Stars, Cells, and God | AI Abilities Emerging or Not?

Reasons to Believe Podcast

Join Jeff Zweerink and Josh Swamidass as they discuss new discoveries taking place at the frontiers of science that have theological and philosophical implications, including the reality of God’s existence.

AI Abilities Emerging or Not?

One concern regarding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) relates to the emergence of unpredictable features that arise as the systems grow in scale. Researchers consider an “emergent ability” as something that the AI has routinely failed to accomplish but suddenly performs well as the system grows in size (either from hardware or software growth). A number of papers claiming emergent abilities populate scientific literature. However, a recent study shows that these “emergent” abilities often reflect poorly designed measurement metrics or insufficient statistics. Better metrics and statistics remove the indicators of emergence. In this episode, computational biologist and physician Josh Swamidass and astrophysicist Jeff Zweerink discuss the details surrounding this issue and offer some insights from a Christian perspective.

PODCAST LINK:

Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?

YOUTUBE LINK:

Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, and Sanmi Koyejo, “Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?,” https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004