Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 5
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/05/22/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiative-5/

Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2022/07/20/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiative-2/

Re: Mathstodon • Joeri Sebrechts
• https://mathstodon.xyz/@joeri_s@mstdn.social/110401673746671834

JS:
❝That's not how it works. The model lacks agency. It is a machine whose gears are cranked by the user's prompt. It can ask questions, but only when prompted to. It is not doing anything at all when it isn't being prompted.❞

Sure, I understand that. The hedge “as it were” is used advisedly for the sake of the argument. (I wrote my own language learner back in the 80s.)

Speaking less metaphorically, the program and its database are always in their respective states and the program has the capacity to act on the database even when not engaged with external prompts.

Is there any reason why the program's “housekeeping” functions should not include one to measure its current state of “uncertainty” (entropy of a distribution) with regard to potential questions — or any reason why it should “hurt to ask”?

As it were …

#Peirce #Inquiry #InquiryDrivenSystems #InquiryIntoInquiry
#ScottAaronson #AI #ChatGPT #GPT #LLM #LargeLanguageModels

Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 3
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/05/01/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiative-3/

Re: Scott Aaronson • Should GPT Exist?
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042

My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042#comment-1946961

The more fundamental problem I see here is the failure to grasp the nature of the task at hand, and this I attribute not to a program but to its developers.

Journalism, Research, and Scholarship are not matters of generating probable responses to prompts or other stimuli. What matters is producing evidentiary and logical supports for statements. That is the task requirement the developers of recent LLM‑Bots are failing to grasp.

There is nothing new about that failure. There is a long history of attempts to account for intelligence and indeed the workings of scientific inquiry based on the principles of associationism, behaviorism, connectionism, and theories of that order. But the relationship of empirical evidence, logical inference, and scientific information is more complex and intricate than is dreamt of in those reductive philosophies.

Note. The above comment was originally posted on March 1st but appears to have been deleted accidentally.

#Peirce #Inquiry #InquiryDrivenSystems #InquiryIntoInquiry
#ScottAaronson #AI #ChatGPT #GPT #LLM #LargeLanguageModels

Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2022/07/20/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiative-2/

Re: Scott Aaronson
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6524
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6534
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6541

❝Personally, I'd give neither of them [Bohr or Einstein] perfect marks, in part because they not only both missed Bell's Theorem, but failed even to ask the requisite question (namely: what empirically verifiable tasks can Alice and Bob use entanglement to do, that they couldn't have done without entanglement?). But I'd give both of them very high marks for, y'know, still being Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr.❞

To Ask The Requisite Question —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6541#comment-1940887

This brings me to the question I was going to ask on the AI post, but was afraid to ask.

Does GPT‑3 ever ask an original question on its own?

Simply asking for clarification of an interlocutor's prompt is not insignificant but I'm really interested in something more spontaneous and “self‑starting” than that. Does it ever wake up one morning, as it were, and find itself in a “state of question”, a state of doubt or uncertainty so compelling as to bring it to ask on its own initiative what we might recognize as a novel question?

Resources —

Survey of Inquiry Driven Systems
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/04/23/survey-of-inquiry-driven-systems-5/

Survey of Theme One Program
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/03/30/survey-of-theme-one-program-5/

#Peirce #Inquiry #InquiryDrivenSystems #InquiryIntoInquiry
#ScottAaronson #AI #ChatGPT #GPT #LLM #LargeLanguageModels

Post : Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 3
URL : http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/05/01/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiative-3/
Posted : May 1, 2023 at 7:48 am
Author : Jon Awbrey
Tags : Anthem, Initiative, Inquiry
Categories : Anthem, Initiative, Inquiry

Re: Scott Aaronson • Should GPT Exist?
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042

My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042#comment-1946961

The more fundamental problem I see here is the failure to grasp the nature of the task at hand, and this I attribute not to a program but to its developers.

Journalism, Research, and Scholarship are not matters of generating probable responses to prompts or other stimuli. What matters is producing evidentiary and logical supports for statements. That is the task requirement the developers of these LLM‑Bots are failing to grasp.

There is nothing new about that failure. There is a long history of attempts to account for intelligence and indeed the workings of scientific inquiry based on the principles of associationism, behaviorism, connectionism, and theories of that order. But the relationship of empirical evidence, logical inference, and scientific information is more complex and intricate than is dreamt of in those reductive philosophies.

Note. The above comment was originally posted on March 1st but appears to have been accidentally deleted.

#ScottAaronson #AI #ChatGPT #GPT #LLM #LargeLanguageModels

Re: Scott Aaronson • Will UT Austin and Texas A&M Survive Beyond This Week?
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243

My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243#comment-1949554

As far as the tenure system goes, a little bit of history regurgitated will bring its rationale into focus.

History of the AAUP —

❝In 1900 when noted economist Edward Ross lost his job at Stanford University because Mrs. Leland Stanford didn't like his views on immigrant labor and railroad monopolies, other professors were watching. The incident stuck in the mind of Arthur O. Lovejoy, philosopher at Johns Hopkins. When he and John Dewey organized a meeting in 1915 to form an organization to ensure academic freedom for faculty members, the AAUP was born. “Academic Freedom” was a new idea then.❞

• https://web.archive.org/web/20121221091245/http://www.aaup.org/about/history-aaup

Without a tenure system there is no academic freedom, and without academic freedom universities as organs of free inquiry will simply wither and die.

