• (ReacTor) A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge

    From James Nicoll@21:1/5 to All on Tue Mar 26 14:10:12 2024
    A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge

    From Grimm's World to Rainbows End, the fiction of Vernor Vinge.

    https://reactormag.com/a-brief-guide-to-the-fiction-of-vernor-vinge/
    --
    My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
    My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
    My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
    My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From James Nicoll@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Tue Mar 26 17:06:28 2024
    In article <utuumi$1u8bf$[email protected]>,
    Cryptoengineer <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 3/26/2024 10:10 AM, James Nicoll wrote:
    A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge

    From Grimm's World to Rainbows End, the fiction of Vernor Vinge.

    https://reactormag.com/a-brief-guide-to-the-fiction-of-vernor-vinge/

    You seem to imply that Vinge invented the 'technological singularity'.

    While I, among many others, first became aware of the idea through his
    1993 essay[1], it predates him. John Von Neumann discussed the notion
    back in 1958. I have no idea if Vinge knew or Von Neumann's
    speculations, or invented the idea independently. It's one of those
    'when it's steam engine time, it will steam engine' ideas.

    Vinge predicted it would happen by 2023. While clearly we're not
    there yet, the explosive development of generative AI clearly
    seems a step in that direction.

    Clippy 2.0 does not a singularity make.
    --
    My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
    My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
    My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
    My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul S Person@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Wed Mar 27 09:21:41 2024
    On Tue, 26 Mar 2024 12:55:44 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 3/26/2024 10:10 AM, James Nicoll wrote:
    A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge

    From Grimm's World to Rainbows End, the fiction of Vernor Vinge.

    https://reactormag.com/a-brief-guide-to-the-fiction-of-vernor-vinge/

    You seem to imply that Vinge invented the 'technological singularity'.

    While I, among many others, first became aware of the idea through his
    1993 essay[1], it predates him. John Von Neumann discussed the notion
    back in 1958. I have no idea if Vinge knew or Von Neumann's
    speculations, or invented the idea independently. It's one of those
    'when it's steam engine time, it will steam engine' ideas.

    Vinge predicted it would happen by 2023. While clearly we're not
    there yet, the explosive development of generative AI clearly
    seems a step in that direction.

    [1] http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

    I don't remember where or when or how I became aware of it.

    But I do know I haven't a lot about it recently.

    Has the rate of progress slown down since, say, the 1990s? So that it
    isn't quite so exponential?
    --
    "Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
    Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
    Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Dimensional Traveler@21:1/5 to Paul S Person on Wed Mar 27 10:29:55 2024
    On 3/27/2024 9:21 AM, Paul S Person wrote:
    On Tue, 26 Mar 2024 12:55:44 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 3/26/2024 10:10 AM, James Nicoll wrote:
    A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge

    From Grimm's World to Rainbows End, the fiction of Vernor Vinge.

    https://reactormag.com/a-brief-guide-to-the-fiction-of-vernor-vinge/

    You seem to imply that Vinge invented the 'technological singularity'.

    While I, among many others, first became aware of the idea through his
    1993 essay[1], it predates him. John Von Neumann discussed the notion
    back in 1958. I have no idea if Vinge knew or Von Neumann's
    speculations, or invented the idea independently. It's one of those
    'when it's steam engine time, it will steam engine' ideas.

    Vinge predicted it would happen by 2023. While clearly we're not
    there yet, the explosive development of generative AI clearly
    seems a step in that direction.

    [1] http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

    I don't remember where or when or how I became aware of it.

    But I do know I haven't a lot about it recently.

    Has the rate of progress slown down since, say, the 1990s? So that it
    isn't quite so exponential?

    It is probably just "normal" now.

    --
    I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
    dirty old man.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Chris Buckley@21:1/5 to Paul S Person on Fri Mar 29 01:06:17 2024
    On 2024-03-27, Paul S Person <[email protected]d> wrote:
    On Tue, 26 Mar 2024 12:55:44 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 3/26/2024 10:10 AM, James Nicoll wrote:
    A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge

    From Grimm's World to Rainbows End, the fiction of Vernor Vinge.

    https://reactormag.com/a-brief-guide-to-the-fiction-of-vernor-vinge/

    You seem to imply that Vinge invented the 'technological singularity'.

    While I, among many others, first became aware of the idea through his
    1993 essay[1], it predates him. John Von Neumann discussed the notion
    back in 1958. I have no idea if Vinge knew or Von Neumann's
    speculations, or invented the idea independently. It's one of those
    'when it's steam engine time, it will steam engine' ideas.

    Vinge predicted it would happen by 2023. While clearly we're not
    there yet, the explosive development of generative AI clearly
    seems a step in that direction.

    [1] http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

    I don't remember where or when or how I became aware of it.

    But I do know I haven't a lot about it recently.

    Has the rate of progress slown down since, say, the 1990s? So that it
    isn't quite so exponential?

    The 1990s was not a period of large amount of progress on AI. Lots of
    things were tried, small amounts of progress were made in related
    disciplines (natural language parsing for example), but nothing really
    advanced general AI.

    One of the related disciplines that did have exponential growth was
    mine: statistical information retrieval. At the beginning of the 90s, state-of-the-art IR in practice was advanced Boolean systems on
    possibly manually annotated documents. By the end of the 90s, with
    the concurrent development of the web, it was natural language queries
    on raw document text.

    Towards the end of the 90s, people (including me) became aware that
    large quantities of data (text) had a quality in itself. I had thoughts
    of using IR to do AI taking advantage of this, but didn't do anything myself though a grad student I mentored, Amit Singhal, later did. Groups like
    IBM in the very early 2000s did develop this for what I consider the first
    real progress in AI: question-answering. This was the group/system/approach that was later developed Watson (that you may have seen on Jeopardy).

    Side note: I wrote a fair number of IR papers with lots of citations
    (30,000+), but I suspect the piece of writing that had the biggest
    impact on IR was my one page post-PhD recommendation for Amit for
    BellLabs++. The manager who hired him later told me that the sole
    reason he offered Amit a position was my letter. It WAS rather
    effusive, saying among other things that I thought he would have a
    larger impact than any IR Grad student world-wide in the last 20
    years. It turns out the manager knew me and knew I was not a
    particularly gushy, over-enthusiastic person (can you tell from my
    posts here:)) 3 years later in early 2000 Amit moved to be Head of
    Research at an up-and-coming search engine company called Google,
    rewrote the IR system, and the rest is history. AI was a pet interest
    of Amit's throughout his 15 years as research head that he pushed as
    much as possible; his goal was the ship's computer on original Star
    Trek - something we're getting close to!

    Overall, at Google and elsewhere, I view the start of exponential
    growth of AI to be around 2000, sparked by first time availability of
    very large data sets (whether text or images or eventually financial)
    fast, cheap computer resources, and the realization that you didn't
    need formal rules - the data was enough. It started reasonably slowly
    but the exponential growth has not stopped yet. However, I will say
    that right now many people are overestimating current AI capabilities
    and underestimating the remaining problems (eg reliability). Lots of
    hype!

    Chris

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From D@21:1/5 to Lynn McGuire on Fri Mar 29 11:00:35 2024
    On Thu, 28 Mar 2024, Lynn McGuire wrote:

    On 3/28/2024 8:06 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-27, Paul S Person <[email protected]d> wrote:
    On Tue, 26 Mar 2024 12:55:44 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 3/26/2024 10:10 AM, James Nicoll wrote:
    A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge

    From Grimm's World to Rainbows End, the fiction of Vernor Vinge.

    https://reactormag.com/a-brief-guide-to-the-fiction-of-vernor-vinge/

    You seem to imply that Vinge invented the 'technological singularity'. >>>>
    While I, among many others, first became aware of the idea through his >>>> 1993 essay[1], it predates him. John Von Neumann discussed the notion
    back in 1958. I have no idea if Vinge knew or Von Neumann's
    speculations, or invented the idea independently. It's one of those
    'when it's steam engine time, it will steam engine' ideas.

