If we ever build an AI that can think and feel, does Optimus’s logic apply to it automatically? Or is Megatron secretly onto something, that freedom has to be earned rather than assumed? And if an LLM ever crossed that line into real sentience, would we even be able to tell?
That’s exactly how humans solve problems too. We don’t need to create entirely new languages and numeral systems, then write completely novel proofs for all the most basic theorems of math, before we can get credit for a new application of existing theorems that we discovered.
And yet people to this day know it as the riff from Can’t Touch This…
Hey dude, thought you might find this interesting: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198
Basically, remember that math equation that we were talking about AI ‘solving’?
I said it used pre-existing formulas rather than coming up with a novel solution, and you said that’s how all math works?
Well it turns out we were both wrong: A human solved the equation and published his work a few days before AI “solved” the equation.
So it didn’t even use pre-existing formulas, it just wholesale stole the answer from someone with actual intelligence, lmao
I’ll clarify that it wasn’t my intent to defend the AI hype. I agree that LLMs are just predictive algorithms that use probabilistic and non-deterministic heuristics to extrapolate likely responses.
I was just pointing out that saying they can’t come up with anything original is maybe not the best angle because it opens up a can of worms about whether even humans can come up with anything truly original, which is philosophically fraught.
Yes the mathematician solved the equation. But he couldn’t have done so without spending years devoted to learning the state of mathematics today, including all the work and research and theorems and proofs from all the mathematicians who came before him.
Maybe he applied old concepts in new ways to solve a problem that hadn’t been solved before. I doubt he invented an entirely new form of mathematics not based in anything that existed before. And even if he did that, chances are he only knew how to do that because of what he’s learned from pre-existing systems of mathematics.
That’s the point I was trying to make
Fair enough, I appreciate the clarification.
I would posit philosophically that the LLM cannot build off of the knowledge of others in the way that a human (like the mathematician) could, and so it is not capable of forming an original thought.
When an LLM model is trained, it is left in a sort of static state of “knowledge”. The model does not have “compounding memory” the way humans do; When a human finishes their education (training) and begins their career they usually continue to learn and gain experience throughout the course of their career.
An LLM doesn’t remember anything, not its experiences, not events that you tell it about, not the last time you prompted it. If you want to teach the LLM something new, you have to re-train the thing. It can’t learn on its own