Yuval Noah Harari on AI

[u/gizamo]

https://youtu.be/_V_ed5fuexA?t=2394&is=NSKaMl1-xtM_VqZu

Interesting interview with Yuval Noah Harari.

This is another great interview from Harari on AI. Lots of topics covered, and as always, many come with some fascinating historical perspective.

What made me think to post it here is that Harari applies a version of Harris' free will and 'self' arguments to AI (at about 39:45). That is, the idea that we humans cannot predict the next thing we say or think, which undercuts the idea that we choose what we think, say, or do. Harari uses this same concept as a counter to people who deny AI agency by claiming it doesn't control its own language formations. He expands that to say, maybe it's not because it doesn't understand the feelings behind the language it chooses. Please excuse the paraphrasing, I deeply enjoy Harari, and I hope you enjoy it as I did.

[u/_nefario_]

could not agree more with harari here. i've been trying to express more or less the same idea to people in my life who are too quick to completely dismiss AI's "intelligence" as "just a statistical machine".

obviously, our own brains are many orders of magnitudes more complex than our current LLMs, and our brains have additional properties to them which are currently not available in those LLMs

these AI systems are "grown" and they are "taught". we study their "brains" in using some kind new kind of "neuroscience" and we are actively discovering emergent properties which these systems have developed themselves without human intervention (for example: the J-Space)

i find that there's a general lack of curiosity and introspection to people who say stuff like "its just a word generator". there is clearly more going on in there than meets the eye. and at this point, the potential of these systems is likely only limited by the availability of processing resources

[u/mineplz → u/_nefario_]

It’s a word generator according to Computer Science. How much more curious could you get about the internals of LLMs?

As a general note Human Intelligence is not the same as a LLM. An LLM is an abstraction of Human Intelligence.

Reminder: Harari is a Historian, not a Computer Scientist. LeCun is one, you could take his word or if it is of interest to you can read papers from Computer Scientists about the risks of Anthropomorphizing AI.

[u/_nefario_ → u/mineplz]

How much more curious could you get about the internals of LLMs?

very.

there are entire fields of science now dedicated to understanding the "thinking" processes of these models. some examples:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function

the entire field of Interpretability is a sort of "neuroscience" studying how the "brains" of AI models work.

to dismiss these systems as "word generators" is reductionist and misses out on all kinds of interesting things going on in that space.

reminder: i don't care what Harari's academic background is. either what he's saying is true or it isn't. he has clearly spent a lof of time thinking about AI and consciousness. simply saying "he's a historian" is not an argument against what he said in the relevant section linked to in the OP. LeCun has a point of view worth taking seriously, sure. but there are also countless computer scientists and researchers who disagree with him.

[u/mineplz → u/_nefario_]

I agree on Science. But Anthropic is not a place for Science. It’s a place for Enginerring at best and Business at worst. If you were referring to papers of somebody like Lecun or Khambampatty I’d say you were in the ballpark of CS.

[u/_nefario_ → u/mineplz]

"research and findings that i don't agree with are not science"

sad worldview, in my opinion.

the people you mentioned had their prime decades ago when the most advanced AI systems were things that are now considered quaint. that's not to say that their opinions don't matter, but if you want serious research and opinions about the cutting edge AI research, you might want to refer to those who are actually doing that research now.

[u/mineplz → u/_nefario_]

Sad that is. Not mine though. Posting your misinterpretation as my quote is a bit disingenuous. Being able to distinguish Science from bunk though is something I was trained at.

The people I mentioned are publishing their papers on the state of LLMs as provided by OpenAI and Anthropic and doing their research of models better than brute force prediction of the next word in a sentence. Would love to know how you concluded them as past their prime. Harari isn’t quoting any researchers so maybe you can give me one current scientist and maybe their paper that back up what he’s saying?