Connectionists: short Op-ed to address AI problems

Wed Jun 5 18:49:38 EDT 2024

Dear Stephen,

We are doing neurosymbolic with image processing – the symbolic stuff on top of a DL model. It also brings in the explanation side. The results are astounding. We get better performance than a pure DL model. And exploring applications with defense agencies. They are impressed with the results we have so far. So, neurosymbolic is definitely the way forward.

Best,
Asim Roy
Professor, Information Systems
Arizona State University
Asim Roy | ASU Search<https://search.asu.edu/profile/9973>
Lifeboat Foundation Bios: Professor Asim Roy<https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.asim.roy>

From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> On Behalf Of Stephen José Hanson
Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2024 6:06 AM
To: Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu>
Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Connectionists: short Op-ed to address AI problems

Dear Flabbergasted:

Thankyou, I endeavor to provide short but useful commentary that could be considered a "work of art".  Graci!

Now either my memory is failing since 2017(not impossible), or you are smoothing over a time series of claims that are actually like a seesaw.

I think if we just rewind some of the connectionist comments; it would be clear, in fact, for example, you had a long series of comments with Geoff that seemed to indicate you were being misreprented as well.  Your complaints have always be around the fact that DL-AI has false alarms (and to be fair other problems)   And sometimes pretty odd-ones.  LLMs human and non-human errors are even more interesting.  The fact that they seem to grow circuits in the attention-heads is gobsmacking!   I thought then and think now you are complaining about peas under a very thick mattress (oh-oh,  metaphors now- I may have opened pandora's box.)

But I will go look at the budding NeuroSymbolic paper you mentioned, but I have my doubts that the statistical bias is equivalent with the architectually simplistic LLMs.  Nonetheless, I have not read it.

I will also make a  coarse  timeline of your comments since 2017, but anyone out there that would like to help, greatly appreciated!

Best,

Stephen
On 6/5/24 8:41 AM, Gary Marcus wrote:
Wow, Stephen, you have outdone yourself. This note is a startling mixture of rude, condescending, inaccurate, and uninformed. A work of art!

To correct four misunderstandings:
1. Yes, my essay was written before LLMs were popular (though around the time Transformers were proposed as it happens). It was however precisely “  a moonshot idea, that doesn't involve leaving the blackbox in the hands of corporate types who value profits over knowledge.” Please read what I wrote. It’s one page, linked below, and you obviously couldn’t be bothered,. (Parenthetically, I was one of the first people to warn that OpenAI was likely to be problematic,  and have done so repeatedly at my Substack.)
2. My argument throughout (back to 2012, in the New Yorker, 2018 in my Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal, etc) has been that deep learning has some role but cannot solve all things, and that it would be not reliable on its own. In 2019 onwards I emphasized many of the social problems that arise from relying on such unreliable architectures. I have never wavered from any of that. (Again, please read my work before so grossly distorting it.) Unreliable systems that are blind to truth and values can cause harm (bias), be exploited (to create disinformation), etc. There is absolutely no contradiction there, as I have explained numerous times in my writings.
3. It’s truly rude to dismiss an entire field as “flotsam and jetsam”,  and you obviously aren’t following the neurosymbolic literature, e.g., you must have missed DeepMind’s neurosymbolic AlphaGeometry paper, in Nature, with its state of the art results, beating pure neural nets.
4. Again, nothing has changed about my view; your last remark is gratuitous and based on a misunderstanding.

Truly flabbergasted,
Gary

On Jun 5, 2024, at 05:18, Stephen José Hanson <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu><mailto:jose at rubic.rutgers.edu> wrote:

Gary, this was before the LLM discovery.   Pierre is proposing a moonshot idea, that doesn't involve leaving the blackbox in the hands of corporate types who value profits over knowledge.  OPENAI seems to be flailing and having serious safety and security issues.  It certainly could be recipe for diaster.

Frankly your views have been all over the place.  DL doesn't work, DL could work but should be merged with the useless flotsam and jetsam from GOFAI over the last 50 years, and now they are too dangerous because they work but they are unreliable, like most humans.

Its hard to know what views of yours to take seriously as they seem change so rapidly.

Cheers

Stephen
On 6/4/24 9:53 AM, Gary Marcus wrote:
I would just point out that I first made this suggestion [CERN for AI] in the New York Times in 2017, and several others have since. There is some effort ongoing to try to make it happen, if you search you will see.

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Opinion | Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck. Here’s How to Move It Forward. (Gift Article)<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.nytimes.com_2017_07_29_opinion_sunday_artificial-2Dintelligence-2Dis-2Dstuck-2Dheres-2Dhow-2Dto-2Dmove-2Dit-2Dforward.html-3Funlocked-5Farticle-5Fcode-3D1.xE0.mcIz.lT-5FK7BZdonGJ-26smid-3Dnytcore-2Dios-2Dshare-26referringSource-3DarticleShare-26u2g-3Di-26sgrp-3Dc-2Dcb&d=DwMGaQ&c=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ&r=wQR1NePCSj6dOGDD0r6B5Kn1fcNaTMg7tARe7TdEDqQ&m=fwBsbQ5xjEJFDg3c0iXuOBcr84mxEGxR0cEG4-hstVM8dJNyq3HVvpCACElUGWT2&s=TGZDkK1TsB_rNyjmal5jG1694upjB2JDhtj3UOe4Cws&e=>
nytimes.com<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.nytimes.com_2017_07_29_opinion_sunday_artificial-2Dintelligence-2Dis-2Dstuck-2Dheres-2Dhow-2Dto-2Dmove-2Dit-2Dforward.html-3Funlocked-5Farticle-5Fcode-3D1.xE0.mcIz.lT-5FK7BZdonGJ-26smid-3Dnytcore-2Dios-2Dshare-26referringSource-3DarticleShare-26u2g-3Di-26sgrp-3Dc-2Dcb&d=DwMGaQ&c=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ&r=wQR1NePCSj6dOGDD0r6B5Kn1fcNaTMg7tARe7TdEDqQ&m=fwBsbQ5xjEJFDg3c0iXuOBcr84mxEGxR0cEG4-hstVM8dJNyq3HVvpCACElUGWT2&s=TGZDkK1TsB_rNyjmal5jG1694upjB2JDhtj3UOe4Cws&e=>

On Jun 3, 2024, at 22:58, Baldi,Pierre <pfbaldi at ics.uci.edu><mailto:pfbaldi at ics.uci.edu> wrote:

I would appreciate feedback from this group,especially dissenting feedback,  on the attached Op-ed. You can send it to my personal email which you can find on my university web site if you prefer. The basic idea is simple:

IF for scientific, security, or other societal reasons we want academics to develop and study the most advanced forms of AI, I can see only one solution:  create  a national or international effort around the largest data/computing center on Earth with a CERN-like structure comprising permanent staff, and 1000s of affiliated academic laboratories. There are many obstacles, but none is completely insurmountable if we wanted to.

Thank you.

Pierre

<AI-CERN-Baldi2024FF.pdf>

--

Stephen José Hanson

Professor of Psychology

Director of RUBIC

Member of Exc Comm RUCCS

--

Stephen José Hanson

Professor of Psychology

Director of RUBIC

Member of Exc Comm RUCCS
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