Everything is not a nail... [LWN.net]

Everything is not a nail...

Posted Oct 26, 2024 13:11 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Everything is not a nail... by chuckwolber
Parent article: OSI readies controversial Open AI definition

> Today those qualia are small, so it is easy to dismiss their subjectivity. Scale that qualia up closer to the complexity of a human mind and the problem should be more clear.

And herein lies the entire problem with AI, imho.

The qualia (whatever that means) of the human brain is much LESS than we give it credit for. But it is QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT from what we call AI and LLM and that junk. AI and LLMs are bayesian inference machines. Human brains have external forces imposing a (not necessarily correct) definition of "right" and "wrong".

When a human brain messes up, its bayesian machine is likely to get eaten by a lion, or gored by a wildebeest, or whatever. When a computer bayesian machine messes up, it's too expensive to retrain.

I've mentioned the crab before, but if a 6502-powered robot crab can cope easily with the complexities of the surf zone, why can't a million-pound AI tell the difference between a car and a tank ... (I suspect it's because the human brain, and maybe that crab?, had a whole bunch of specialist units which probably was much larger than the central bayesian machine - we're going down the wrong route ... again ...)

Cheers,
Wol

to post comments

Everything is not a nail...

Posted Oct 26, 2024 17:31 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> When a human brain messes up, its bayesian machine is likely to get eaten by a lion, or gored by a wildebeest, or whatever.

That's extremely rare occurance.

> When a computer bayesian machine messes up, it's too expensive to retrain.

That could be true for LLMs, today, but many smaller-scaled AI models are retrained from scratch rountinely.

Pretty soon there would be more LLMs retrained from scratch than100 or 200 billions of people that ever lived on this planet.

Would that mean that LLMs would achieve parity with humans, when that would happen? Hard to predict… my gut feeling is that no, that wouldn't happen – but not because encounters with lions or wildebeests made humans are that much better, but because nature invented a lot of tricks over billions of years that we don't know how to replicate… yet.

> I've mentioned the crab before, but if a 6502-powered robot crab can cope easily with the complexities of the surf zone, why can't a million-pound AI tell the difference between a car and a tank

It could. In fact today AI already does smaller number of mistakes than human on such tasks.

Yes, AI does different mistakes, but average precision is better.

> I suspect it's because the human brain, and maybe that crab?, had a whole bunch of specialist units which probably was much larger than the central bayesian machine - we're going down the wrong route ... again ...

We just tend to dismiss the issues with “optical illusions” and exaggerate AI mistakes. To feel better about themselves, maybe?

When you are shown picture where the exact same color looks “white” in one place and “black” in the other place you don't even need AI to reveal the difference, simple sheet of paper is enough – but that's not perceived as human brain deficiency because we all are built the same and all fall prey to the exact same illusion.

AIs are built differently and they are fooled by different illusions than what humans misperceive – and that difference is, in our arrogance, treated as “human superiority”.

It's only when AI starts doing things so much better than human, beats human so supremely decisively, when there are no doubt that AI is “head and shoulders” above human for this or that task… only then humans… redefine this particular task as “not really important”. Like it happened to go and chess, among other things.