> This kind of facile moving the goalposts is imho a cheap shot and (not imho, fact) is a recurring phenomenon as we make incremental progress toward AI.
I think you missed my point. I think we're going in the wrong direction for AI entirely, and these "advances" are fundamentally misguided. OpenAI is explicitly about "intelligence," and so we should question if this is in fact that.
It's clear that humans have fundamental intelligence much better than all of this stuff with 6 orders of magnitude less input (at least of the same data sort) on a problem.
Perhaps it would be better to say, "I think the ML winter is just around the corner" as opposed to "the AI winter is just around the corner." That said, this really is math, and these algos still don't actually do anything resembling true intelligence.
It’s actually about AI which is distinct from intelligence.
>6 orders of magnitude less input
That is utterly mistaken.
We have the input of millions of generations of evolution which have shaped our brains and given us a lot of instinctive knowledge that we do not need to learn from environmental input that happens during our lifetime.
Instead it was learned over the course of billions of years, during the lifetimes of other organisms that preceded us.
Our brain structure was developed and tuned by all these inputs to have some built in pretrained models. That’s what instincts are. Billions of years in the making. Millions, at the very least, if you want to restrict it to recent primates, although doing so is nonsensical.
What's absolutely crazy is somehow we think of our DNA base pairs as somehow more important than the physical context that DNA ends up in (society, humans, talking, etc.)
We have the ability to be intelligent and make thoughts with 1 millionth the amount of textual data as this OpenAI GPT-3 study. Maybe... just maybe... intelligence is far more related to things other than just having more data.
I'll actually expand on this and throw this out there: intelligence is in a way antagonistic to more data.
A more intelligent agent needs less knowledge to make a better decision. It's like a function that can do the same computation with fewer inputs. A less intelligent agent requires a lookup table of previously computed intelligent things instead of figuring it out on its own. I think all these "AI" studies are glorified lookup tables.
Throw some novel text prompt/task at it and see what happens. If it was just "glorified lookup tables" then the result should be consistently garbage.
Note in particular that "like a function that can do the same computation with fewer inputs" maps very well to GPT-3 - it can complete many interesting tasks by just having a few samples provided to it, instead of having to fine-tune it with more training.
> Note in particular that "like a function that can do the same computation with fewer inputs" maps very well to GPT-3 - it can complete many interesting tasks by just having a few samples provided to it, instead of having to fine-tune it with more training.
The reason it doesn't need more training is because it's already trained itself with millions of lifetimes of human data and encoded that in the parameters!
Humans aren't born trained with data. The fact that we're throwing more and more data at this problem is crazy. The compression ratio of GPT-3 is worse than GPT-2.
> The reason it doesn't need more training is because it's already trained itself with millions of lifetimes of human data and encoded that in the parameters!
You know what else is trained by the experiences of thousands of individual (and billions of collective) human lifetimes of data? And several trillions of non-human ones?
> Humans aren't born trained with data.
That's either very wrong or about to evolve into a no true scotsman regarding what counts as data.
AKA "why is it so hard to swat a fly?" because they literally have a direct linkage betweeen sensing incoming air pressure and jumping. Thats why fly swatters don't make a lot of air pressure.
Why do you yank your hand back when you get burned? It's not a controlled reaction. Where did you learn it? You didn't.
If you think the brain is much more than a chemical computer you are sadly mistaken. I would encourage you (not really but it's funny to say) to go experiment with psychedelics and steroids and you will quickly realize that these substances can take over your own perceived intelligence.
The most fascinating of all of this is articles/documentaries about trans people that have started taking hormones and how their perception of the world -drastically- changed. From "feeling" a fast car all of a sudden, to being able to visualize flavors. It's absolutely amazing.
Humans are exposed to much more input than just the things they read. Think of every thing you've ever seen and how much data that represents. All of that is your training data. Is it more or less than GPT-3?
With that style of argumentation, you can say that NNs have even more input than humans: they also have all of the technical development of the last 50,000 years built into them.
Not really. Out evolution and existence in our current form rely on many things that have happened in the entire universe up to this point. But I’m not saying each of our brains and bodies encode all that information. We just benefit from it with an intricate physical structure that would have been difficult to create any other way.
But we’re not done yet. Give it time. We can go in plenty of directions. Just because you don’t think the current direction is right, that doesn’t rule out other directions happening. And who’s to say this stuff won’t end up being somehow useful? There’s a great talk on how trying to make progress toward an objective in evolutionary algorithms is not a good way to get there.
I think you missed my point. I think we're going in the wrong direction for AI entirely, and these "advances" are fundamentally misguided. OpenAI is explicitly about "intelligence," and so we should question if this is in fact that.
It's clear that humans have fundamental intelligence much better than all of this stuff with 6 orders of magnitude less input (at least of the same data sort) on a problem.
Perhaps it would be better to say, "I think the ML winter is just around the corner" as opposed to "the AI winter is just around the corner." That said, this really is math, and these algos still don't actually do anything resembling true intelligence.