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  12. <title>Artificial General Intelligence and the bird brains of Silicon Valley (archive) — David Larlet</title>
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  59. <h1>Artificial General Intelligence and the bird brains of Silicon Valley</h1>
  60. </header>
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  69. <hr>
  70. <blockquote>
  71. <p>
  72. The problem is, if one side of the communication does not have meaning,
  73. then the comprehension of the implicit meaning is an illusion arising
  74. from our singular human understanding of language (independent of the
  75. model). Contrary to how it may seem when we observe its output, an LM is
  76. a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic
  77. forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to
  78. probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any
  79. reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot.
  80. </p>
  81. </blockquote>
  82. <figcaption>
  83. <p>Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al., <em>On the Dangers of Stochastic
  84. Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?</em>.</p>
  85. </figcaption>
  86. </figure>
  87. <p>Bird brains have a bad reputation. The diminutive size of your average
  88. bird and their brain has lead people to assume that they are, well,
  89. dumb.</p>
  90. <p>But, bird brains are amazing. Birds commonly outperform mammals with
  91. larger brains at a variety of general reasoning and problem-solving
  92. tasks. Some by a large margin. Their small brains manage this by
  93. packing numerous neurons in a small space using structures that are
  94. unlike from those you find in mammals.</p>
  95. <p>Even though birds have extremely capable minds, those minds are built in
  96. ways that are different from our own or other mammals. Similar
  97. capabilities; different structure.</p>
  98. <p>The ambition of the Silicon Valley AI industry is to create something
  99. analogous to a bird brain: a new kind of mind that is functionally
  100. similar to the human mind, possibly outperforming it, while being built
  101. using very different mechanisms. Similar capabilities; different
  102. structure.</p>
  103. <p>This effort goes back decades, to the dawn of computing, and has had
  104. limited success.</p>
  105. <p>Until recently, it seems.</p>
  106. <p>If you’re reading this, you’ve almost certainly interacted with a
  107. Generative AI, however indirectly. Maybe you’ve tried Bing Chat. Maybe
  108. you’ve subscribed to the paid tier for ChatGPT. Or, maybe you’ve used
  109. Midjourney to generate images. At the very least you’ve been forced to
  110. see the images or text posted by the overenthusiastic on social media.</p>
  111. <p>These AI models are created by pushing an enormous amount of training
  112. data through various algorithms:</p>
  113. <ul>
  114. <li>Language models like ChatGPT is trained on a good chunk of the textual material available in digital form in the world.</li>
  115. <li>Image models like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are trained on a huge collection of images found on the internet.</li>
  116. </ul>
  117. <p>What comes out the other end is a mathematical model of the media domain
  118. in question: text or images.</p>
  119. <p>You know what Generative AI is in terms of how it presents to you as
  120. software: clever chatbots that do or say things in response to what you
  121. say: <em>your prompt</em>. Some of those responses are useful, and they give
  122. you an impression of sophisticated comprehension. The models that
  123. generate text are fluent and often quite engaging.</p>
  124. <p>This fluency is misleading. What Bender and Gebru meant when they coined
  125. the term <em>stochastic parrot</em> wasn’t to imply that these are, indeed, the
  126. new bird brains of Silicon Valley, but that they are unthinking text
  127. synthesis engines that just repeat phrases. They are the proverbial
  128. parrot who echoes without thinking, not the actual parrot who is capable
  129. of complex reasoning and problem-solving.</p>
  130. <p>A <em>zombie parrot</em>, if you will, that screams for <em>brains</em> because it has
