subjective experience. We cannot truly prove we are not a brain in a jar or a simulation. Anything beyond assertions about the present moment and the senses that the individual experiences are just pure leaps of faith based on the persistent illusion, or perceived persistent illusion of reality (or not).
We know really nothing of our own consciousness and it is by definition impossible to prove anything outside of it, from inside the framework of consciousness.
If we can somehow find a means to break outside of the pure speculation bubble of thoughts and sensations and somehow prove what human experience is, then we may be in a position to make assertions about missing evidence for other forms of intelligence or experience.
But until then definitions of both human and artificial intelligence remain an exercise for the reader.
People often point to the relative simplicity of the architecture and code as proof that the system can’t be doing whatever it is that consciousness does, but in doing so they ignore the vast size of the data those simple structures are operating over. Nobody can actually say whether consciousness is just emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system, and knowing how a system is built tells you nothing about whether it clears the bar for that kind of emergence. Architectural simplicity and total system complexity aren’t the same thing.
Ie the intelligence sits in the weights and may sit there in the synapses in our brains too.
When we talk about machines being simple mimicking entities we pay no attention to whether or not we are also simple mimicking entities.
Most other assertions in this topic regarding what consciousness truly is tend to be stated without evidence and exceedingly anthropocentric whilst requiring a higher and higher bar for anything that is not human and no justification for what human intelligence really entails.
I don't think "Sitting in an office you sit in every day" or "Sitting in your living room" are the same amount of bandwidth/storage as "Travelling around the moon". I'm sure we have compression algorithms for this stuff and it's somewhat related to novelty.
I'm aware of an association between perception of time to number of photons received in the eyes.
These relate to both how much time the events appear to take subjectively as well as how well remembered they are or how long they feel retrospectively. As in there is an actual physiological explanation for "time flies when you're having fun".
There probably is something to also be said for attention too. Increased awareness and attention will undoubtedly use up more 'bandwidth' or 'storage' too.
I saw a fancy HTML table generator that had so many parameters and flags and bells and whistles that it took IIRC hundreds of lines of code to save writing a similar amount of HTML in a handful of different places.
Yes the initial HTML looked similar in these few places, and the resultant usage of the abstraction did not look similar.
But it took a very long time reading each place a table existed and quite a bit longer working out how to get it to generate the small amount of HTML you wanted to generate for a new case.
Definitely would have opted for repetition in this particular scenario.
That seems to me like it just shifts the problem one level. Why are K's and Kikis spiky and why are B's and Boubas round. Why is it universal too across people with different writing systems and languages.
I think in this example those prep work items _are_ doing the thing.
But then telling people about a new product could also be doing the thing.
There’s definitely something to be said for defining what the thing really is being an important part of doing it, but that can also spiral out of control into not doing the thing.
I think thingness is more of a variable property of the current thing you are doing. Than a binary is or isn’t the thing.
All we can really do is regularly check how much the thingness of the current thing is aligned with the main thing’s thingness.
I love the irony in the pitting of the US vs China, Iran & Russia, whilst talking about stoking division.
Don't corollaries to your comments also apply at a higher level globally, or is there something special about considering countries as a grouping vs political parties?
Surely they're all just games we play in our minds and people kind of arbitrarily just agree that countries most definitely exist and this is my in-group, whereas others are enemies.
I don't see why the abilities couldn't be an encoded modelling of enough of the world to produce those abilities. It seems like a simple enough explanation. Less data, less room to build a model of how things work. More data, sufficient room to build a model.
Conway's Game of Life is then not conscious in and of itself, because there's not enough in its encoded data to result in emergent behaviour beyond what we see.
If we expand it to also include a vast amount of data such as a Turing machine running an LLM then we can reasonably say we are closer to saying that that configuration of it is conscious.
It's not the firing-of-neurons mechanism and its relevant complexity or simplicity that make us conscious or not.
It's not the GoL algorithm that would make the machine conscious either.
It's the emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system.
The system _including_ its data.