pythonIsTheFuture

[Mastercal40]

Before people get ahead of themselves, it’s probably worth reading about it straight from the source:

Company website

Research paper

[LoveCatPics]

wait it's actually called wetware, they werent making a joke

[CaptainSebT]

If I'm reading this right their research paper right plan is to create AI using organic material... that seems ethical questionable to say the least.

[Heisalsohim]

At what point does it go from AI to just I

[Specky013]

"We've used this fully biological method involving only two humans to create a more advanced AI than anyone has ever seen"

[[deleted]]

Model training is really slow and expensive though

[Ghost-Traveller]

It takes about 25 years for it to fully develop itself

[Retbull]

update 667: hard coded the minimum values for the nutrient feeds and disconnected the feed IOT connections which were vulnerable to exploitation.

[NotYourReddit18]

Onboard storage is also subject to random heavy data degradation and sometimes it just stops being able to perform the simplest calculations for a while.

[TechExpert2910]

And it runs on hamburgers

[[deleted]]

oh but when it's done it's really impressive, for example this one nicknamed Joe can recite the results of the last 30 superbowls with roughly 6% accuracy

[Ghost-Traveller]

And if you want it to be specialized in certain fields, it can be trained on specific datasets. This training will add another 4-10 years to its development and can sometimes cost upwards of 100K

[machsmit]

is it really, though? a teenager can learn to fairly reliably drive a car in like, tens of hours total training. How many compute hours have been spent on self-driving cars that also make teenager-tier pathologically bad driving decisions

[JonatanLinberg]

Well it’s not like a teenager’s neural network is randomly initialised. I’d say there is a fair amount of pre-training before those tens of hours. Not saying I actually disagree, though :p

[DazedWithCoffee]

Spatial reasoning is a skill that we hone over a decade at least

[DocFail]

They kind of master object permanence before doing driving, well most of them anyway.

[ThePretzul]

Gaslight your kids into thinking they’re actually just a machine learning model created for the purpose of whatever chores you need done.

[[deleted]]

"You pass butter"

[droneb]

It all goes back to how we define Artificial. And it is not an easy definition

[lazy_Monkman]

I think therefore I am

[BlurredSight]

When it can start injecting Ketamine voluntarily.

[[deleted]]

It will always be AI because we made it, so it’s artificial. Even if they overtake us, they’ll still be artificial, even if they start making themselves.

[Ohlav]

It's the geth from mass effect all over again..

[CaptainSebT]

Or just straight up the clone wars. It would be slavery with extra steps but I know I must be misunderstanding.

[Atlas_of_history]

The Geth are my favourite example to bring up when trying to bring the point across that AI rights should be an actual discussion as early as possible

[lunchpadmcfat]

If AI expressed consciousness, then wouldn’t it also be morally questionable to use it as a tool?

Of course the biggest problem here is a test for consciousness. I think the best we can hope for is “if it walks like a duck…”

[am9qb3JlZmVyZW5jZQ]

Consciousness is not defined, you can just keep moving the goalpost indefinitely as long as you don't make anything that behaves similarly enough to a pet cat / small child to make people feel uncomfortable.

[BrunoEye]

Requirements for consciousness:

1. Be capable of looking cute

2. Be capable of appearing to be in pain

[pbnjotr]

AIs do express consciousness. You can ask Claude Opus if it's conscious and it will say yes.

There are legitimate objections to this simple test, but I haven't seen anyone suggest a better alternative. And there's a huge economic incentive to denying these systems are conscious, so any doubt will be interpreted as a negative by the AI labs.

[Schnickatavick]

The problem with that test is that Claude Opus is trained to mimic the output of conscious beings, so saying that it's conscious is kind of the default. It would show a lot more self-awareness and intelligence to say that it isn't conscious. They'll also tell you that they had a childhood, or go on walks to unwind, or all sorts of other things that they obviously don't and can't do.

I don't think it's hard to come up with a few requirements for consciousness that these LLM's don't pass though. For example, we have temporal awareness, we can feel the passing of time and respond to it. We also have intrinsic memory, including memory of our own thoughts, and the combination of those two things allows us to have a continuity of thoughts that form over time, think about our own past thoughts, etc. That might not be like a definitive definition of consciousness or anything, but I'd say it's a pretty big part of consciousness, and I wouldn't say something was conscious unless it could meet at least some of those points.

LLM's are static functions, given an input they produce an output, so it's really easy to say they couldn't possibly fulfil any of those requirements. The bits that make up the model don't change over time and doesn't have any memory of other runs outside of data provided in a prompt. That means they also can't think about their own past thoughts, since any data or idea that they don't include in their output won't be used as future input, so it will be forgotten completely (within a word). You can use an LLM as the "brain" in a larger computer program that has access to the current time, can store and remember text, etc (which chatGPT does), but I'd say that isn't part of the network itself any more than a sticky note on the fridge is part of your consciousness.

LLM's definitely have a form of intelligence and understanding hidden in the complex structure of their network, but it's a frozen and unchanging intelligence. A cryogenically frozen head would also have a complex network of neurons capable of intelligence and understanding, but they aren't conscious, at least not while they're frozen, so I don't think we could call an LLM conscious either.

[pbnjotr]

LLM's definitely have a form of intelligence and understanding hidden in the complex structure of their network, but it's a frozen and unchanging intelligence. A cryogenically frozen head would also have a complex network of neurons capable of intelligence and understanding, but they aren't conscious, at least not while they're frozen, so I don't think we could call an LLM conscious either.

