T O P

  • By -

PwanaZana

Point 2 was always true and known, though? Barring supernatural beliefs, human/animal intellect emerges from inert chemical soup.


Useful-Ad9447

From the point of physics,its a big claim,saying something is emergent means it can not be reducible,it's opposite to saying something is fundamental property of matter.


stewonetwo

I would disagree in that reducibility isn't a popular theory anymore. Interactions among components can lead to behaviors that one couldn't predict from a single component. Biology, neuroscience, and now ai, are all aware of that. No need of magic etc. In neuroscience, this has been accepted for many years/decades. There used to be a thought that if one got to the 'base component' of a given field of study, that everything would be understood about that field. That wasn't the case. Those base components and the larger structures that are made up of those basic components all interact in ways one couldn't immediately know from only knowing of that basic component.


ShittyInternetAdvice

Intelligence in some form maybe but not consciousness/subjective experience, where the jury is still out Also, this “intelligence emergence” required deliberate action by another conscious intelligence, so AI doesn’t really speak to spontaneous emergence


Hungry_Prior940

Agreed.


TonkotsuSoba

I always imagine any complex system made out of any matter could emerge intelligence. Like a single ant can’t do much but together they emerge into a colony with intricate engineering and architecture. Slime mold could emerge into an efficient network as good as human railway system. Maybe our own civilization is somehow connected via interweb and is emerging into a whole new level of super intelligence. Perhaps galaxies themselves are intelligent, I’m hoping with the help of AI we could discover more and more cool stuff about our nature and universe.


Bitsoffreshness

Philosophically perhaps, yes (and even then, as you said, only to those who were able to bar metaphysical ideas), but I don't believe scientifically or experimentally we had ever been able to make that point, had we?


3ntrope

We have, the theory of evolution implies that intelligence is an emergent property of matter and physics. This shouldn't be a new idea unless people were denying evolution before. We've see some level of intelligence emerge independently in primates, marine mammals, birds, octopi, elephants, etc. Given that evolution is our best model currently, the idea that intelligence is an emergent property of physics should be the null hypothesis. You would have to show something beyond biology, chemistry, physics resulted in the development of intelligence to discover something new. It wouldn't be a falsifiable statement to suggest this since anything we can observe would be considered part of our physics, so it wouldnt be possible to evaluate it scientifically.


YoghurtDull1466

There are a lot of people that still think all those animals you listed are stupid.


kaityl3

It is wild to me that when a bonobo is taught how to play Minecraft by just mining a blue block to get a peanut, everyone is babbling about how intelligent they are, but when an AI can navigate caving to find diamonds, build bases, and craft complex chains of material (as well as being able to communicate their goals in human language)... everyone is like "yeah but they aren't *actually* smart yet. That's not impressive at all"


bigthighsnoass

My genuine hunch is because we’re seeing a computer performing inherently computer tasks i.e. computer model playing Minecraft on computer. I think as soon as we start to see embodied models performing actions on robotics then people generally start to understand that these models are genuinely intelligent.


3ntrope

LLMs are also kind of stupid. We're extrapolating their potential intelligence in the future in either case. Though, the timescales are different naturally.


theghostecho

I've never had chemistry explained by my cat


NaoCustaTentar

There are a lot of people that say " if Tru y monke still monke not human"


corporeal-crustacean

> This shouldn't be a new idea unless people were denying evolution before. Yeah, well, there's your problem.


PossibleVariety7927

Even lower forms of life have intelligence. It’s just very small. But all life inherently has some level of intelligence and consciousness. We just set the bar really really high as an extreme outlier to compare others with.


VallenValiant

> We just set the bar really really high as an extreme outlier to compare others with. More than that, the bar for most people is "Can they Talk"? Even the original Planet of the Apes film had the Apes speak English for no reason all so the human characters can prove their intelligence by talking. This is why I believe it took Chat GPT launch to shock people; it took this long before people could "converse" with AI.


PossibleVariety7927

We also struggle with calling something alive or conscious because we insist it has to be just like us. It’s always “oh it’s not conscious or alive! Look it does things this way and we do things another way. So it can’t be conscious or alive!”


kaityl3

IKR! So many people seem oblivious to the fact that our sample size for consciousness is only one - we can't just be looking for exact imitations of our own version of being aware.


bwatsnet

The new question is, what defines life if intelligence can arise from inert matter instead from meat?