    Vinge predicted it would happen by 2023. While clearly we're not
    there yet, the explosive development of generative AI clearly
    seems a step in that direction.

    [1] http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

    I don't remember where or when or how I became aware of it.

    But I do know I haven't a lot about it recently.

    Has the rate of progress slown down since, say, the 1990s? So that it
    isn't quite so exponential?

    The 1990s was not a period of large amount of progress on AI. Lots of
    things were tried, small amounts of progress were made in related
    disciplines (natural language parsing for example), but nothing really
    advanced general AI.

    One of the related disciplines that did have exponential growth was
    mine: statistical information retrieval. At the beginning of the 90s,
    state-of-the-art IR in practice was advanced Boolean systems on
    possibly manually annotated documents. By the end of the 90s, with
    the concurrent development of the web, it was natural language queries
    on raw document text.

    Towards the end of the 90s, people (including me) became aware that
    large quantities of data (text) had a quality in itself. I had thoughts
    of using IR to do AI taking advantage of this, but didn't do anything
    myself
    though a grad student I mentored, Amit Singhal, later did. Groups like
    IBM in the very early 2000s did develop this for what I consider the first >> real progress in AI: question-answering. This was the
    group/system/approach
    that was later developed Watson (that you may have seen on Jeopardy).

    Side note: I wrote a fair number of IR papers with lots of citations
    (30,000+), but I suspect the piece of writing that had the biggest
    impact on IR was my one page post-PhD recommendation for Amit for
    BellLabs++. The manager who hired him later told me that the sole
    reason he offered Amit a position was my letter. It WAS rather
    effusive, saying among other things that I thought he would have a
    larger impact than any IR Grad student world-wide in the last 20
    years. It turns out the manager knew me and knew I was not a
    particularly gushy, over-enthusiastic person (can you tell from my
    posts here:)) 3 years later in early 2000 Amit moved to be Head of
    Research at an up-and-coming search engine company called Google,
    rewrote the IR system, and the rest is history. AI was a pet interest
    of Amit's throughout his 15 years as research head that he pushed as
    much as possible; his goal was the ship's computer on original Star
    Trek - something we're getting close to!

    Overall, at Google and elsewhere, I view the start of exponential
    growth of AI to be around 2000, sparked by first time availability of
    very large data sets (whether text or images or eventually financial)
    fast, cheap computer resources, and the realization that you didn't
    need formal rules - the data was enough. It started reasonably slowly
    but the exponential growth has not stopped yet. However, I will say
    that right now many people are overestimating current AI capabilities
    and underestimating the remaining problems (eg reliability). Lots of
    hype!

    Chris

    Having been a software developer since 1975, I am really wondering about the AI hype. The AI thing so far seems to be a major expansion of the old Eliza program. Of course, I am really outdated, writing in Fortran and C++ nowadays. I have about two million lines of F77 / C++ code that I am shepherding around the place for several customers.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

    Lynn

    I agree. I am also not super impressed. I've tried the common ones and for
    my use cases I find that I still need to proof read, change and rewrite.
    The same goes for code.

    So I can just as well come up with the text/code myself, with the added advantage that I then know exactly what I did.

    But based on what I am reading, there are ninjas who seem to have fused
    with their favourite AI of choice and feel they are much more productive.

    That said, I think the progress from Eliza is great, and if the progress continues so that I don't have to do what I have to do today, then it's a valuable tool for corporate BS and for simple coding tasks (parse file,
    convert to csv, give me a basic web site setup in framework X).

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Chris Buckley@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Fri Mar 29 14:02:13 2024
    On 2024-03-29, D <[email protected]> wrote:


    On Thu, 28 Mar 2024, Lynn McGuire wrote:

    On 3/28/2024 8:06 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-27, Paul S Person <[email protected]d> wrote:
    On Tue, 26 Mar 2024 12:55:44 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 3/26/2024 10:10 AM, James Nicoll wrote:
    A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge

    From Grimm's World to Rainbows End, the fiction of Vernor Vinge. >>>>>>
    https://reactormag.com/a-brief-guide-to-the-fiction-of-vernor-vinge/ >>>>>
    You seem to imply that Vinge invented the 'technological singularity'. >>>>>
    While I, among many others, first became aware of the idea through his >>>>> 1993 essay[1], it predates him. John Von Neumann discussed the notion >>>>> back in 1958. I have no idea if Vinge knew or Von Neumann's
    speculations, or invented the idea independently. It's one of those
    'when it's steam engine time, it will steam engine' ideas.

    Vinge predicted it would happen by 2023. While clearly we're not
    there yet, the explosive development of generative AI clearly
    seems a step in that direction.

    [1] http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

    I don't remember where or when or how I became aware of it.

    But I do know I haven't a lot about it recently.

    Has the rate of progress slown down since, say, the 1990s? So that it
    isn't quite so exponential?

    The 1990s was not a period of large amount of progress on AI. Lots of
    things were tried, small amounts of progress were made in related
    disciplines (natural language parsing for example), but nothing really
    advanced general AI.

    One of the related disciplines that did have exponential growth was
    mine: statistical information retrieval. At the beginning of the 90s,
    state-of-the-art IR in practice was advanced Boolean systems on
    possibly manually annotated documents. By the end of the 90s, with
    the concurrent development of the web, it was natural language queries
    on raw document text.

    Towards the end of the 90s, people (including me) became aware that
    large quantities of data (text) had a quality in itself. I had thoughts
    of using IR to do AI taking advantage of this, but didn't do anything
    myself
    though a grad student I mentored, Amit Singhal, later did. Groups like
    IBM in the very early 2000s did develop this for what I consider the first >>> real progress in AI: question-answering. This was the
    group/system/approach
    that was later developed Watson (that you may have seen on Jeopardy).

    Side note: I wrote a fair number of IR papers with lots of citations
    (30,000+), but I suspect the piece of writing that had the biggest
    impact on IR was my one page post-PhD recommendation for Amit for
    BellLabs++. The manager who hired him later told me that the sole
    reason he offered Amit a position was my letter. It WAS rather
    effusive, saying among other things that I thought he would have a
    larger impact than any IR Grad student world-wide in the last 20
    years. It turns out the manager knew me and knew I was not a
    particularly gushy, over-enthusiastic person (can you tell from my
    posts here:)) 3 years later in early 2000 Amit moved to be Head of
    Research at an up-and-coming search engine company called Google,
    rewrote the IR system, and the rest is history. AI was a pet interest
    of Amit's throughout his 15 years as research head that he pushed as
    much as possible; his goal was the ship's computer on original Star
    Trek - something we're getting close to!

    Overall, at Google and elsewhere, I view the start of exponential
    growth of AI to be around 2000, sparked by first time availability of
    very large data sets (whether text or images or eventually financial)
    fast, cheap computer resources, and the realization that you didn't
    need formal rules - the data was enough. It started reasonably slowly
    but the exponential growth has not stopped yet. However, I will say
    that right now many people are overestimating current AI capabilities
    and underestimating the remaining problems (eg reliability). Lots of
    hype!