  131. none.</p>
  132. <p>The fluency of the zombie parrot—the unerring confidence and a style of
  133. writing that some find endearing—creates a strong illusion of
  134. intelligence.</p>
  135. <p>Every other time we read text, we are engaging with the product of
  136. another mind. We are so used to the idea of text as a representation of
  137. another person’s thoughts that we have come to mistake their writing
  138. <em>for</em> their thoughts. But they aren’t. Text and media are tools that
  139. authors and artists create to let people change their own state of
  140. mind—hopefully in specific ways to form the image or effect the author
  141. was after.</p>
  142. <p>Reading is an indirect collaboration with the author, mediated through
  143. the writing. Text has no inherent reasoning or intelligence. Agatha
  144. Christie’s ghost does not inhabit the words of <em>Murder on the Orient Express</em>.
  145. Stephen King isn’t hovering over you when you read <em>Carrie</em>. The ghost
  146. you feel while reading is an illusion you’ve made out of your own
  147. experience, knowledge, and imagination. Every word you read causes your
  148. mind to reconstruct its meaning using your memories and creativity. The
  149. idea that there is intelligence somehow inherent in writing is an
  150. illusion. The intelligence is <em>all</em> yours, all the time: thoughts you
  151. make yourself in order to make sense of another person’s words. This can
  152. prompt us to greatness, broaden our minds, inspire new thoughts, and
  153. introduce us to new concepts. A book can contain worlds, but we’re the
  154. ones that bring them into being as we read. What we see is uniquely our
  155. own. The thoughts are not transported from the author’s mind and
  156. injected into ours.</p>
  157. <p>The words themselves are just line forms on a background with no
  158. inherent meaning or intelligence. The word “horse” doesn’t come with the
  159. Platonic ideal of a horse attached to it. The word “anger” isn’t full of
  160. seething emotion or the restrained urge towards violence. Even words
  161. that are arguably onomatopoeic, like the word “brabra” we use in
  162. Icelandic for the sound a duck makes, are still incredibly specific to
  163. the cultures and context they come from. We are the ones doing the heavy
  164. lifting in terms of reconstructing a picture of an intelligence behind
  165. the text. When there is no actual intelligence, such as with ChatGPT, we
  166. are the ones who end up filling in the gaps with our memories,
  167. experience and imagination.</p>
  168. <p>When ChatGPT demonstrates intelligence, that comes from us. Some of
  169. it we construct ourselves. Some of it comes from our inherent
  170. biases.</p>
  171. <p>There is no ‘there’ there. We are alone in the room, reconstructing an
  172. abstract representation of a mind. The reasoning you see is only in your
  173. head. You are hallucinating intelligence where there is none. You are
  174. doing the textual equivalent of seeing a face in a power outlet.</p>
  175. <p>This drive—<em>anthropomorphism</em>—seems to be innate. Our first instinct
  176. when faced with anything unfamiliar—whose drives, motivations, and
  177. mechanisms we don’t understand—is to assume that they think much like a
  178. human would. When that unfamiliar agent uses language like a human
  179. would, the urge to see them as near or fully human is impossible to
  180. resist—a recurring issue in the history of AI research that dates all
  181. the way back to 1966.</p>
  182. <p>These tools solve problems and return fluent, if untruthful, answers,
  183. which is what creates such a convincing illusion of intelligence.</p>
  184. <p>Text synthesis engines like ChatGPT and GPT-4 do not have any
  185. self-awareness. They are mathematical models of the various patterns to
  186. be found in the collected body of human text. How granular the model is
  187. depends on its design and the languages in question. Some of the
  188. tokens—the smallest unit of language the model works with—will be
  189. characters or punctuation marks, some of them will be words, syllables,
  190. or even phrases. Many language models are a mixture of both.</p>
  191. <p>With enough detail—a big enough collection of text—these tools will
  192. model enough of the probabilistic distribution of various words or
  193. characters to be able to perform what looks like magic:</p>
  194. <ul>
  195. <li>They generate fluent answers by calculating the most probable sequence
  196. of words, at that time, which would serve as the continuation of or
  197. response to the prompt.</li>
  198. <li>They can perform limited reasoning tasks that correlate with textual
  199. descriptions of prior reasoning tasks in the training data.</li>
  200. </ul>
  201. <p>With enough of these correlative shortcuts, the model can perform
  202. something that looks like common sense reasoning: its output is text
  203. that replicates prior representations of reasoning. This works for
  204. as long as you don’t accidentally use the wrong phrasing in your prompt
  205. and break the correlation.</p>
  206. <p>The mechanism behind these systems is entirely correlative from the
  207. ground up.What looks like reasoning is incredibly fragile and
  208. breaks as soon as you rephrase or reword your prompt. It exists
  209. only as a probabilistic model of text. A Generative AI chatbot is a
  210. language engine incapable of genuine thought.</p>
  211. <p>These language models are interactive but static snapshots of the
  212. probability distributions of a written language.</p>
  213. <p>It’s obviously interactive, that’s the whole point of a chatbot. It’s
  214. static in that it does not change when it’s used or activated. In fact,
  215. changing it requires an enormous amount of computing power over a long
  216. period of time. What the system models are the distributions and
  217. correlations of the tokens it records for the texts in its training data
  218. set—how the various words, syllables, and punctuation relate to each
  219. other over as much of the written history of a language as the company
  220. can find.</p>
  221. <p>That’s what distinguishes biological minds from these algorithmic
  222. hindsight factories: a biological mind does not reason using the
  223. probability distributions of all the prior cultural records of its
  224. ancestors. Biological minds learn primarily through trial and error.