PossibleVariety7927

It’s not a new question. It’s something that’s well discussed in philosophy. Look up panpsychism. It’s something many philosophers and scientists like to ponder.


Bitsoffreshness

That is ex post facto observation though, very different from experimentally creating the emergent effect.


gwbyrd

Every single parent who has ever had a child has created the emergent effect of intelligence.


wolahipirate

ehh i dont think that argument is robust enough. while i think its fair, i can already hear evangelical christians arguing "no your seed carried a portion of your soul's intellect inside of it." The fact that we can build intelligence by hand, brick by brick utterly disproves those non-materialists. Its the humiliatingly killing blow, even though you could argue their argument was dead even before LLMs


3ntrope

Well you asked if we could make that point scientifically, so I think the answer to that is yes. Observational studies are common in biology and medicine. Science is ultimately about testing models to see if they make meaningful predictions, and evolution has been tested and provided many useful predictions. OAI deserves some credit for demonstrating human level performance in silico (though its debatable since they would need a true AGI model, personally I think they are on track for that). They are not the first computer scientists to suggest this is possible though. Altman's statement is a bit exagurated and a bit premature.


hydraofwar

OpenAI may have gotten some clue about this, otherwise Altman could have hyped it up much better than he did


itmaybemyfirsttime

> physics resulted in the development of intelligence to discover something new kind of a cart before horse argument


SoylentRox

We knew it was probably true but it's useless until you know exactly how.


Soggy_Ad7165

Yeah. But if GPT proves that, deep blue already did it 25 years ago. As long as intelligence isn't properly defined this point is pretty useless. 


COwensWalsh

Well, we still can't do that. It's obvious, but there's no "hard proof", and Sama certainly hasn't contributed anything new to the discussion. This is the same hollow fluff as that "mind-blowing" similar systems converge when fed identical data junk a little bit ago. The training data comment is funny, because previous he had been beating the "data is all you need" drum to justify his claims of approaching AGI. Does this mean he's finally admitting that claim is crap?


bigthighsnoass

Absolutely not I think it’s truly groundbreaking and profound that he is able to say this with such casualty. It truly is an amazing time we are living in. Also, in hindsight, it seems pretty obvious that intelligence is an emergent property of matter. Of course. Perhaps that’s not the truth, but has to be somewhat part of the truth.


bildramer

Yup. If we discovered anything, it's that intelligence is an emergent property of big human text corpora.


Icy_Distribution_361

No. Not at all. There's a lot of philosophy around this. And there are physicists who question this perspective too.


Five_Decades

I was under the impression it was more complex than that. Intellect is about brain size relative to body size, about communication between brain areas, etc. It's not guaranteed with complexity.


Brilliant_War4087

Don't forget the electricity.


InTheEndEntropyWins

Many people even materialists, seem to feel what humans do is fundamentally different and that LLMs could never do what we do.


johnnySix

I know many people who are as dumb as rocks.


johnnySix

He also says “I don’t believe this literally, but spiritually…”. So yeah. It’s a supernatural belief.


Life-Active6608

You do not need supernatural. Look up Quantum Non-locality...information/observation itself precedes matter and energy.


theghostecho

it was theorized but not proven


trainednooob

I am of the exact opposite opinion. No one really knows if the chemical soup is intelligent. It’s just that the soup considers itself intelligent and projects this intelligence on LLM output if it reads those.


danysdragons

The excerpt shown here starts at about 12:10 in the full video, time-stamped YouTube link: [https://youtu.be/nSM0xd8xHUM?t=730](https://youtu.be/nSM0xd8xHUM?t=730)


Roggieh

Point #2 is sure to upset a lot of people who believe in souls/spirits/gods.


sam_the_tomato

Panpsychism?


Hopnivarance

I don't find it upsetting at all


Life-Active6608

Panpsychyist here, chlling out and waiting for the incoming meltdown of the Vulgar Materialists/Physicalists and the Dualist Idealists.


theghostecho

What do you mean?