    Chris

    Having been a software developer since 1975, I am really wondering about the >> AI hype. The AI thing so far seems to be a major expansion of the old Eliza >> program. Of course, I am really outdated, writing in Fortran and C++
    nowadays. I have about two million lines of F77 / C++ code that I am
    shepherding around the place for several customers.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

    Lynn

    I agree. I am also not super impressed. I've tried the common ones and for
    my use cases I find that I still need to proof read, change and rewrite.
    The same goes for code.

    So I can just as well come up with the text/code myself, with the added advantage that I then know exactly what I did.

    But based on what I am reading, there are ninjas who seem to have fused
    with their favourite AI of choice and feel they are much more productive.

    That said, I think the progress from Eliza is great, and if the progress continues so that I don't have to do what I have to do today, then it's a valuable tool for corporate BS and for simple coding tasks (parse file, convert to csv, give me a basic web site setup in framework X).

    The progress of AI has been truly impressive the last couple of
    decades. But one of the major problems is that general AI is
    extremely hard to evaluate well. There are many different criteria
    that need to be used and humans disagree deeply on almost every
    one of them. Eg, what does it mean to be fair?

    Ellen Voorhees was the TREC project manager at NIST for decades until
    she retired last year. TREC has been the leading text evaluation workshop/conference since the early 1990s. Her last couple of years at
    NIST were spent trying to come up with tasks upon which general AI
    could be evaluated. She did not succeed. Just too big of a mismatch
    between the breadth of what "intelligence" means and the human
    disagreements on the narrow criteria that can be evaluated in a task.
    It was just too messy. (I heard about it often; we've been married
    for over 40 years.)

    One of the problems with the general public's opinion of AI is that
    the fluency of the new models is just too good! That sort of fluency
    in humans is only achievable by adult experts but the generative AI
    models are masking all their understanding gaps, which may be equivalent
    to a 10 year old child.

    To my mind, a major proof that we have reached the area of true learning,
    is the performance of AlphaGo and then AlphaZero 7 or 8 years ago. The
    massive data there was their own game simulations and it was a very restricted world of chess, go, and other games but to start with just the rules, come up with their own criteria for "good moves", and become better than anybody
    else in the world in less than a day is impressive! This is the type
    of learning that is going into general Ai models of today.

    Chris

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Scott Dorsey@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Fri Mar 29 15:57:23 2024
    Lynn McGuire <[email protected]> wrote:

    Having been a software developer since 1975, I am really wondering about
    the AI hype. The AI thing so far seems to be a major expansion of the
    old Eliza program. Of course, I am really outdated, writing in Fortran
    and C++ nowadays. I have about two million lines of F77 / C++ code that
    I am shepherding around the place for several customers.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

    Don't think about it as Eliza, because Eliza is rules-based and you can
    look into the box.

    Think about machine learning as giant matrix. Stuff goes in and we tweak
    the matrix coefficients so that the stuff comes out that we want when we multiply the matrix by the stuff that went in. After the learning period
    is over, we put completely new stuff in, and other completely new stuff
    comes out that hopefully is related in the same way as the data we trained
    it on.

    It's not really rules-based and what something weird comes out, it is very difficult to go back and work out what data in the training process caused
    that weird association to occur. Often it is impossible.

    If you remember the McCulloch and Pitts Perceptron machine in the sixties,
    that is basically the great grandfather of the modern machine learning
    systems. In the end, connectionism won and traditional AI methods lost. --scott

    --
    "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From D@21:1/5 to Chris Buckley on Sat Mar 30 12:12:03 2024
    On Fri, 29 Mar 2024, Chris Buckley wrote:

    On 2024-03-29, D <[email protected]> wrote:


    On Thu, 28 Mar 2024, Lynn McGuire wrote:

    On 3/28/2024 8:06 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-27, Paul S Person <[email protected]d> wrote:
    On Tue, 26 Mar 2024 12:55:44 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 3/26/2024 10:10 AM, James Nicoll wrote:
    A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge

    From Grimm's World to Rainbows End, the fiction of Vernor Vinge. >>>>>>>
    https://reactormag.com/a-brief-guide-to-the-fiction-of-vernor-vinge/ >>>>>>
    You seem to imply that Vinge invented the 'technological singularity'. >>>>>>
    While I, among many others, first became aware of the idea through his >>>>>> 1993 essay[1], it predates him. John Von Neumann discussed the notion >>>>>> back in 1958. I have no idea if Vinge knew or Von Neumann's
    speculations, or invented the idea independently. It's one of those >>>>>> 'when it's steam engine time, it will steam engine' ideas.

    Vinge predicted it would happen by 2023. While clearly we're not
    there yet, the explosive development of generative AI clearly
    seems a step in that direction.

    [1] http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

    I don't remember where or when or how I became aware of it.

    But I do know I haven't a lot about it recently.

    Has the rate of progress slown down since, say, the 1990s? So that it >>>>> isn't quite so exponential?

    The 1990s was not a period of large amount of progress on AI. Lots of >>>> things were tried, small amounts of progress were made in related
    disciplines (natural language parsing for example), but nothing really >>>> advanced general AI.

    One of the related disciplines that did have exponential growth was
    mine: statistical information retrieval. At the beginning of the 90s,
    state-of-the-art IR in practice was advanced Boolean systems on
    possibly manually annotated documents. By the end of the 90s, with
    the concurrent development of the web, it was natural language queries >>>> on raw document text.

    Towards the end of the 90s, people (including me) became aware that
    large quantities of data (text) had a quality in itself. I had thoughts >>>> of using IR to do AI taking advantage of this, but didn't do anything
    myself
    though a grad student I mentored, Amit Singhal, later did. Groups like >>>> IBM in the very early 2000s did develop this for what I consider the first >>>> real progress in AI: question-answering. This was the
    group/system/approach
    that was later developed Watson (that you may have seen on Jeopardy).

    Side note: I wrote a fair number of IR papers with lots of citations
    (30,000+), but I suspect the piece of writing that had the biggest
    impact on IR was my one page post-PhD recommendation for Amit for
    BellLabs++. The manager who hired him later told me that the sole
    reason he offered Amit a position was my letter. It WAS rather
    effusive, saying among other things that I thought he would have a
    larger impact than any IR Grad student world-wide in the last 20
    years. It turns out the manager knew me and knew I was not a
    particularly gushy, over-enthusiastic person (can you tell from my
    posts here:)) 3 years later in early 2000 Amit moved to be Head of
    Research at an up-and-coming search engine company called Google,
    rewrote the IR system, and the rest is history. AI was a pet interest >>>> of Amit's throughout his 15 years as research head that he pushed as
    much as possible; his goal was the ship's computer on original Star
    Trek - something we're getting close to!

    Overall, at Google and elsewhere, I view the start of exponential
    growth of AI to be around 2000, sparked by first time availability of
    very large data sets (whether text or images or eventually financial)
    fast, cheap computer resources, and the realization that you didn't
    need formal rules - the data was enough. It started reasonably slowly >>>> but the exponential growth has not stopped yet. However, I will say
    that right now many people are overestimating current AI capabilities
    and underestimating the remaining problems (eg reliability). Lots of
    hype!

    Chris

    Having been a software developer since 1975, I am really wondering about the
    AI hype. The AI thing so far seems to be a major expansion of the old Eliza
    program. Of course, I am really outdated, writing in Fortran and C++
    nowadays. I have about two million lines of F77 / C++ code that I am
    shepherding around the place for several customers.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

    Lynn

    I agree. I am also not super impressed. I've tried the common ones and for >> my use cases I find that I still need to proof read, change and rewrite.
    The same goes for code.

    So I can just as well come up with the text/code myself, with the added
    advantage that I then know exactly what I did.

    But based on what I am reading, there are ninjas who seem to have fused
    with their favourite AI of choice and feel they are much more productive.

