Nonsense on Stilts
We recorded 12 claims from this post. 4 were checked against evidence. 8 can’t be checked. 1 more is held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (12)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.”
Our reading: Neither LaMDA nor similar large language models such as GPT-3 are remotely intelligent.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all.”
Our reading: LaMDA-style language models only match statistical patterns of human language, and their output has no real meaning.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Forecast
“None of the software in either of those systems has survived in modern efforts at “artificial general intelligence”, and I am not sure that LaMDA and its cousins will play any important role in the future of AI, either.”
Our reading: Marcus doubts that LaMDA and similar language models will play any important role in the future of AI.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“What these systems do, no more and no less, is to put together sequences of words, but without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools, without any clue about what that mean.”
Our reading: Language models like LaMDA string words together without any coherent understanding of the world.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t.”
Our reading: LaMDA is not sentient.
No horizon
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
Observation
“Software like LaMDA simply doesn’t; it doesn’t even try to connect to the world at large, it just tries to be the best version of autocomplete it can be, by predicting what words best fit a given context.”
Our reading: Software like LaMDA does not connect to the world; it is just autocomplete predicting which words fit a context.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The result depends on reading external grounding as a connection to the world.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“We in the AI community have our differences, but pretty much all of find the notion that LaMDA might be sentient completely ridiculous.”
Our reading: Nearly all of the AI community considers the idea that LaMDA might be sentient ridiculous.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: Public commentators are a self-selected group.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“The public knows the test of course, but the AI community wishes it would go away; we all know that beating that test isn’t meaningful.”
Our reading: The AI community wishes the Turing Test would go away, and its members all know that beating the test is not meaningful.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The usable scholarly overview predates the target period.
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
Observation
“But 8 years later I doubt most people (even in AI) have ever even heard of his program, outside of my mentioning it here. It made zero lasting contribution to AI.”
Our reading: The Eugene Goostman chatbot, celebrated in 2014, made no lasting contribution to AI.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The decisive evidence is a retrospective participant account published in 2023 about events in 2016–2018.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“Fooling people into thinking a program is intelligent is just not the same as building programs that actually are intelligent.”
Our reading: Fooling people into thinking a program is intelligent is not the same as building an intelligent program.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“In truth, literally everything that the system says is bullshit.”
Our reading: Everything LaMDA says is bullshit with no real meaning behind it.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“But there is no absolutely no reason whatever for us to waste time wondering whether anything anyone in 2022 knows how to build is sentient. It is not.”
Our reading: No AI system that anyone knew how to build in 2022 is sentient.
No horizon
Qualifier: anything anyone in 2022 knows how to build
Held from this post (1)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.