  225. Try, fail, try again. They build their neural network, which is
  226. functionally very different from what you see in a software model,
  227. through constant feedback, experimentation, and repeated failure—driven
  228. by a chemical network that often manifests as instinct, emotion,
  229. motivation, and drive. The neural network—bounded, defined, and driven
  230. by the chemical network—is constantly changing and responding to outside
  231. stimuli. Every time an animal’s nervous system is “used”, it changes. It
  232. is always changing, until it dies.</p>
  233. <p>Biological minds <em>experience</em>. Synthesis engines parse imperfect
  234. <em>records</em> of experiences. The former are forward-looking and operate
  235. primarily in the present, sometimes to their own detriment. The latter
  236. exist exclusively as probabilistic manifestations of imperfect
  237. representations of thoughts past. They are snapshots. Generative AI are
  238. themselves cultural records.</p>
  239. <p>These models aren’t new bird brains—new alien minds that are peers to
  240. our own. They aren’t even insect brains. Insects have autonomy. They are
  241. capable of general problem-solving—some of them dealing with tasks of
  242. surprising complexity—and their abilities tolerate the kind of
  243. minor alterations in the problem environment that would break the
  244. correlative pseudo-reasoning of a language model. Large Language
  245. Models are something lesser. They are water running down pathways etched
  246. into the ground over centuries by the rivers of human culture. Their
  247. originality comes entirely from random combinations of historical
  248. thought. They do not know the ‘meaning’ of anything—they only know the
  249. records humans find meaningful enough to store. Their unreliability
  250. comes from their unpredictable behaviour in novel circumstances. When
  251. there is no riverbed to follow, they drown the surrounding landscape.</p>
  252. <p>The entirety of their documented features, capabilities, and recorded
  253. behaviour—emergent or not—is explained by this conceptual model of
  254. generative AI. There are no unexplained corner cases that don’t fit or
  255. actively disprove this theory.</p>
  256. <p>Yet people keep assuming that what ChatGPT does can only be explained as
  257. the first glimmer of genuine Artificial General Intelligence. The bird
  258. brain of Silicon Valley is born at last!</p>
  259. <p>Because text and language are the primary ways we experience other
  260. people’s reasoning, it’ll be next to impossible to dislodge the notion
  261. that these are genuine intelligences. No amount of examples, scientific
  262. research, or analysis will convince those who want to maintain a
  263. pseudo-religious belief in alien peer intelligences. After all, if you
  264. want to believe in aliens, an artificial one made out of supercomputers
  265. and wishful thinking <em>feels</em> much more plausible than little grey men
  266. from outer space. But that’s what it is: <em>a belief in aliens.</em></p>
  267. <p>It doesn’t help that so many working in AI seem to <em>want</em> this to be
  268. true. They seem to be true believers who are convinced that the spark of
  269. Artificial General Intelligence has been struck.</p>
  270. <p>They are inspired by the science fictional notion that if you make
  271. something complex enough, it will spontaneously become intelligent. This
  272. isn’t an uncommon belief. You see it in movies and novels—the notion
  273. that any network of sufficient complexity will spontaneously become
  274. sentient has embedded itself in our popular psyche. James Cameron’s
  275. skull-crushing metal skeletons have a lot to answer for.</p>
  276. <p>That notion doesn’t seem to have any basis in science. The idea that
  277. general intelligence is an emergent property of neural networks that
  278. appears once the network reaches sufficient complexity, is a view based
  279. on archaic notions of animal intelligence—that animals are soulless
  280. automata incapable of feeling or reasoning. That view that was
  281. formed during a period where we didn’t realise just how common
  282. self-awareness (i.e. the mirror test) and general reasoning is in the
  283. animal kingdom. Animals are smarter than we assumed and the
  284. difference between our reasoning and theirs seems to be a matter of
  285. degree, not of presence or absence.</p>
  286. <p>General reasoning seems to be an <em>inherent</em>, not emergent, property of
  287. pretty much any biological lifeform with a notable nervous system.</p>
  288. <p>The bumblebee, despite having only a tiny fraction of the neurons of a
  289. human brain, is capable of not only solving puzzles but also of
  290. <em>teaching other bees to solve those puzzles.</em> They reason and have a
  291. culture. They have more genuine and robust general reasoning
  292. skills—that don’t collapse into incoherence at minor adjustments to the
  293. problem space—than GPT-4 or any large language model on the market.
