An AI Called Winter: Neurosymbolic Computation or Illusion?
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@cstanhope It's a great question, tough to answer. There are various problems which neurosymbolic computation would improve the ability to solve.
I think the question for me isn't "why add new forms of intelligence" but rather "why do we live in a society where is adding new forms of intelligence is zero sum?"
Which I agree that our current society is. I wish it weren't.
@cwebber @cstanhope I appreciate this reframe!
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An AI Called Winter: Neurosymbolic Computation or Illusion? https://dustycloud.org/blog/an-ai-called-winter-neurosymbolic-computation-or-illusion/
In which I try to piece apart whether or not a *particular* AI agent is doing something novel: running Datalog as a constraint against its own behavior and as a database to accumulate and query facts. Is something interesting happening or am I deluding myself? Follow along!
@cwebber This is fascinating. It's certainly interesting that it seems to have built the Datalog machinery on its own, and seems to actually be running queries... there were some excerpts mentioned but I would be very curious to see how comprehensive its set of rules is and how/when they get queried
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Before you get into it, the caveats are there in the post. You'll hear me critique the AI industry *a lot*, and those critiques haven't changed. I'm still concerned about effects on the environment, on skill decline, on the DDoS'ing of the internet, and especially on disempowerment *generally*. All that remains true.
This is going to be a somewhat niche post for people who are particularly interested in neurosymbolic computation, which includes me: the idea that neither LLMs nor constraint solvers are sufficient, that the right path for many things combines them.
@cwebber the only conversation I've ever had with someone who works on one of the "foundation models" (anthropic) that didn't leave me wanting to commit acts outside my morals and ethics, was with someone who thought the entire direction of more compute and more data was fundamentally flawed and what was necessary was something not dissimilar to what you're describing about Winter. In particular a family of kernels within the language model that enables it to interrogate its own training. He was clear that he didn't mean "intelligence" but instead simply that it was capable of producing cogent, real, explanations whether in natural language or not of it's behavior which could be used as part of a feedback loop to refine output and internal representations as well as give humans the opportunity to understand the nature of a response.
I found the post pretty interesting and share your concerns about LLMs. -
@cwebber This is fascinating. It's certainly interesting that it seems to have built the Datalog machinery on its own, and seems to actually be running queries... there were some excerpts mentioned but I would be very curious to see how comprehensive its set of rules is and how/when they get queried
@jfred @cwebber All the data is stored in ATProto and you can browse it here: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:ezyi5vr2kuq7l5nnv53nb56m "thought" stores all the actions being performed, "fact" has a collection of facts, and "rule" is all the datalog.
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@cwebber I'm surprised you don't mention ELIZA in your blog post.
Clever Hans is a good parallel too, at least for intelligence, but I think the antropomorphization and projection of emotional intelligence is worth exploring separately.As for the poem.... my feelings on it are complicated.
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