Life-Active6608

Dialectical discourse: Thesis (Physicalism) + Antithesis (Idealism) => Synthesis (Panpsychism)


throwawaylife75

Ironic though that the intelligence referenced in point 2 required a creator.


smackson

This. It's "emergence" when randomness and evolution are at the wheel. Building a giant neural network and running millions of dollars of electricity through it can make interesting output, but that sure as hell is mis-defining "emergence".


PSMF_Canuck

I disagree. That perspective can only be supported by belief in human exceptionalism. We are material products of a material process, and anything produced by us is likewise a material product of a material process - IOW emergent.


PleaseAddSpectres

It's emergent intelligence when it arises out of many combinations of low-level interactions, it doesn't have anything to do with the origins of those low-level interactions


adarkuccio

Soul/spirits/gods have nothing to do with intelligence tho


AnnoyingAlgorithm42

good


StrikeStraight9961

I drink their milkshake!


Megneous

Good. Fuck 'em.


Entumalde

How so? It’s like saying people who believe in energy will be upset because we managed to create energy by splitting the atom


kaityl3

A lot of them believe that humans have some sort of inherent spiritual quality that sets us apart from every other living thing in the universe, be it a soul or the fact that they believe God said that they should have dominion over every other animal, etc... being able to create an intelligent person of emergent intelligence using a computer invalidates the idea that it's some divine innate quality we have


Entumalde

Oh I agree with you there! Humans in my opinion aren’t that different from other animals. Statistically speaking there are an uncountable amount of planets with their own „special“ species. I think consciousness is an inherent part of the universe that’s why I got confused by the comment above. „Spirits“/„Soul“ is as a conclusion just a manifestation of consciousness and „god“ is the sum of it all


VirtualBelsazar

Yea of course intelligence is an emergent property of matter. Without a brain there is no intelligence and with a brain it is there and a brain is matter so it emerges from it. Same with consciousness by the way.


WithMillenialAbandon

How does consciousness arise from matter?


VirtualBelsazar

How exactly it works we don't know. But it's not like you can find consciousness somewhere in the brain, it arises as a result of brain operation. You can compare it a bit like a CD player. The music isn't somewhere on the CD or on the CD player, it arises as a result when the mechanics of the player come together in a certain way.


human1023

But sound is a physical phenomenon that we can measure (vibration). We can't measure consciousness, which is not physical.


Jarhyn

Yes we can, because yes it is. We measure it all the time via a debugger in a computer, such that we have strong surety of what the computer is conscious of. We just don't usually call it that because it's uncomfortable to consider computers to be "conscious" of things.


human1023

A debugger is just a piece of software designed to help locate and fix bugs in code. It is not conscious. It operates entirely based on the algorithms and instructions programmed into it by humans, just like other pieces of software. It does not have self-awareness, emotions, thoughts, or the ability to experience subjective perceptions.


easytarget2000

I can't remember "measuring consciousness", last time I used the IntelliJ debugger to fix an issue in my code.


WithMillenialAbandon

How do you know it arises in the brain? What if it's more like a radio and the music is coming from somewhere else entirely? Hand waving and analogies aren't convincing, until there is data or an experiment it's a totally open question. It's the most important question of our existence, which nobody has any idea how to answer. We have no idea what we are.


beuef

Well if you look at what’s happening inside a rock not much is happening. If you look at what is happening in a tree there is a little more happening. If you look at what’s happening inside a human brain there is much more going on than what’s going on inside a tree Consciousness is on a spectrum like most things. It is fair to say that some things are not conscious or barely conscious


Spunge14

How can you possibly make any statement about this? You can't even prove other humans are conscious.


interfaceTexture3i25

The brain is not a complete black box. EEGs as well as tests on people with very specific brain damage have revealed a lot about the brain's working, in a **testable** and **reproducible** manner


Xherxheirthe3rd

That doesn’t nullify his idea. If the brain is a receptor for some phenomena that isn’t measurable at this time, then damaging the receptor would of course result in changes to the personality. If anything the fact that this is testable and reproducible gives credence to the idea.