  294. That’s with only around half a million neurons to work with.</p>
  295. <p>Conversely, GPT-3 is made up of 175 <em>billion</em> parameters—what passes for
  296. a “neuron” in a digital neural network. GPT-4 is even larger, with
  297. some estimates coming in at a <em>trillion</em> parameters. Then you have
  298. fine-tuned systems such as ChatGPT, that are built from multiple
  299. interacting models layered on top of GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, which make for an
  300. even more complex interactive system.</p>
  301. <p>ChatGPT, running on GPT-4 is, easily a <em>million</em> times more complex than
  302. the “neural network” of a bumblebee and yet, out of the two, it’s the
  303. striped invertebrate that demonstrates robust and adaptive
  304. general-purpose reasoning skills. Very simple minds, those belonging to
  305. small organisms that barely have a brain, are capable of reasoning about
  306. themselves, the world around them, and the behaviour of other
  307. animals.</p>
  308. <p>Unlike the evidence for ‘sparks’ of AGI in language models, the evidence
  309. for animal reasoning—even consciousness—is broad, compelling, and
  310. encompasses decades of work by numerous scientists.</p>
  311. <p>AI models are flawed attempts at digitally synthesising neurologies.
  312. They are built on the assumption that all the rest—metabolisms,
  313. hormones, chemicals, and senses—aren’t necessary for developing
  314. intelligence.</p>
  315. <p>Reasoning in biological minds does not seem to be a property that
  316. emerges from complexity. The capacity to reason looks more likely to be
  317. a <em>built-in</em> property of most animal minds. A reasoning mind
  318. appears to be a direct consequence of how animals are structured as a
  319. whole—chemicals, hormones, and physical body included. The animal
  320. capacity for problem-solving, social reasoning, and self-awareness seem
  321. to increase, unevenly, and fitfully with the number of neurons until it
  322. reaches the level we see in humans. Reasoning does not ‘emerge’ or
  323. appear. Some creatures are better at it than others, but it’s there in
  324. some form even in very small, very simple beings like the bumblebee. It
  325. doesn’t happen magically when you hook up a bunch of disparate objects
  326. together in a complex enough network. A reasoning mind is the <em>starting
  327. point</em> of biological thinking, not the endpoint that only “emerges” with
  328. sufficient complexity.</p>
  329. <p>The internet—a random interconnected collection of marketing offal,
  330. holiday snaps, insufferable meetings, and porn—isn’t going to become
  331. self-aware and suddenly acquire the capacity for general reasoning once
  332. it reaches a certain size, and neither will Large-Language-Models. The
  333. notion that we are making autonomous beings capable of Artificial
  334. General Intelligence just by loading a neural network up with an
  335. increasingly bigger collection of garbage from the internet is not one
  336. that has any basis in anything we understand about biology or animal
  337. reasoning.</p>
  338. <p>But, AI companies insist that they are on the verge of AGI. Their
  339. rhetoric around it verges on the religious as the idea of an AGI is
  340. idealised and almost worshipped. They claim to be close to making a
  341. new form of thinking life, but they refuse to release the data required
  342. to prove it. They’ve built software that performs well on the
  343. arbitrary benchmarks they’ve chosen and claim are evidence of general
  344. intelligence, but those tests prove no such thing and have no such
  345. validity. The benchmarks are theatrics that have no applicability
  346. towards demonstrating genuine general intelligence.</p>
  347. <p>AI researchers love to resurrect outdated pseudoscience such as
  348. phrenology—shipping AI software that promises to be able to tell you if
  349. somebody is likely to be a criminal based on the shape of their
  350. skull. It’s a field where researchers and vendors routinely claim
  351. that their AIs can detect whether you’re a potential criminal, gay, a
  352. good employee, liberal or conservative, or even a psychopath, based on
  353. “your face, body, gait, and tone of voice.”</p>
  354. <p><em>It’s pseudoscience</em>.</p>
  355. <p>This is the field and the industry that claims to have accomplished the
  356. first ‘spark’ of Artificial General Intelligence?</p>
  357. <p>Last time we saw a claim this grand, with this little scientific
  358. evidence, the men in the white coats were promising us room-temperature
  359. fusion, giving us free energy for life, and ending the world’s
  360. dependence on fossil fuels.</p>
  361. <p>Why give the tech industry the benefit of the doubt when they are all
  362. but claiming godhood—that they’ve created a new form of life never seen