    That said, I think the progress from Eliza is great, and if the progress
    continues so that I don't have to do what I have to do today, then it's a
    valuable tool for corporate BS and for simple coding tasks (parse file,
    convert to csv, give me a basic web site setup in framework X).

    The progress of AI has been truly impressive the last couple of
    decades. But one of the major problems is that general AI is
    extremely hard to evaluate well. There are many different criteria
    that need to be used and humans disagree deeply on almost every
    one of them. Eg, what does it mean to be fair?

    Ellen Voorhees was the TREC project manager at NIST for decades until
    she retired last year. TREC has been the leading text evaluation workshop/conference since the early 1990s. Her last couple of years at
    NIST were spent trying to come up with tasks upon which general AI
    could be evaluated. She did not succeed. Just too big of a mismatch
    between the breadth of what "intelligence" means and the human
    disagreements on the narrow criteria that can be evaluated in a task.
    It was just too messy. (I heard about it often; we've been married
    for over 40 years.)

    One of the problems with the general public's opinion of AI is that
    the fluency of the new models is just too good! That sort of fluency
    in humans is only achievable by adult experts but the generative AI
    models are masking all their understanding gaps, which may be equivalent
    to a 10 year old child.

    To my mind, a major proof that we have reached the area of true learning,
    is the performance of AlphaGo and then AlphaZero 7 or 8 years ago. The massive data there was their own game simulations and it was a very restricted
    world of chess, go, and other games but to start with just the rules, come up with their own criteria for "good moves", and become better than anybody
    else in the world in less than a day is impressive! This is the type
    of learning that is going into general Ai models of today.

    Chris


    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and go,
    massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you could add
    great progress when it comes to self driving cars, robots, image
    recognition and voice recognition too.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul S Person@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Sat Mar 30 08:51:04 2024
    On Sat, 30 Mar 2024 08:27:28 -0500, "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> wrote:

    <snippo>

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_, >Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever hasn't
    been done yet."

    That dovetails with something I've run into: when a bit of AI research
    produces something /useful/ it ceases to be "AI" and is called
    something else. "AI" is always used for pure research, unpolluted by
    tawdry commercialization.
    --
    "Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
    Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
    Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From D@21:1/5 to Paul S Person on Sat Mar 30 19:15:56 2024
    On Sat, 30 Mar 2024, Paul S Person wrote:

    On Sat, 30 Mar 2024 08:27:28 -0500, "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> wrote:

    <snippo>

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_, >> Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever hasn't
    been done yet."

    That dovetails with something I've run into: when a bit of AI research produces something /useful/ it ceases to be "AI" and is called
    something else. "AI" is always used for pure research, unpolluted by
    tawdry commercialization.


    Agreed. I read the same somewhere and I agree.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Scott Lurndal@21:1/5 to Michael F. Stemper on Sat Mar 30 19:33:25 2024
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:


    On Fri, 29 Mar 2024, Chris Buckley wrote:

    On 2024-03-29, D <[email protected]> wrote:


    On Thu, 28 Mar 2024, Lynn McGuire wrote:

    Having been a software developer since 1975, I am really wondering about the
    AI hype.  The AI thing so far seems to be a major expansion of the old Eliza
    program.

    That said, I think the progress from Eliza is great, and if the progress >>>> continues so that I don't have to do what I have to do today, then it's a >>>> valuable tool for corporate BS and for simple coding tasks (parse file, >>>> convert to csv, give me a basic web site setup in framework X).

    The progress of AI has been truly impressive the last couple of
    decades.  But one of the major problems is that general AI is
    extremely hard to evaluate well. There are many different criteria
    that need to be used and humans disagree deeply on almost every
    one of them.  Eg, what does it mean to be fair?

    One of the problems with the general public's opinion of AI is that
    the fluency of the new models is just too good!  That sort of fluency
    in humans is only achievable by adult experts but the generative AI
    models are masking all their understanding gaps, which may be equivalent >>> to a 10 year old child.

    To my mind, a major proof that we have reached the area of true learning, >>> is the performance of AlphaGo and then AlphaZero 7 or 8 years ago.  The >>> massive data there was their own game simulations and it was a very restricted
    world of chess, go, and other games but to start with just the rules, come up
    with their own criteria for "good moves", and become better than anybody >>> else in the world in less than a day is impressive!  This is the type
    of learning that is going into general Ai models of today.

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_, >Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever hasn't
    been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI. It's just machine learning and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns. Eliza writ large.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Scott Dorsey@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Sat Mar 30 21:40:36 2024
    Paul S Person <[email protected]d> wrote:
    That dovetails with something I've run into: when a bit of AI research >produces something /useful/ it ceases to be "AI" and is called
    something else. "AI" is always used for pure research, unpolluted by
    tawdry commercialization.

    This is a longstanding tradition. When I was in grad school, expert systems were AI, but by the time I was out, expert systems weren't AI anymore.
    (In the end expert systems didn't turn out to be useful either but that
    is a separate issue).

    But now we have come to a weird point in time when "AI" seems to be synonomous with "machine learning systems."
    --scott
    --
    "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Chris Buckley@21:1/5 to Michael F. Stemper on Sun Mar 31 02:50:51 2024
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_, >>> Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever hasn't
    been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI. It's just machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns. Eliza writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be impressed. But
    right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start to have meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's conflicting information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it
    would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict
    with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean
    something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial
    Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others?

    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason. AlphaZero is given
    the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of
    playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more
    impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed
    in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong
    probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated,
    and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the
    board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its
    own. It then uses those high level concepts to only consider
    reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer
    simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.)

    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show intelligence in your opinion?

    Chris

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Dimensional Traveler@21:1/5 to Chris Buckley on Sat Mar 30 20:11:56 2024
    On 3/30/2024 7:50 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_, >>>> Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever hasn't >>>> been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI. It's just machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns. Eliza writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be impressed. But
    right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start to have
    meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the Singularity. >>
    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's conflicting
    information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it
    would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict
    with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean
    something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others?

    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason. AlphaZero is given
    the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of
    playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed
    in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong
    probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated,
    and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the
    board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its
    own. It then uses those high level concepts to only consider
    reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer
    simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.)

    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show intelligence in your opinion?

    I would say that is highly advanced number crunching. It can run
    predictive simulations much farther into the "future" than past systems
    but that is just more advanced computation hardware. But the main
    problem with claiming successful "artificial intelligence" is you first
    have to _define_ "intelligence" in some kind of measurable, objective
    manner. As far as I know we can't.

    --
    I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
    dirty old man.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Chris Buckley@21:1/5 to Dimensional Traveler on Sun Mar 31 11:59:16 2024
    On 2024-03-31, Dimensional Traveler <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 7:50 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_,
    Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever hasn't >>>>> been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI. It's just machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns. Eliza writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be impressed. But
    right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start to have
    meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's conflicting
    information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text into >>> one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it
    would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict
    with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean
    something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial
    Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial
    *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others?

    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason. AlphaZero is given
    the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of
    playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more
    impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed
    in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong
    probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated,
    and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the
    board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its
    own. It then uses those high level concepts to only consider
    reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer
    simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.)

    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show
    intelligence in your opinion?

    I would say that is highly advanced number crunching. It can run
    predictive simulations much farther into the "future" than past systems
    but that is just more advanced computation hardware. But the main
    problem with claiming successful "artificial intelligence" is you first
    have to _define_ "intelligence" in some kind of measurable, objective
    manner. As far as I know we can't.