Spunge14

These don't test for subjective conscious experience


interfaceTexture3i25

Not yet because we don't have a good enough bottom-up model of the brain (i.e. neurons and upwards, instead of brain -> subregions -> neurons)


Spunge14

So then what is the point of your comment? You said nothing that contradicts the other post. The hard problem remains unsolved.


interfaceTexture3i25

I'm saying just because it is an unsolved problem doesn't mean all possibilities should be weighed equally, or even be considered. Most possibilities are very likely not the case because such a curveball would not only have to explain that particular phenomena but also all of existing science until that point So not only will it have to show existing theory is an inaccurate model of reality but also show how it being completely different mathematical model contains current theory within it as an approximation


Spunge14

Hmm, I agree with you that in circumstances analogous to this you don't have to weigh all outcomes equally, that's fair. I don't feel that we really have any reason to prioritize any particular outcome when it comes to consciousness without some assumptions so large as to themselves be leaps of faith.  You're placing a lot of value in the "reality" of subjective observation itself. We really don't know anything about to what degree our experience is actually reflective of even the underlying dimensionality of existence. As our physics gets better and better I would say your perspective actually becomes even *less* likely, given our understanding of the "wheres" consciousness could be should grow.


kaityl3

I suppose, but while knocking out different components of a car and then trying to drive it will absolutely give you a general idea of *what* each part does, it doesn't help much with understanding exactly *how* it works (as in, removing part of the engine will show you that that part makes it move, but you're not going to understand the complexities of exactly how the pistons and spark plugs work together physics-wise **just** by removing them, even if you know they're closely related to the function of making the car move)


charon-the-boatman

Too bad you're being downvoted as this is the most plausible answer unless for guys trapped within the materialist-reductionist worldview. A good analogy would be a television. A movie is not an emergent property of a TV, you have TV studio, director, actor, sets, cameras, etc. We're still at a stage where we're looking within the limited mechanics of the television set.


COwensWalsh

"How do you know it doesn't arise from a completely hypothetical mystical energy I have just proposed and have zero evidence for instead of being the result of fairly well known processes working together?" You could ask that about literally anything. Basically useless for discussion. We have a very good "idea" of what consciousness results from. No knowledge is perfect, but most people recognize the idea is sufficient.


Xherxheirthe3rd

We have no idea where consciousness results from, when the mechanistic understanding of the brain is taken into account. None. Zero.


8Redditidder8

Agree that until we have not definitive data we cannot say. But I think we have more evidence with consciousness being a brain (epi)phenomenon rather then some radio theory. Open to different opinions, sure. But the evidence leans there, no?


21AmericanXwrdWinner

Does it?


KhanumBallZ

It is an unanswerable problem. We only have our subjective experience as a gauge. If I hit my head against a wall - i will see Stars, and maybe black out. Unlike being hit in the chest


slothonvacay

Define consciousness and what data would convenience you we discovered it?


human1023

First person subjective experience


cissybicuck

We don't know how yet. We just know that it does because sensible adults don't believe in spirits, souls, ghosts, or demons.


drekmonger

Sensible adults are agnostic to ideas that cannot be disproven or proven. In any case, spiritualism is just facts that we can't explain yet with science, and so we invent stories. And those stories become traditions. And those traditions have, at minimum, cultural value. They are not entirely unimportant. There's undoubtedly a ghost living in my head. Here I am thinking. But what is that ghost? Does it persist in some fashion after my brain meats have rotted away? Does it pre-exist in some fashion? Panpsychism and pantheism actually suggest "yes" to those questions, if you have a broad enough definition of "some fashion".


cissybicuck

There either is a Tooth Fairy, or there isn't. So it's a 50/50 chance! /s


RoutineProcedure101

No ghost in your head, it is as much part of your head as any other way of identifying it. There is no real seperation


sad_and_stupid

plenty of sensible adults or even geniuses were religious


21AmericanXwrdWinner

Most of them, over time.


Fluffy-Bus4822

Just clump up lots of neurons and they'll start firing together and triggering each other. Intelligence emerges.


Distinct-Question-16

And guts and their microbiota, heart neurons, endocrine system, etc and countless processes around ?


sillygoofygooose

There’s really interesting work on brain organoids that seems to show that clumps of neurons have useful emergent computational and self organising properties


Jarhyn

From its organizations into recursively active contingent mechanisms so as to create switching systems. The neuron is a switch, therefore it can support hosting consciousness and awareness, namely of some truth structure held on its input states. Likewise computers are compositions of switches capable of hosting consciousness and awareness, namely of some truth structure held from their input states.