#ScottAaronson #LargeLanguageModels #GPT
#AcademicFreedom #HigherEducation #Tenure

Re: Scott Aaronson • Will UT Austin and Texas A&M Survive Beyond This Week?
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243

My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243#comment-1949542

Alas, my friends, read the writing on the wall —

“Money, Money, Techno Upstartin”

Why should society invest in universities, anyway? Why should individuals devote the great measure of their lives and fortunes to acquiring the discipline and joining the calling of responsible research, teaching, and service when that whole apparatus of laborious training can be replaced by a chatbot simulating the conduct of a human, in particular, an Average Indolent fifth-grader who copies all his book reports off Wikpedia?

No, no, mes amis, the job you lose to a bot will sooner or later be your own.

#ScottAaronson #LargeLanguageModels #GPT

Re: ScottAaronson • Should GPT Exist?
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042

My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042#comment-1946764

Well, here's one that woke me up in the middle of the night.

All I know is the current spate of intellectual property strip-mine operations is something close to the very antithesis of what attracted me to artificial intelligence (or intelligence amplification as Ashby more aptly conceived it) over fifty years ago. It now has all the hallmarks of yet another capital corporate exploitation of a formerly promising line of scientific inquiry. The movement pulling so many of us in way back when, promising to bring computing power to the people, is now a classic case of enantiodromia, gradually shifting the locus of control from the human individual to the corporate agenda.

The once cute metaphors leading us to personify programs have become misleading misdirections. Programs don't do anything but run, and they run with the agendas particular people give them. It is time to stop falling for the prestidigitation and start paying attention to the corporate pseudo-personhood behind the screen.

#ScottAaronson #LargeLanguageModels #LLM #GPT

Re: Scott Aaronson • Quips Are What I've Got
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7188

My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7188#comment-1948497

Most of the discussions I've seen and been involved in on this subject have been more reasoned than otherwise. Not to say I don't enjoy a good quip from time to time. The way I see it, if we look around at all that's going on these days, we shouldn't too quickly dismiss the power of misinformation and disinformation. It doesn't take most people becoming complete morons to put the kind of society we value at risk — evidence suggests a good third becoming terminally gullible will be enough.

When the dust settles to equilibrium, my guess is we'll be looking at just another medium of information, heavily bent in service to the corporate interests with their hands on the tiller.

If we ask who's in charge, they'll refer us to an Invisible Hand. But we'll need to keep our eyes and our AI open anyway.

#ScottAaronson #LargeLanguageModels

Re: Scott Aaronson • If AI Scaling Is To Be Shut Down, Let It Be For A Coherent Reason
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7174

My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7174#comment-1948292

My personal Critique of Coherent Reasons — I won’t bother addressing a moratorium or shutdown since any pretense of doing that would amount to PR as fake as any other Great Reset we might hear about these days — but why I’d wish for caution and public reflection going forward is the Public Interest in things like Critical Thinking, Information Literacy, not to mention a Healthy Skepticism about Corporate Agendas.

FB just called to mind a thing I wrote a while ago that pretty well speaks to the heart of the issue for me, and I can’t do better than preamble with that —

Democracy, Education, Information

Our Enlightenment Forerunners had the insight to see the critical flaw in all historical failures at democratic government, to wit, or not — If The People Rule, Then The People Must Be Wise. The consequence is that equally distributed Education and Information are not just Commodities you buy so you and yours can get ahead of them and theirs — they are Essential to the intelligent functioning of government and the Public Interest. That is why we are supposed to have Universal Free Public Education. That is why we used to have a government operated postal service that enabled the free-flow of information at a nominal fee, not whatever price the market would bear.

#ScottAaronson #LanguageModels

There is nothing new about that failure. There's a whole history of attempts to account for intelligence and indeed the workings of scientific inquiry on the principles of associationism, behaviorism, connectionism, and theories of that order. But the relationship of empirical evidence, logical inference, and scientific information is more complex and intricate than is dreamt of in those reductive philosophies.

#ScottAaronson #LanguageModels

3/3

Journalism, Research, and Scholarship are not matters of generating probable responses to prompts (stimuli). What matters is producing evidentiary and logical supports for statements. That is the task requirement the developers of recent LLM-Bots are failing to grasp.

#ScottAaronson #LanguageModels

2/

Re: Scott Aaronson on Language Models At Large
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042

My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042#comment-1946961

The more fundamental problem I see here is the failure to grasp the nature of the task at hand, and this I attribute not to a program but to its developers.

#ScottAaronson #LanguageModels

1/

Re: #ScottAaronson on #LargeLanguageModels
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042

My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042#comment-1946764

All I know is the current spate of intellectual property strip-mine operations is something close to the very antithesis of what attracted me to artificial intelligence (or intelligence amplification as Ashby more aptly conceived it) over 50 years ago. It now has all the hallmarks of yet another capital corporate exploitation of a formerly promising line of scientific inquiry.

1/

Re: #ScottAaronson on #LargeLanguageModels
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042

My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042#comment-1946764

Scott Aaronson on fire debunking a paper that appears to claim that RSA 2048 can be broken with (near-term, NISQ) quantum computers. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6957

#ScottAaronson #QuantumComputing #Cryptography #rsa #qaoa

For some reason I've been thinking about the deplorable defenses of James Damore from people like #UTexas's #ScottAaronson mean.
https://www.yodaiken.com/2017/08/16/the-crackpot-google-manifesto/
"

More frequently now reminders that there are many great researchers in Physics, CS and elsewhere that are not on social media, often despite intense pestering by students and colleagues. One of these is #ScottAaronson . Thankfully his blog site
https://scottaaronson.blog/ documents his journey well and is also a valuable resource for work in #QuantumComputation and related fields