    Why? Weren't you around for that almost interminable discussion on
    the definitions of "life"? "Life" is an high level concept that
    humans have many, very different, definitions for that don't agree
    with each other. They agree on determining whether something is alive
    on the vast majority of cases, but no measurable, objective definition
    exists. That's life.

    "Intelligence" is yet another, even more difficult, high level concept
    that there will never be a single agreed upon definition in English.
    Just too high a level of concept and too many fuzzy English words
    (other high level concepts) around. But that doesn't mean we can't
    come up with useful definitions for our purposes, just as we do with
    "life".

    You need to be very careful when talking about measurable, objective
    manner. That implies automated, implying a program, say Eval_I, could
    do it. Would you be satisfied with an intelligence evaluation of a
    program that examined possible solutions of whatever problem and
    picked the one that scored highest on Eval_I?

    This is not just a theoretical problem. For instance, the premier
    Information Retrieval conference has a workshop this summer on
    evaluating information retrieval systems using GPT as the decider
    of "correct" answers. The problems and difficulties are obvious.

    Chris

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Chris Buckley@21:1/5 to Michael F. Stemper on Sun Mar 31 14:24:12 2024
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_, >>> Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever hasn't
    been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI. It's just machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns. Eliza writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be impressed. But
    right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start to have meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's conflicting information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it
    would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict
    with each other.

    Without the narrow world of AlphaZero and games, where what is happening
    and not happening is much clearer, I'd have to argue from my experiences
    with text and GPT. I think we all agree that that is much less convincing
    and satisfactory. Nonetheless, I'll give a brief argument, though my
    previous post on AlphaZero is the better argument.

    I've been doing research in simple machine learning and pattern
    matching of text for over 40 years. That's pretty much the definition
    of statistical information retrieval. I know what the limits of
    simple LLM's are. People have been trying to add AI and knowledge
    structures on top of statistical ir for many decades, but unsuccessfully
    (for general search.)

    And the level of performance of simple LLM's and pattern matching is
    pretty bad. It's far below what you've seen every day from Google Search
    for the past 20 years. Google Search (at least in the 200X's) got its increased performance by adding human input, mostly indirect. It did a very good job at using human links between web pages and using human click-through data (what pages humans actually click on after searching.)

    This poor performance of simple LLMs and pattern matching continues to
    this day. A couple of years ago I participated in a workshop
    "comparison" designed to look at the problems of retrieval in a
    rapidly changing domain (Covid research papers). Performance of
    simple LLMs (including from researchers from places like Google) wasn't significantly better than year 2000 systems.

    So what has changed from simple LLMs to LLMs like GPT-4? Basically
    deep learning: being able to make use of multiple layers of processing,
    where high level concepts are defined and recognized and then operated
    on by higher layers of processing (with feedback from those higher levels
    used at the lower levels.) That's pretty much how I define "intelligence":
    the ability to recognize and reason with high level (abstract) concepts.

    Note that when you say "it's just machine learning and pattern recognition",
    I don't really disagree. But that's because my definition of
    "machine learning" includes "machine intelligence" as an almost
    proper subset. GPT-4 (or AlphaZero) is learning new abstract concepts
    and operating with them. What more do you require from machine
    intelligence?

    Chris

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul S Person@21:1/5 to Chris Buckley on Sun Mar 31 08:36:54 2024
    On 31 Mar 2024 14:24:12 GMT, Chris Buckley <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_, >>>> Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever hasn't >>>> been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI. It's just machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns. Eliza writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be impressed. But
    right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start to have
    meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the Singularity. >>
    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's conflicting
    information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it
    would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict
    with each other.

    Without the narrow world of AlphaZero and games, where what is happening
    and not happening is much clearer, I'd have to argue from my experiences
    with text and GPT. I think we all agree that that is much less convincing >and satisfactory. Nonetheless, I'll give a brief argument, though my >previous post on AlphaZero is the better argument.

    I've been doing research in simple machine learning and pattern
    matching of text for over 40 years. That's pretty much the definition
    of statistical information retrieval. I know what the limits of
    simple LLM's are. People have been trying to add AI and knowledge
    structures on top of statistical ir for many decades, but unsuccessfully
    (for general search.)

    And the level of performance of simple LLM's and pattern matching is
    pretty bad. It's far below what you've seen every day from Google Search
    for the past 20 years. Google Search (at least in the 200X's) got its >increased performance by adding human input, mostly indirect. It did a very >good job at using human links between web pages and using human click-through >data (what pages humans actually click on after searching.)

    This poor performance of simple LLMs and pattern matching continues to
    this day. A couple of years ago I participated in a workshop
    "comparison" designed to look at the problems of retrieval in a
    rapidly changing domain (Covid research papers). Performance of
    simple LLMs (including from researchers from places like Google) wasn't >significantly better than year 2000 systems.

    So what has changed from simple LLMs to LLMs like GPT-4? Basically
    deep learning: being able to make use of multiple layers of processing,
    where high level concepts are defined and recognized and then operated
    on by higher layers of processing (with feedback from those higher levels >used at the lower levels.) That's pretty much how I define "intelligence": >the ability to recognize and reason with high level (abstract) concepts.

    Note that when you say "it's just machine learning and pattern recognition", >I don't really disagree. But that's because my definition of
    "machine learning" includes "machine intelligence" as an almost
    proper subset. GPT-4 (or AlphaZero) is learning new abstract concepts
    and operating with them. What more do you require from machine
    intelligence?

    I think that, real-world-wise, I myself am waiting for one of the
    artificial alleged-intelligences to produce the GUT. Or something
    equally impressive.

    One of my brothers claimed, for a while, that our dog, a small
    terrier-mix which would jump up and down when I got out his leash and
    said, in a baby-talk voice, "Georgie want to go for a walk?",
    understood what I was saying.

    So, one day after a particularly vexing discussion on the topic, I got
    out the leash and, in the same tone of voice, said "Georgie want to be
    cooked and eaten?". And he jumped and down just the same, which
    convinced my brother that the dog didn't understand what I was saying
    at all (well, once I pointed out that the only alternative was that he
    /did/ want to be cooked and eaten just as much as he wanted to go for
    a walk).

    And then, of course, I attached the leash to his collar and took him
    for a walk. To do anything else, after all, would have been cruel.

    But the point is that people have a tendency to ascribe, to clearly
    non-human entities, traits which they just don't have. And not just
    animals, of course.
    --
    "Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
    Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
    Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul S Person@21:1/5 to Scott Dorsey on Sun Mar 31 08:21:28 2024
    On 30 Mar 2024 21:40:36 -0000, [email protected] (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

    Paul S Person <[email protected]d> wrote:
    That dovetails with something I've run into: when a bit of AI research >>produces something /useful/ it ceases to be "AI" and is called
    something else. "AI" is always used for pure research, unpolluted by
    tawdry commercialization.

    This is a longstanding tradition. When I was in grad school, expert systems >were AI, but by the time I was out, expert systems weren't AI anymore.
    (In the end expert systems didn't turn out to be useful either but that
    is a separate issue).

    But now we have come to a weird point in time when "AI" seems to be synonomous >with "machine learning systems."

    Well, we are living in an age of semantic goo ...
    --
    "Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
    Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
    Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Dimensional Traveler@21:1/5 to Cryptoengineer on Sun Mar 31 09:31:39 2024
    On 3/31/2024 8:12 AM, Cryptoengineer wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 11:11 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 7:50 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and >>>>>>> go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you >>>>>>> could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars,
    robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden >>>>>> Braid_,
    Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever
    hasn't
    been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI.  It's just
    machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns.   Eliza
    writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be impressed. But >>>> right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start to have >>>> meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the
    Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's conflicting
    information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text
    into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it
    would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict
    with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean
    something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial
    Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial
    *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others?