  363. before?</p>
  364. <p>As <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard">Carl Sagan said</a>:
  365. <em>“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”</em></p>
  366. <p>He didn’t say “extraordinary claims require only vague insinuations and
  367. pinky-swear promises.”</p>
  368. <p>To claim you’ve created a completely new kind of mind that’s on par with
  369. any animal mind—or, even superior—and provides general intelligence
  370. using mechanisms that don’t resemble anything anybody has ever seen in
  371. nature, is by definition the most extraordinary of claims.</p>
  372. <p>The AI industry is backing their claims of Artificial General
  373. Intelligence with hot air, hand-waving, and cryptic references to data
  374. and software nobody outside their organisations is allowed to review or
  375. analyse.</p>
  376. <p>They are pouring an every-increasing amount of energy and work into
  377. ever-larger models all in the hope of triggering the
  378. ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity">singularity</a>’
  379. and creating a digital superbeing. Like a cult of monks boiling the
  380. oceans in order to hear whispers of the name of God.</p>
  381. <p>It’s a farce. All theatre; no evidence. Whether they realise it or not,
  382. they are taking us for a ride. The sooner we see that they aren’t
  383. backing their claims with science, the sooner we can focus on finding
  384. safe and productive uses—limiting its harm, at least—for the technology
  385. as it exists today.</p>
  386. <p>After everything the tech industry has done over the past decade, the
  387. financial bubbles, the gig economy, legless virtual reality avatars,
  388. crypto, the endless software failures—just think about it—do you think
  389. we should believe them when they make grand, unsubstantiated claims
  390. about miraculous discoveries? Have they earned our trust? Have they
  391. shown that their word is worth more than that of independent scientists?</p>
  392. <p>Do you think that they, with this little evidence, have really done what
  393. they claim, and discovered a literal new form of life? But are
  394. conveniently unable to prove it because of ‘safety’?</p>
  395. <p>Me neither.</p>
  396. <p>The notion that large language models are on the path towards Artificial
  397. General Intelligence is a dangerous one. It’s a myth that directly
  398. undermines any effort to think clearly or strategise about generative AI
  399. because it strongly reinforces <em>anthropomorphism</em>.</p>
  400. <p>That’s when you reason about an object or animal <em>as if it were a
  401. person</em>. It prevents you from forming an accurate mental model of the non-human thing’s behaviour. AI is especially prone to creating this reaction. Software such as chatbots trigger all three major factors that promote
  402. anthropomorphism in people:</p>
  403. <ol>
  404. <li><em>Understanding.</em> If we lack an understanding of how an object works,
  405. our minds will resort to thinking of it in terms of something that’s
  406. familiar to us: people. We understand the world as people because
  407. that’s what we are. This becomes stronger the more similar we
  408. perceive the object to be to ourselves.</li>
  409. <li><em>Motivation.</em> We are motivated to both seek out human interaction
  410. and to interact effectively with our environment. This reinforces
  411. the first factor. The more uncertain we are of how that thing works,
  412. the stronger the anthropomorphism. The less control we have over it,
  413. the stronger the anthropomorphism.</li>
  414. <li><em>Sociality</em>. We have a need for human contact and our tendency
  415. towards anthropomorphising objects in our environment increase with
  416. our isolation.</li>
  417. </ol>
  418. <p>Because we lack cohesive cognitive models for what makes these language
  419. models so fluent, feel a strong motivation to understand and use them as
  420. they are integrated into our work, and, increasingly, our socialisation
  421. in the office takes on the very same text conversation form as a chatbot
  422. does, we inevitably feel a strong drive to see these software systems as
  423. people. The myth of AGI reinforces this—supercharges the anthropomorphism—because it implies that “people”
  424. is indeed an appropriate cognitive model for how these systems behave.</p>
  425. <p>It isn’t. <strong><em>AI are not people.</em></strong> Treating them as such is a major
  426. strategic error as it will prevent you from thinking clearly about their
  427. capabilities and limitations.</p>
  428. <p>Believing the myth of Artificial General Intelligence makes you incapable of understanding what language models today are and how they work.</p>
  429. </article>
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