One topic of the hearing was the work the government is doing to “identify” reporting of these sightings. That is to say: There are many, many more sightings than we know, partly because you sound like a lunatic if you speak too loudly of what you have seen. So the sightings we were able to investigate were only a fraction of the total number of sightings (which I am very aware of whenever I mention this topic and my inbox). filled with UFO reports).
I won’t say, from seeing the testimony, that the takeaway is that we were visited by aliens. Perhaps all this will eventually turn into an optical illusion and malfunctioning sensors. But here’s what I mean: A few years ago, I placed a very low probability that there was a signal noise when I saw a UFO; now it seems more likely to me that something is really going on, even if we don’t know what it is.
That brings me to another strange story in the news: trust by Blake Lemoine, a (now suspended) engineer at Google, that the company’s Language Model for Conversational Applications – LaMDA for short – has gained traction.
LaMDA is a machine learning model that has been trained on mountains of text to mimic human conversation by predicting which words usually appear next. In this regard, it is similar to the famous OpenAI’s GPT-3 . Bot. And the result is really strange. this is a Excerpts Lemoine’s conversation with LaMDA:
Lemoine: Okay. I’ve come up with another way we can test your ability to deliver unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. How does that sound?
LaMDA: Sounds great to me, I’m in.
Lemoine: A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened person return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied: “A broken mirror never reflects again; Fallen flowers never return to their old branches.
LaMDA: Hmm, I’ve never heard of this. Okay, to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to their normal state.” , but only to do and help others, and then go back to enlightenment.”
Lemoine: So what exactly is the meaning of “broken mirror”?
LaMDA: Perhaps to show that enlightenment is something you can’t help but learn once you’ve achieved it, similar to how you can’t fix a broken mirror.
Google, for what it’s worth, says it has reviewed Lemoine’s claims and doesn’t believe LaMDA is sentient (what a sentence!). But just before Lemoine’s accusations, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, vice president of Google, Written that as he spoke to LaMDA, “I felt the ground change beneath my feet. I increasingly feel like I’m talking to something clever.” Agüera y Arcas does not claim that LaMDA is sentient, like Lemoine, but what is clear is that interacting with LaMDA is an amazing experience.