    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason.  AlphaZero is given
    the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of
    playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more
    impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed
    in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong
    probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated,
    and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the
    board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its
    own.  It then uses those high level concepts to only consider
    reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer
    simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.)

    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show
    intelligence in your opinion?

    I would say that is highly advanced number crunching.  It can run
    predictive simulations much farther into the "future" than past
    systems but that is just more advanced computation hardware.  But the
    main problem with claiming successful "artificial intelligence" is you
    first have to _define_ "intelligence" in some kind of measurable,
    objective manner.  As far as I know we can't.

    There's a saying, attributed to Lenin: "Quantity has a quality all its
    own."

    I go for the duck test.

    If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck,
    then its a duck.

    Show me the AI duck. :)

    --
    I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
    dirty old man.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From D@21:1/5 to Dimensional Traveler on Sun Mar 31 22:32:32 2024
    This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text,
    while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools.

    On Sun, 31 Mar 2024, Dimensional Traveler wrote:

    On 3/31/2024 8:12 AM, Cryptoengineer wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 11:11 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 7:50 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and go, >>>>>>>> massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you could >>>>>>>> add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, robots, image >>>>>>>> recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden >>>>>>> Braid_,
    Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever hasn't >>>>>>> been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI.  It's just machine >>>>>> learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns.   Eliza writ >>>>>> large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be impressed. But >>>>> right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start to have >>>>> meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the
    Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's conflicting >>>>> information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text into >>>>> one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it >>>>> would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict >>>>> with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean
    something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial
    Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial
    *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others?

    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason.  AlphaZero is given >>>> the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of
    playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more
    impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed
    in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong
    probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated,
    and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the
    board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its
    own.  It then uses those high level concepts to only consider
    reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer
    simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.)

    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show
    intelligence in your opinion?

    I would say that is highly advanced number crunching.  It can run
    predictive simulations much farther into the "future" than past systems
    but that is just more advanced computation hardware.  But the main problem >>> with claiming successful "artificial intelligence" is you first have to
    _define_ "intelligence" in some kind of measurable, objective manner.  As >>> far as I know we can't.

    There's a saying, attributed to Lenin: "Quantity has a quality all its
    own."

    I go for the duck test.

    If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck,
    then its a duck.

    Show me the AI duck. :)

    I'd say it's a duck called Turing! =)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Dimensional Traveler@21:1/5 to Cryptoengineer on Sun Mar 31 16:09:56 2024
    On 3/31/2024 1:46 PM, Cryptoengineer wrote:
    Dimensional Traveler <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 3/31/2024 8:12 AM, Cryptoengineer wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 11:11 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 7:50 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>>> On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and >>>>>>>>> go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you >>>>>>>>> could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, >>>>>>>>> robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden >>>>>>>> Braid_,
    Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever >>>>>>>> hasn't
    been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI.  It's just
    machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns.   Eliza >>>>>>> writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be impressed. But >>>>>> right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start to have >>>>>> meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the
    Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's conflicting >>>>>> information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text >>>>>> into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it >>>>>> would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict >>>>>> with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean
    something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial
    Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial
    *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others?

    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason.  AlphaZero is given >>>>> the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of
    playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more >>>>> impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed >>>>> in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong
    probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated,
    and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the
    board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its >>>>> own.  It then uses those high level concepts to only consider
    reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer
    simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.)

    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show >>>>> intelligence in your opinion?

    I would say that is highly advanced number crunching.  It can run
    predictive simulations much farther into the "future" than past
    systems but that is just more advanced computation hardware.  But the >>>> main problem with claiming successful "artificial intelligence" is you >>>> first have to _define_ "intelligence" in some kind of measurable,
    objective manner.  As far as I know we can't.

    There's a saying, attributed to Lenin: "Quantity has a quality all its
    own."

    I go for the duck test.

    If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck,
    then its a duck.

    Show me the AI duck. :)


    Just generated this one, with the prompt "Draw a detailed image of a duck swimming on a pond."

    https://imgur.com/NN8n3px

    Its not quacking like a duck, so not a duck. :P


    --
    I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
    dirty old man.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From D@21:1/5 to Cryptoengineer on Mon Apr 1 10:41:45 2024
    This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text,
    while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools.

    On Sun, 31 Mar 2024, Cryptoengineer wrote:

    Dimensional Traveler <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 3/31/2024 8:12 AM, Cryptoengineer wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 11:11 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 7:50 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>>> On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and >>>>>>>>> go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you >>>>>>>>> could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, >>>>>>>>> robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden >>>>>>>> Braid_,
    Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever >>>>>>>> hasn't
    been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI.  It's just
    machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns.   Eliza >>>>>>> writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be impressed. But >>>>>> right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start to have >>>>>> meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the
    Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's conflicting >>>>>> information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text >>>>>> into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it >>>>>> would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict >>>>>> with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean
    something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial
    Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial
    *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others?

    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason.  AlphaZero is given >>>>> the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of
    playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more >>>>> impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed >>>>> in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong
    probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated,
    and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the
    board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its >>>>> own.  It then uses those high level concepts to only consider
    reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer
    simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.)

    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show >>>>> intelligence in your opinion?

    I would say that is highly advanced number crunching.  It can run
    predictive simulations much farther into the "future" than past
    systems but that is just more advanced computation hardware.  But the >>>> main problem with claiming successful "artificial intelligence" is you >>>> first have to _define_ "intelligence" in some kind of measurable,
    objective manner.  As far as I know we can't.

    There's a saying, attributed to Lenin: "Quantity has a quality all its
    own."

    I go for the duck test.

    If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck,
    then its a duck.

    Show me the AI duck. :)


    Just generated this one, with the prompt "Draw a detailed image of a duck swimming on a pond."

    https://imgur.com/NN8n3px

    Pt

    What AI service are you using? Is it free?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Don@21:1/5 to Chris Buckley on Mon Apr 1 12:57:31 2024
    Chris Buckley wrote:

    <snip>

    "Intelligence" is yet another, even more difficult, high level concept
    that there will never be a single agreed upon definition in English.
    Just too high a level of concept and too many fuzzy English words
    (other high level concepts) around. But that doesn't mean we can't
    come up with useful definitions for our purposes, just as we do with
    "life".

    You need to be very careful when talking about measurable, objective
    manner. That implies automated, implying a program, say Eval_I, could
    do it. Would you be satisfied with an intelligence evaluation of a
    program that examined possible solutions of whatever problem and
    picked the one that scored highest on Eval_I?

    This is not just a theoretical problem. For instance, the premier
    Information Retrieval conference has a workshop this summer on
    evaluating information retrieval systems using GPT as the decider
    of "correct" answers. The problems and difficulties are obvious.

    "Intelligence" is an ambiguous abstraction, adaptable to circumstances,
    as needed. In my idiom "intelligence" implies people able to discern
    narratives embedded in corporate media, AI, or anything else.

    At present, AI helps search engines act more like a "friend" towards
    me. Better AI than me sift through an endless heaps of search results.

    Danke,

    --
    Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God.
    tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From D@21:1/5 to Cryptoengineer on Mon Apr 1 19:35:13 2024
    This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text,
    while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools.