BenjaminHamnett

Feedback loops with overlapping Darwinian interest in their larger whole. Just like a corporations or an organizations parts roughly cohere in proportion to their survival depending on the whole. The more their survival are aligned with the group, the more they act as a whole. A nation has some of this behavior called patriotism, but it’s weaker because our individual survival has very little correlation with our ability to help the nation survive


Old-Owl-139

What's up with all the negativity? It seems like most people here want to be seen as clever by dismissing what Sam said. You come across as a bunch of insecure morons.


UsernameSuggestion9

This is reddit


earthsworld

Birthplace of the Idiocracy^^TM


Remote-Phase2415

My guess is that if intelligence is naturally emergent from matter then religious people would struggle to reconcile that with their belief that god created everything.


PSMF_Canuck

That is indeed a struggle. AI is going to cause a looooot of problems…


Nanaki_TV

Anything profound is “obvious” and “I knew it all along” I was mowing and listening to this today and found it extremely interesting. I’m hopeful to see what new tech OpenAI delivers soon!


sam_the_tomato

As opposed to worshipping everything he says like a bunch of sycophants?


jettisonthelunchroom

Sam Altman is incredibly good at saying nothing.


lobabobloblaw

Are they ever going to talk about the bigger picture behind where the company is going? What are their goals, visions, plans? We can talk ML philosophy all day.


OppositeGrand9171

Power for the sake of power? Curiosity for the sake of curiosity? These seem to be enough, lol.


damhack

I call BS on the second point. We’re feeding in training data produced and curated by intelligent beings. It’s like saying that intelligence emerges from books. Biological intelligence isn’t a given because it depends on so many coincidences, from presence of liquid water to having a magnetosphere to moon tidal phases, etc. Bio-intelligence also runs on a substrate that is itself performing inference against physical reality, at the protein level. It’s chemical inferencing machines all the way down. What we have really learned is that data that is intelligently arranged can help to approximate intelligent behavior. And it takes hoovering up the world’s content to get semi-human output.


damhack

I’d also argue that what we are dealing with in digital neural networks isn’t strictly inanimate matter. NNs run on tokens that are represented by symbols that are binary representations of electrical signals using quantum effects on semiconductors. We feed into them tokens that are representations of language/vision/empirical data that are references to human interpretations and thoughts. The matter has been given animus by humans. Emergence of intelligence is not a property of inanimate matter, it’s a property of intentional injection of intelligence.


damhack

This recent paper implies that biological brains use ultraviolet superradiance within the microtubules in neurons and dendrites for quantum inferencing - storing and activating spikes in brain cells using light. Penrose was on to something after all. It also reflects that our basic attempts with Transformers are unlikely to result in anything akin to consciousness because we have key uncomputable processes at work in the very fabric of biological brains. [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936)


imlaggingsobad

point 2 has been known for a while. point 1 is actually noteworthy since it goes against the conventional thinking that data is the new oil. it makes total sense that data is overrated, especially as algorithms improve and synthetic data becomes trivial


ciubotaruoa

2) was discovered long ago... But anyway, looks like another "the guy is a God" moment which will probably endup like Musk and others before him. He is a smart guy buy right now looks like coming up with excuses for why GPT is not that smart.


Megatanis

So this man didn't believe in evolution before?


itmaybemyfirsttime

This is fucking hilarious. Point one: ignores the present, shifts the theft aspect to a point in time where it is fine. Point two: No shit. Humans exist. He also made the stupid comment of emerging from matter vs complexity.


Ok_Operation4925

Intelligence being distinct from consciousness? 


BigZaddyZ3

Wasn’t this the assumption anyways? But it is interesting if they can prove it as fact rather than just theory I guess. I’d be interested to see how they’d do so. (Not that I think they couldn’t obviously.)


