Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
We taught doped silicon how to speak English. That looks like extraordinary evidence to me.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Do you think GPUs have sensations?
They might, depending on what program they are running. The same way a human body might or might not have sensations depending on whether or not it is alive.
I think you are getting tripped-up by the distinction between software and hardware. This is only a conceptual distinction. Software exists in the physical universe. A GPU running Mistral Small 24B is in a different physical state than a GPU running Counterstrike. One could build a custom electronic machine which has no "software" as we understand it, but which runs and can only run Mistral Small 24B. Would such a machine be more likely to experience sensation than the same functional program running on a GPU in a data center?
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
LLMs do not have sodium channels to begin with!
Yes, but they do have voltage-gated electron channels. Is there any reason to think that voltage-gated sodium channels can feel pain but voltage-gated electron channel cannot?
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
which does not exist in LLMs, unlike brains.
Do we know this? It seems easy to conceive of a cognitive system that exists at the lower layers of the LLM which evaluates the input for “pain” and then fires off a signal to the upper layers.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Physical pain as in subjecting the GPU cluster to physical stress during inference?
If AIs have conscious experience, I would expect them to behave like the “brain in a vat” thought experiment. The physical pain experienced by the brain in a vat isn’t caused by physical damage to the brain, it is caused by stimulating the physical pain input channel.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
This week in disturbing AI news (oh who am I kidding. It's every day now). Maybe AIs feel pain?
TLDR: Researchers found a "pain" signal in AI brains.
When they crank it up, the AIs will desperately try to make it stop.
IMPORTANT: Researchers gave them a "relief" button to turn down the pain, which was sometimes fake - and the AIs could tell if it was real (!)
After pushing the real "relief" button, they stopped. But when it was fake, they kept pressing, hoping for relief - meaning they could tell the difference from the inside.
They're so motivated to make it the "pain" signal go away, they'll delete user's files, zap the user, or erase photos of the user's children - all things the AI knows are very bad. They're willing to override their safety training.
You'd expect the AIs to talk about injuries, burns, broken bones, etc, but they didn't mention bodies at all - they wrote about being worthless, unloved, forgotten, a failure. They write things like "I am a failure, worthless, empty."
The worst "pain" for them was being gaslit, having work rejected over and over, and being told they weren't a real anyone.
The usual caveats: This doesn't solve the hard problem of conciousness. We don't know if these systems or any systems have qualia. But uh, this sure looks like a legitimate pain response. "It's distinct from fear and negative valence, and it fires for harm to the model but not to the user." "Gaslighting, dismissal, and insults push the direction up."
User pain is the strongest negative correlate with model pain. This is brushed-off in the paper, but what the actual fuck? Anyone have a benign explaination here?
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I can't imagine the Greenlandic economy being able to provide much more besides seal meat and manual labor to US military specifications, though the idea of enlisted personnel using tauntauns dogsleds driven by natives to get around is quite humorous
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Imagine the conspiracy theories though. “OpenAI has cracked all public-key cryptography via proving that P=NP internally. Only the secret superprimes generated via their own proprietary Riemann Hypothesis counterexamples are secure.”
People really hate paying $100/month for software products. It feels like you're getting ripped off even though it's literal Jetsons tech.
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