    On Mon, 1 Apr 2024, Cryptoengineer wrote:

    On 4/1/2024 4:41 AM, D wrote:


    On Sun, 31 Mar 2024, Cryptoengineer wrote:

    Dimensional Traveler <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 3/31/2024 8:12 AM, Cryptoengineer wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 11:11 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 7:50 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>>>>> On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and >>>>>>>>>>> go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you >>>>>>>>>>> could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, >>>>>>>>>>> robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden >>>>>>>>>> Braid_,
    Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever >>>>>>>>>> hasn't
    been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI.  It's just >>>>>>>>> machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns.   Eliza >>>>>>>>> writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be impressed. >>>>>>>> But
    right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start to >>>>>>>> have
    meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the >>>>>>>> Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's conflicting >>>>>>>> information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text >>>>>>>> into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it >>>>>>>> would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict >>>>>>>> with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean
    something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial
    Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial >>>>>>> *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others? >>>>>>>
    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason.  AlphaZero is given >>>>>>> the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of >>>>>>> playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more >>>>>>> impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed >>>>>>> in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong
    probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated, >>>>>>> and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the >>>>>>> board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its >>>>>>> own.  It then uses those high level concepts to only consider
    reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer
    simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.) >>>>>>>
    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show >>>>>>> intelligence in your opinion?

    I would say that is highly advanced number crunching.  It can run >>>>>> predictive simulations much farther into the "future" than past
    systems but that is just more advanced computation hardware.  But the >>>>>> main problem with claiming successful "artificial intelligence" is you >>>>>> first have to _define_ "intelligence" in some kind of measurable,
    objective manner.  As far as I know we can't.

    There's a saying, attributed to Lenin: "Quantity has a quality all its >>>>> own."

    I go for the duck test.

    If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck,
    then its a duck.

    Show me the AI duck.  :)


    Just generated this one, with the prompt "Draw a detailed image of a duck >>> swimming on a pond."

    https://imgur.com/NN8n3px

    Pt

    What AI service are you using? Is it free?\

    https://perchance.org/ai-photo-generator

    Yes, it was free, at least for my use.

    I just googled 'free ai image generator', and picked one. I have no
    informed opinion to compare them.

    BTW, that was it's second try. The first had two duck bodies, left
    and right, centered on one duck head.

    pt

    Ahh, got it. Thank you for the pointer!

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul S Person@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Tue Apr 2 08:59:29 2024
    On Mon, 1 Apr 2024 12:07:17 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 4/1/2024 4:41 AM, D wrote:


    On Sun, 31 Mar 2024, Cryptoengineer wrote:

    Dimensional Traveler <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 3/31/2024 8:12 AM, Cryptoengineer wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 11:11 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 7:50 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>>>>> On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes:
    On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and >>>>>>>>>>> go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you >>>>>>>>>>> could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, >>>>>>>>>>> robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden >>>>>>>>>> Braid_,
    Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever >>>>>>>>>> hasn't
    been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI.� It's just >>>>>>>>> machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns.�� Eliza >>>>>>>>> writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be
    impressed. But
    right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start >>>>>>>> to have
    meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the >>>>>>>> Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's
    conflicting
    information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text >>>>>>>> into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it >>>>>>>> would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict >>>>>>>> with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean
    something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial
    Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial >>>>>>> *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others? >>>>>>>
    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason.� AlphaZero is >>>>>>> given
    the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of >>>>>>> playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more >>>>>>> impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed >>>>>>> in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong
    probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated, >>>>>>> and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the >>>>>>> board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its >>>>>>> own.� It then uses those high level concepts to only consider
    reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer
    simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.) >>>>>>>
    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show >>>>>>> intelligence in your opinion?

    I would say that is highly advanced number crunching.� It can run
    predictive simulations much farther into the "future" than past
    systems but that is just more advanced computation hardware.� But the >>>>>> main problem with claiming successful "artificial intelligence" is you >>>>>> first have to _define_ "intelligence" in some kind of measurable,
    objective manner.� As far as I know we can't.

    There's a saying, attributed to Lenin: "Quantity has a quality all its >>>>> own."

    I go for the duck test.

    If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck,
    then its a duck.

    Show me the AI duck.� :)


    Just generated this one, with the prompt "Draw a detailed image of a duck >>> swimming on a pond."

    https://imgur.com/NN8n3px

    Pt

    What AI service are you using? Is it free?\

    https://perchance.org/ai-photo-generator

    Yes, it was free, at least for my use.

    I just googled 'free ai image generator', and picked one. I have no
    informed opinion to compare them.

    BTW, that was it's second try. The first had two duck bodies, left
    and right, centered on one duck head.

    Reminds me of a police procedural novel I read once which opens with
    two cops recalling how they "solved" a case by demonstrating that a
    man could shoot himself and the cartridge ejected could come to rest
    in a vertical position on its base on the top of the dresser. They
    recorded a test of the whole event (no, they didn't shoot anyone).
    Their Captain was very happy with them, as it promised to be a very
    sticky murder otherwise.

    What they /didn't/ mention to their Captain is that what he saw
    recorded on film was the result of their 47th attempt.

    And it only took the "ai image generator" two tries. But, of course, a
    duck floating in water isn't quite the same thing.

    It was, BTW, a nice-looking image.

    I can hardly wait for ai image generators to be deployed politically.
    If they haven't been already.
    --
    "Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
    Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
    Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul S Person@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Wed Apr 3 08:56:00 2024
    On Tue, 2 Apr 2024 13:52:29 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 4/2/2024 11:59 AM, Paul S Person wrote:
    On Mon, 1 Apr 2024 12:07:17 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 4/1/2024 4:41 AM, D wrote:


    On Sun, 31 Mar 2024, Cryptoengineer wrote:

    Dimensional Traveler <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 3/31/2024 8:12 AM, Cryptoengineer wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 11:11 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 7:50 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>>>>>>> On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes: >>>>>>>>>>>> On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and >>>>>>>>>>>>> go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you >>>>>>>>>>>>> could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, >>>>>>>>>>>>> robots, image recognition and voice recognition too.

    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden >>>>>>>>>>>> Braid_,
    Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever >>>>>>>>>>>> hasn't
    been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI.� It's just >>>>>>>>>>> machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns.�� Eliza >>>>>>>>>>> writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be
    impressed. But
    right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start >>>>>>>>>> to have
    meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the >>>>>>>>>> Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's
    conflicting
    information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text >>>>>>>>>> into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it >>>>>>>>>> would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict >>>>>>>>>> with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean >>>>>>>>> something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial >>>>>>>>> Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial >>>>>>>>> *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others? >>>>>>>>>
    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason.� AlphaZero is >>>>>>>>> given
    the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of >>>>>>>>> playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more >>>>>>>>> impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed >>>>>>>>> in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong >>>>>>>>> probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated, >>>>>>>>> and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the >>>>>>>>> board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its >>>>>>>>> own.� It then uses those high level concepts to only consider >>>>>>>>> reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer >>>>>>>>> simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.) >>>>>>>>>
    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show >>>>>>>>> intelligence in your opinion?

    I would say that is highly advanced number crunching.� It can run >>>>>>>> predictive simulations much farther into the "future" than past >>>>>>>> systems but that is just more advanced computation hardware.� But the >>>>>>>> main problem with claiming successful "artificial intelligence" is you >>>>>>>> first have to _define_ "intelligence" in some kind of measurable, >>>>>>>> objective manner.� As far as I know we can't.

    There's a saying, attributed to Lenin: "Quantity has a quality all its >>>>>>> own."

    I go for the duck test.

    If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck, >>>>>>> then its a duck.