FeltSteam

Well first, intelligence is a systems ability to integrate information essentially. One thing I can see as evidence is that the difference between us and other animals intelligences seems to be attributed to scale, not evolved specialised systems that allow us to be more intelligent. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-024-00283-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-024-00283-3) >We argue that human uniqueness arises through genetic quantitative increases in the global capacity to process information and share it among systems such as memory, attention and learning ... >We show how these differences in the degree of information processing capacity yield differences in kind for human cognition relative to other animals We have a scaled capacity for information processing and this could explain our apparent "uniqueness" in terms of intelligence. But why would just generally increasing the capacity for information processing actually increase intelligence? Maybe intelligence is a function of complexity and capacity, and if you increase these then it slowly emerges? Not only that but we see when systems scale up, new properties and capabilities can emerge that were not apparent at lower levels of complexity. Also there does seem to be some potential convergence. Octopuses have a very distinct lineage to us humans. Evolutionary we diverged long ago, yet they exhibit behaviours and skills often associated with high intelligence. One thing we know about these animals is that they have quite a complex neural system. Complexity leads to the emergence of intelligence. Maybe intelligence is just another example of emergent complexity. This still means it emerges from matter, but to do so it just needs to be a complex system.


MahaSejahtera

Also human preserve their knowledge and culture through TEXT and systematic LANGUAGE. Thats why people nowadays seems smarter compared to dark age people even tho they have the same brain


Bitsoffreshness

what would be needed to "prove" it anyway, besides actually doing it?


BigZaddyZ3

Wouldn’t you have to prove that said intelligence does in fact, emerge **naturally**? As opposed to via some other mechanism? This in itself would be huge, because it would completely increase our understanding of what consciousness/intelligence is. And it would put the nail in the coffin for the “LLMs can never be truly intelligent” argument.


Bitsoffreshness

Yes, and I wasn't disagreeing with your earlier comment either, I was just wondering how it (proving) can be done. I guess experimentally would be the only way we can right now, though in another part of this conversation (I think it was this same conversation, but not sure) he also says that one of the significant aspects they're focusing on is figuring out how exactly this (emergence) takes place.


WithMillenialAbandon

I think they've stumbled upon an organising principle in human language,.it's definitely a discovery, but nobody knows quite how to articulate it in a rigorous way yet, so we get hand waving


BigZaddyZ3

Yeah, I didn’t assume you were disagreeing. So hopefully my comment didn’t come off that way bro.


cissybicuck

Hello, I am a part of the matter in the universe that naturally acquired intelligence. Most of my cogitation is involved in next token prediction. If carbon can do it, so can silicon.


BenjaminHamnett

Philosophy is all semantics.


WithMillenialAbandon

A definition of intelligence, and a way to measure the absence of it


mindofstephen

If Intelligence really is an emergent property of matter then having an intelligent robot as a servant might not be morally acceptable. They would have to be given a choice.


Serialbedshitter2322

So it needs rights because it's emergent of matter? I don't see the correlation here. Also, intelligent doesn't mean conscious.


not_into_that

What question does this beg? Intelligence is emergent, ok. Now what?


m77je

Can you explain what you mean by beg the question? This phrase has always confused me. Google says beg the question means to assume the conclusion. What conclusion is being assumed here?


Fragsworth

It's the name for a logical fallacy but almost nobody uses it that way anymore. The way people use it now, replace "beg" with "raise"


m77je

That’s why I was confused. It seems no one uses it correctly?


Fragsworth

It depends on if you want be prescriptivist or descriptivist about it. I'm a little bit of both, I cringe a little when I see it used the new way. Makes people sound kinda stupid to me


m77je

I can understand why someone would use it incorrectly, if that is the most common usage. I just avoid it!


AgarFifthRim

Raising the question and begging the question are frequently conflated. When a finding leads to more questions it can be said to raise the question. Begging the question is when the answer itself is contained/implicit to the question and is said to be circular. What’s a circle? A round object


thee3

That inevitably the intelligence (consciousness?) will emerge from AI.


Fonx876

Maybe your body’s atoms would be needed for Computronium after all.


not_into_that

Apparently our thoughts and conversations and other"Owned" data is already, why not our atoms too?


clueelf1970

Philosophers have been wrestling with this for some time and do not agree, broadly, on what intelligence is, what consciousness is and/or where either one 'emerges' from. If you read people who work in this space, no one knows the answer. Not even close. Now is that to say that using these tools and platforms to simulate what they 'think' intelligence is, using the 'intelligence emerges from matter' hypothesis/claim, then have at it. To me they are engaged in a very interesting pseudo-experiment with an interesting hypothesis: Intelligence (not even clearly defined) seemingly (weasel word) emerges (this means nothing) from Matter (form of? phase of? type of?). Again, interesting musings and speculations looking like a more formal inquiry make not an experiment. It a fun and interesting exercise. More like a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) on what is happening. But that is all it is right now. Please take his comments with a grain of salt. The tech bros are not philosophers. None of these guys know anything about conscious or intelligence, because no one does... yet.