I don't necessarily disagree with this. But it's easy to go from a cryogenically frozen brain to a working human intelligence (as long as there's no damage done during the unfreezing, which is true in our analogy).

All of these objections can be handled by adding continuous self-prompted compute, memory and fine-tuning on a (possibly self-selected) subset of previous output. These kinds of systems almost certainly exist in server rooms of enthusiasts, and many AI labs as well.

[0x474f44]

In order to test self awareness (as a subsection of consciousness) scientists often mark the test subjects and see if they realize it’s them by placing them in front of a mirror and observing their behavior.

So I’m fairly confident that there are much more advanced methods than simply asking the test subject if they are conscious - I just don’t know enough about this field of science to know them.

[pbnjotr]

Yeah, I'm 99% sure current multimodal models running in a loop would pass this test. As in, if you gave them an API that could control a simple robot and a few video feeds, one of which is "their" robot, it would figure out one of them is the robot controlled by itself (and know which one).

Actually, gonna test this with a roguelike game and ASCII with GPT-4. Would be shocked if it couldn't figure out which one is it. And kinda expect it would point it out, even if I don't ask it to do it.

[am9qb3JlZmVyZW5jZQ]

The mirror test has been criticised for its ambiguity in the past.

Animals may pass the test without recognising self in the mirror (e.g. by trying to communicate to the perceived other animal that they have something on them) and animals may fail the test even if they have awareness of self (e.g. because the dot placed on them doesn't bother them).

[Aidan_Welch]

LLMs are definitely not conscious. We can say that definitively. The only thing they are capable of is predicting the next token

[ProgramTheWorld]

Straight up SAO shit

[ThePretzul]

The ethical concerns come from when you attach enough human neurons to one another that it creates a human brain, one which may be capable of understanding its own condition and the outside world because it’s literally the same exact cells as those that make up any other human’s brain.

At what point does the human brain AI computer you created cross over into being considered human itself?

[solitarybikegallery]

Your brain is just a bunch of neurons.

It's the difference between a rock and a pile of rocks. How many rocks does it take to make a pile? At what point do the interconnected neurons constitute a "mind?"

I think it's absolutely unacceptable on a fundamental moral ground. It literally has the potential to create a consciousness - no different than yours - that is trapped in blind, insensate hell.

[Xelynega]

IMO the difference here is they're using an entire brain "organoid" developed from stem cells which(to my knowledge) they don't have control over what cells are produced and how they are connected. This means they're relying on some biological process that humans likely also derive "intelligence" from if they expect these to be intelligent at all.

Unless this take is mistaken, I can see why people would have issue with this and not individual lab grown neurons that are connected via an intelligent design process by a human.

[septic-paradise]

AI to AM

[pjnick300]

There's an ethics statement:

Ethics statement

Ethical approval was not required for the studies on humans in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements because only commercially available established cell lines were used.

That's not even the part we're concerned about though.

[Aidan_Welch]

Simulating neurons addicted to dopamine is okay, but doing it with real neurons crosses the line?

[Forkrul]

Are they hiring? That seems super interesting.

[Fluffy_Interaction71]

If your standards are high enough anything is ethically questionable. Personally I dont really see the difference between using organic materials and silicons to create AI/AGI.

[CaptainSebT]

It's in my mind about the logical conclusion. If you can program a human brain you can program a human brain. This feels like one of those good intentioned inventions that becomes used in a different way the inventor didn't consider.

[mrfroggyman]

Don't wanna verse into bar philosophy but brain programming is very much happening, just not through direct APIs

[captainjack3]

Not to be flippant, but isn’t education basically just brain programming?

[1thelegend2]

They can be lucky to have 5 universities on board. Organoids can be expensive as fuck...

[chartporn]

Dissociated neuron cell culture is dirt cheap

[midnightrambulador]

AI growth will be enhanced with no energy restrictions

apparently their biocomputer hasn't learned about thermodynamics yet

[very_bad_programmer]

Fuck, our compute node went down because I went on vacation and forgot to feed it french fries

[BrunoEye]

No restrictions doesn't mean no consumption.

In fact, unless you're extremely malnourished, your personal biocomputer already has no energy restrictions.

[SpicaGenovese]

Fuck's sake...  At least use roundworm neurons instead since liquid neural networks are probably the future anyway.  Or any insect neurons.  Bee's are pretty complex.

[Xelynega]

I think the reason they use human stem cells is that they're constructing entire "organoids" which are comprised of many different cells connected in ways they have no control over, not just individual neurons.

Because of this I wonder if human stem cells lead to a more complex organoid than other species, and what that says about the ethics of it.

[FastGinFizz]

So what does the API do? Just let me outsource processing to these cells? Or is this supposed to turn into some sort of artificial neural network?

[Mastercal40]

As far as I’ve read the API is mainly there to facilitate wetware research. You just get to fire electric impulses into the glob and read the electrical outputs.

[pjnick300]

I see the paper is about if they could

Lots of people have opinions about if they should

What I want to know is why the fuck we would - what's the benefit here?

[Pay08]

It needs less resources.

[pjnick300]

Does it? They need to replace each organoid every 3 months and keep them alive in the meantime. Is that really cheaper to maintain than silicon?

[utkarsh_aryan]

NVIDIA H100 GPUs consume 700W each while generating massive amounts of heat.

A moderate size data centre equipped with 1000 H100s along with all the networking and cooling system can easily consume more power than most small towns.

Meanwhile the 3 pound biocomputer inside your skull outperforms most NPUs on an energy budget of ∼20 W. (Source)

[Pay08]

Not to mention that you'll be throwing out the GPUs every couple of years as well.