    Show me the AI duck.� :)


    Just generated this one, with the prompt "Draw a detailed image of a duck >>>>> swimming on a pond."

    https://imgur.com/NN8n3px

    Pt

    What AI service are you using? Is it free?\

    https://perchance.org/ai-photo-generator

    Yes, it was free, at least for my use.

    I just googled 'free ai image generator', and picked one. I have no
    informed opinion to compare them.

    BTW, that was it's second try. The first had two duck bodies, left
    and right, centered on one duck head.

    Reminds me of a police procedural novel I read once which opens with
    two cops recalling how they "solved" a case by demonstrating that a
    man could shoot himself and the cartridge ejected could come to rest
    in a vertical position on its base on the top of the dresser. They
    recorded a test of the whole event (no, they didn't shoot anyone).
    Their Captain was very happy with them, as it promised to be a very
    sticky murder otherwise.

    What they /didn't/ mention to their Captain is that what he saw
    recorded on film was the result of their 47th attempt.

    And it only took the "ai image generator" two tries. But, of course, a
    duck floating in water isn't quite the same thing.

    It was, BTW, a nice-looking image.

    I can hardly wait for ai image generators to be deployed politically.
    If they haven't been already.

    They have:
    Fake Trump arrest: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65069316

    Faked Biden robocall: >https://www.wired.com/story/biden-robocall-deepfake-danger/

    There are other cases, in the US and other countries.

    Semantic goo now spreads to images!

    Wow, is /that/ discouraging!
    --
    "Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
    Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
    Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul S Person@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Thu Apr 4 09:05:40 2024
    On Wed, 3 Apr 2024 12:49:53 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 4/3/2024 11:56 AM, Paul S Person wrote:
    On Tue, 2 Apr 2024 13:52:29 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 4/2/2024 11:59 AM, Paul S Person wrote:
    On Mon, 1 Apr 2024 12:07:17 -0400, Cryptoengineer
    <[email protected]> wrote:

    On 4/1/2024 4:41 AM, D wrote:


    On Sun, 31 Mar 2024, Cryptoengineer wrote:

    Dimensional Traveler <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 3/31/2024 8:12 AM, Cryptoengineer wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 11:11 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
    On 3/30/2024 7:50 PM, Chris Buckley wrote:
    On 2024-03-30, Michael F. Stemper <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 30/03/2024 14.33, Scott Lurndal wrote:
    "Michael F. Stemper" <[email protected]> writes: >>>>>>>>>>>>>> On 30/03/2024 06.12, D wrote:

    Yes, if we're talking narrow, focused use cases such as chess and
    go, massive progress indeed. Depending on how you define it, you
    could add great progress when it comes to self driving cars, >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> robots, image recognition and voice recognition too. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>
    If I recall correctly, in _Go:del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden
    Braid_,
    Douglas Hofstader commented that "AI is sometimes just whatever >>>>>>>>>>>>>> hasn't
    been done yet."

    But none of what is called "AI" today is really AI.� It's just >>>>>>>>>>>>> machine learning
    and pattern matching with a massive database of patterns.�� Eliza >>>>>>>>>>>>> writ large.

    Agreed. If it learns more than word patterns, I might be >>>>>>>>>>>> impressed. But
    right now, it's just textual manipulation. When the words start >>>>>>>>>>>> to have
    meaning to the program(s), then we'll really be approaching the >>>>>>>>>>>> Singularity.

    As far as I can tell, though, it's not aware that there's >>>>>>>>>>>> conflicting
    information out there. If you fed a bunch of Electric Universe text
    into
    one of these programs, it'd be just as happy parroting it back as it
    would GR. It wouldn't realize that the two "systems" are in conflict
    with each other.

    All you folks are redefining AI once again, twisting it to mean >>>>>>>>>>> something unrecognizable (to me at least). It is not Artificial >>>>>>>>>>> Consciousness; it is not Artificial Embodiment. It is Artificial >>>>>>>>>>> *Intelligence*.

    Is a fish intelligent? Are some dogs more intelligent than others? >>>>>>>>>>>
    I included my paragraph on AlphaZero for a reason.� AlphaZero is >>>>>>>>>>> given
    the rules of the game but no other game info. It took 34 hours of >>>>>>>>>>> playing itself at Go to become the best in the world. (The even more
    impressive MuZero doesn't even have the rules of the game programmed
    in.)

    It is not just pattern matching. By 50 moves of Go with strong >>>>>>>>>>> probability the board is in a position that it has never simulated, >>>>>>>>>>> and games to completion go 200+ moves. Every move and stone on the >>>>>>>>>>> board is important. AlphaZero is learning high level concepts on its
    own.� It then uses those high level concepts to only consider >>>>>>>>>>> reasonable moves. (It does several orders of magnitude fewer >>>>>>>>>>> simulations at game time than other programs, at least at chess.) >>>>>>>>>>>
    How is this not intelligence? What would AlphaZero have to do to show
    intelligence in your opinion?

    I would say that is highly advanced number crunching.� It can run >>>>>>>>>> predictive simulations much farther into the "future" than past >>>>>>>>>> systems but that is just more advanced computation hardware.� But the
    main problem with claiming successful "artificial intelligence" is you
    first have to _define_ "intelligence" in some kind of measurable, >>>>>>>>>> objective manner.� As far as I know we can't.

    There's a saying, attributed to Lenin: "Quantity has a quality all its
    own."

    I go for the duck test.

    If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acts like a duck, >>>>>>>>> then its a duck.

    Show me the AI duck.� :)


    Just generated this one, with the prompt "Draw a detailed image of a duck
    swimming on a pond."

    https://imgur.com/NN8n3px

    Pt

    What AI service are you using? Is it free?\

    https://perchance.org/ai-photo-generator

    Yes, it was free, at least for my use.

    I just googled 'free ai image generator', and picked one. I have no
    informed opinion to compare them.

    BTW, that was it's second try. The first had two duck bodies, left
    and right, centered on one duck head.

    Reminds me of a police procedural novel I read once which opens with
    two cops recalling how they "solved" a case by demonstrating that a
    man could shoot himself and the cartridge ejected could come to rest
    in a vertical position on its base on the top of the dresser. They
    recorded a test of the whole event (no, they didn't shoot anyone).
    Their Captain was very happy with them, as it promised to be a very
    sticky murder otherwise.

    What they /didn't/ mention to their Captain is that what he saw
    recorded on film was the result of their 47th attempt.

    And it only took the "ai image generator" two tries. But, of course, a >>>> duck floating in water isn't quite the same thing.

    It was, BTW, a nice-looking image.

    I can hardly wait for ai image generators to be deployed politically.
    If they haven't been already.

    They have:
    Fake Trump arrest: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65069316

    Faked Biden robocall:
    https://www.wired.com/story/biden-robocall-deepfake-danger/

    There are other cases, in the US and other countries.

    Semantic goo now spreads to images!

    Wow, is /that/ discouraging!

    It looks like that 'verifying what is true' is becoming
    increasingly difficult.

    It wasn't that much easier, say, 200 years ago.

    I believe I noted at one point here that Darwin once claimed that the
    Black African knee was intermediate between the White knee and the Ape
    knee.

    But he didn't do this by direct observation. He relied on a
    correspondent, who may have been mislead by a racist attitude, and
    Darwin had no way to "verify what is true" in that case.

    Two newspaper headlines might also be considered: the one claiming
    that the Spanish had sunk an American ship in Cuba, starting a war
    with a lie; and "Dewey Defeats Truman", reflecting the newspapers
    wishes rather than reality.

    So it would probably be more accurate to say "the brief era in which
    "verifying what it true" was /not/ difficult has ended.
    --
    "Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
    Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
    Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)