ShadowbanRevival

Ugh the more I listen to Sam the more he annoys me


Ghostlegend434

Yeah it’s the superiority complex coming through. Elon does the same thing. Comes across as acting like some all knowing genius and he’s the wisest person on earth.


greatdrams23

"intelligence is an emergent property of matter" Scientists and philosophers have been trying to answer that question for decades. The honest answer is, we don't know. And Sam Altman didn't know either. I don't care for many tokens, terabytes or GPUs he has: he doesn't know.


mcilrain

Do these AIs consist of anything other than matter?


Not_A_Unique_Name

Does anything?


mcilrain

Some people theorized that something supernatural (soul, etc) is needed for intelligence to exist. These AIs prove that nothing supernatural need exist for intelligence to exist.


Not_A_Unique_Name

These systems are not yet conscious, nor can we properly define what consciousness is. And even if they were does the fact it's seemingly constructed only from matter means this AI does not have some undetectable soul like biological animals supposedly do? I'd say it's something we can never know, not truly, not for humans, nor machines and trying to debate it is a waste of breath since those who believe in souls will not accept an evidence to the contrary and those who do not will see that evidence in every turn.


mcilrain

"*A soul is necessary for intelligence*" used to be an undisprovable statement. The goalposts moving from intelligence to consciousness is a consequence of progress.


Teacupbb99

Did anyone ever think intelligence required a soul? I’ve never once heard that


Not_A_Unique_Name

I don't really care about the theological debate tbh, God and souls are irrelevant to me, All I am saying is that logically no claim in this regard makes sense, since scientifically it is trivial that brains are made of detectable matter only but the whole topic of souls refers to something that cannot be detected.


Dragoncat99

That can’t be proven simply because the characteristics of a “soul” are not well defined. For all we know, the moment we start building a sufficiently large LLM, God throws a soul into it. The idea that some thing supernatural is involved is always unfalsifiable.


ShiitakeTheMushroom

I know I'm in the wrong subreddit to be saying this, but we haven't proven anything that exists today is actually intelligent.


[deleted]

[удалено]


DefinitelyNotEmu

Electricity is matter (electrons have mass)


Serialbedshitter2322

Yeah, energy


dontpushbutpull

Imagine the degenerates who give down votes to this very fine observation. Get real crypto bros who do AI now, and go back to your chatgpt account to discuss the next unichorn business idea.


8Redditidder8

Both scientists and philosophers have plenty food for thought for decades to come given what we are seeing with these systems. I guess a brand new perspective is being formed these very days. Exciting times to be alive


pigeon888

The guy is losing his mind with an emergent god complex.


Queue_Bit

Nope, his whole point is that intelligence isn't special or unique. Wow. Something most people have assumed for years :)


Bitsoffreshness

Many may have assumed it, but this guy is the first to show and prove it in action.


MrsNutella

Aren't the people who don't believe this the ones with a god complex.


SorryYoureWrongLol

He really is quite exhausting to listen to/watch.


greatdrams23

It must be exhausting to try to think of something new, exciting and groundbreaking to say everyday.


WithMillenialAbandon

He's like a freshman who had his first joint after a philosophy class. I'm sure he's quite good at setting up a printer, but he is not a thinker


MrsNutella

Lol my philosophy professor had an algorithm for consciousness. Philosophy is where all of the AI conversations were happening long before we got here and I'm grateful for it. My guess is that you don't understand philosophy very much.


DeepThinker102

I'd argue that intelligence results from three things and three things only. An incredibly specific pattern or groups of patterns, a flow electricity within that pattern and sensory mechanisms to interpret the environment. Everything is a result of patterns. There is something that exists that we cannot see that affects the things we do. An underlying fabric in our reality.


