I am a Computer Science PhD who has works on the core modeling team for Google Gemini. I also have some background in Computational Complexity theory and Quantum Computing.
I have a blog at https://onemanynone.substack.com/ where I publish posts aimed at a broader and less technical audience.
OneManyNone
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I think we may be approaching these questions too differently, and I’m having trouble appreciating your question. I want to make sure I actually answer it.
The way I’m modelling the situation is this, the implication being that this is the closest to the way we would want to understand our universe:
1. A universe is created2. Observers are “placed” in this universe as a result of the universe’s inherent processes
3. You are “assigned” to one of these observers at random
In this framework, you don’t necessarily get to verify anything. It’s merely the case that if you were modelling the universe that way, then you would find that the probability of being in any given universe was determined only by step 1, unaffected by step 3.
That comment about math was just intended as a rhetorical flourish. My apologies if it was over stated. In context, though, hopefully it was clear that I meant once you’ve established what question you’re actually asking, the math is straightforward.
Would you be willing to expand a little on your last sentence and explain a bit more about what you’re asking? I’m not sure I followed.
I feel as if I can agree with this statement in isolation, but can’t think of a context where I would consider this point relevant.
I’m not even talking about the question of whether or not the AI is sentient, which you asked us to ignore. I’m talking about how do we know that an AI is “suffering,” even if we do assume it’s sentient. What exactly is “suffering” in something that is completely cognitively distinct from a human? Is it just negative reward signals? I don’t think so, or at least if it was, that would likely imply that training a sentient AI is unethical in all cases, since training requires negative signals.
That’s not to say that all negative signals are the same or that maybe in some contexts it’s painful or not, just that I think determining that is an even harder problem than determining if the AI is sentient.
Fair enough. But for the purposes of this post, the point is that capability increased without increased compute. If you prefer, bucket it as “compute” vs “non-compute” instead of “compute” vs “algorithmic”.
I think whether or not it’s trivial isn’t the point: they did it, it worked, and they didn’t need to increase the compute to make it happen.
I agree. I made this point and that is why I did not try to argue that LLMs did not have qualia.
But I do believe you can consider necessary conditions and look at their absence. For instance, I can safely declare that a rock does not have qualia, because I know it does not have a brain.
Similarly, I may not be able to measure whether LLMs have emotions, but I can observe that the processes that generated LLMs are highly inconsistent with the processes that caused emotions to emerge in the only case where I know they exist. Pair that with the observation that specific human emotions seem like only one option out of infinitely many, and it makes a strong probabilistic argument.
This is sort of why I made the argument that we can only consider necessary conditions, and look for their absence.
But more to your point, LLMs and human brains aren’t “two agents that are structurally identical.” They aren’t even close. The fact that a hypothetical built-from-scratch human brain might have the same qualia as humans isn’t relevant, because that’s not what’s being discussed.
Also, unless your process was precisely “attempt to copy the human brain,” I find it very unlikely that any AI development process would yield something particularly similar to a human brain.
I have explained myself more here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EwKk5xdvxhSn3XHsD/don-t-over-anthropomorphize-ai
OK, I’ve written a full rebuttal here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EwKk5xdvxhSn3XHsD/don-t-over-anthropomorphize-ai. The key points are at the top.
In relation to your comment specifically, I would say that anger may have that effect on the conversation, but there’s nothing that actually incentivizes the system to behave that way—the slightest hint of anger or emotion would be immediate negative reward during RLHF training. Compare to a human: There may actually be some positive reward to anger, but even if there isn’t evolution still allowed to get angry because we are mesa-optimizers where that has a positive effect overall.
Therefore, the system learned angry behavior in stage-1 training. But that has no reward structure, and therefore could not associate different texts to different qualia.
Hmmm… I think I still disagree, but I’ll need to process what you’re saying and try to get more into the heart of my disagreement. I’ll respond when I’ve thought it over.
Thank you for the interesting debate. I hope you did not perceive as me being overly combative.
I see, but I’m still not convinced. Humans behave in anger as a way to forcibly change a situation into one that is favorable to itself. I don’t believe that’s what the AI was doing, or trying to do.
I feel like there’s a thin line I’m trying to walk here, and I’m not doing a very good job. I’m not trying to comment on whether or not the AI has any sort of subjective experience. I’m just saying that even if it did, I do not believe it would bare any resemblance to what we as humans experience as anger.
Ah okay. My apologies for misunderstanding.
Okay, sure. But those “bugs” are probably something the AI risk community should take seriously.
I would argue that “models generated by RL-first approaches” are not more likely to be the primary threat to humanity, because those models are unlikely to yield AGI any time soon. I personally believe this is a fundamental fact about RL-first approaches, but even if it wasn’t it’s still less likely because LLMs are what everyone is investing in right now and it seems plausible that LLMs could achieve AGI.
Also, by what mechanism would Bing’s AI actually be experiencing anger? The emotion of anger in humans is generally associated with a strong negative reward signal. The behaviors that Bing exhibited were not brought on by any associated negative reward, it was just contextual text completion.
Those are examples of LLMs being rational. LLMs are often rational and will only get better at being rational as they improve. But I’m trying to focus on the times when LLMs are irrational.
I agree that AI is aggregating it’s knowledge to perform rationally. But that still doesn’t mean anything with respect to its capacity to be irrational.
Imagine a graph with “LLM capacity” on the x axis and “number of irrational failure modes” on the y axis. Yes, there’s a lot of evidence this line slopes downward. But there is absolutely no guarantee that it reaches zero before whatever threshold gets us to AGI.
And I did say that I didn’t consider the rationality of GPT systems fake just because it was emulated. That said, I don’t totally agree with EY’s post—LLMs are in fact imitators. Because they’re very good imitators, you can tell them to imitate something rational and they’ll do a really good job being rational. But being highly rational is still only one of many possible things it can be.
And it’s worth remembering that the image at the top of this post was powered by GPT-4. It’s totally possible LLM-based AGI will be smart enough not to fail this way, but it is not guaranteed and we should consider it a real risk.
Fair enough, once again I concede your point about definitions. I don’t want to play that game either.
But I do have a point which I think is very relevant to the topic of AI Risk: rationality in LLMs is incidental. It exists because the system is emulating rationality it has seen elsewhere. That doesn’t make it “fake” rationality, but it does make it brittle. It means that there’s a failure mode where the system stops emulating rationality, and starts emulating something else.
I was aware of that, and maybe my statement was too strong, but fundamentally I don’t know if I agree that you can just claim that it’s rational even though it doesn’t produce rational outputs.
Rationality is the process of getting to the outputs. What I was trying to talk about wasn’t scholarly disposition or non-eccentricity, but the actual process of deciding goals.
Maybe another way to say it is this: LLMs are capable of being rational, but they are also capable of being extremely irrational, in the sense that, to quote EY, their behavior is not a form of “systematically promot[ing] map-territory correspondences or goal achievement.” There is nothing about the pre-training that directly promotes this type of behavior, and any example of this behavior in fundamentally incidental.
Fair enough. Thank you for the feedback. I have edited the post to elaborate on what I mean.
I wrote it the way I did because I took the statement as obviously true and didn’t want to be seen as claiming the opposite. Clearly that understanding was incorrect.
The problem doesn’t specify, you are correct. But if you’re trying to use this as a guide for figuring out how to assign probabilities to the origins of our universe, then the 50⁄50 reasoning is the correct one.