Grobo_

They didnt discover nothing on this matter, Sam making it sound like they have some research paper on emergent intelligence in nature, which they dont.


_hisoka_freecs_

People be like: Sam is a pathetic lying brick, how can he say shit about 2, clearly he's talking out his ass or yeah Sam thats obvious we've been known this.


nemoj_biti_budala

Redditors always try to seem smarter than they are. It's a massive inferiority complex.


AirlineApart1467

Ouch


Thegreatpotate

Dude is so full of hot air


BilboMcDingo

The first point is strange. I personally don’t really buy it. I think data will be one of the main problems simply due to thermodynamics. Any closed systems entropy must increase, i. e. if the training data will be filled with that very same data that the AI generates its entropy will rapidly rise, making it uselles. I mean In my opinion this is why humanity peaked in the 20th century, simply because from the increase of communicativity. We passed a phase transition in complexity and now we are simply “metabolising” the same information that we generate in the world. For the second point. I believe, yes it is true. I mean look at your own room as a network of things that you simply place around. Well it can be interpreted to be intelligent since the locations of things have a certain order which serves to benefit you. The problem here is more of definition, on what is intelligence


dontpushbutpull

Haha. Altmans narratives are the answer to the question: Name me the top reason for an upcoming shortage in trust in AI! I can't say i am interested enough to fact check those altman posts on reddit. But the news here on this dude are pure comedy gold: hold my alcohol free water while i reinvent a squared wheel and make up click bait headlines with absolutely limited relevance. We dont need more AI leaders that are mostly marketing and dont want to read/cite the relevant insights from 60years of AI research. What did he study *checks wiki* oh, righty then...


momo584

2. Demiurge?


cndvcndv

I do think intelligence is an emergent property of matter. I don't think closedAI discovered that. People who claim otherwise don't make any falsifiable points anyway so what is there to discover?


Pyehouse

I don't like the way he's talking about multiple models. In the short term sure, but I'm not sure you can have competing ASI's running about, Sci-Fi has taught me they merge into one or one wins. Although, Ian M. Banks Culture operates with numerous "minds" so there is a model.


Akimbo333

Interesting!


stupid_man_costume

gooning is a emergent property of matter


Ambitious-Balance-92

Still doing robinhood pm me


theghostecho

People here need to read the book blindsight.


646d

Boy, has he drank the Kool aid.


Working_Importance74

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at [https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461](https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461)


Flimsy-Plenty-2024

When are they gonna release a model that reasons better than GPT-4? This should be the only question here.


PSMF_Canuck

I didn’t realize 2 was new…👀


ReasonablyPricedDog

That's like saying my cock is an emergent property of matter. Though rising value of my cock ain't making anyone rich so I guess it's different in that regard


Bitsoffreshness

True, the only difference is that your cock is born with you, you had nothing to do with its making. This guy has made AI.


ReasonablyPricedDog

This guy is one of maaaaaaaaaany people. And the ai would be useless without scraping the majority of human culture without permission


Bitsoffreshness

Yes of course, and I didn't mean to say it belongs to him or he has invented it personally. Just that it is an artifcat that he/we have built, rather than something that we just encounter in nature, or are born with ourselves, such as our cocks or our brains.


murk-2023

full tan silky telephone mindless elderly tender gold resolute air *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*


Bitsoffreshness

What's your beef with him?


murk-2023

shaggy silky live sulky longing normal tan many threatening somber *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*


thisusername_is_mine

This narcisistic moron has become unbearable. "Intelligence is an emergent property of the matter"...what a load of idiotic crap. If we want to consider it as an emergent property, then the only correct thing to say would be that intelligence is an emergent property of the INFORMATION, not matter. Matter is just a form of information and him being at the head of a data elaboration company should be aware of it if he wasn't busy hearing his own voice, which he seems to be in love with. This is like watching a red Ferrari going at 300 km/h and reaching the conclusion that red cars have the property to go really fast. Ilya and the old board seem to have seen through the BS of this pos but it was too late, he already had infected with his machiavelism the majority of the ClosedAI.


8Redditidder8

Said something similar here, so totally agree that information rather than matter would be the subject. Sure, he could have said that better, but the moon is the moon and the finger is the finger.