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GPT-3 is impressive, but is still "a Chinese Room" (1). It does not understand the questions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikiped

GPT-3 is impressive, but is still "a Chinese Room" (1). It does not understand the questions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

foota 6y ago
It may not understand in the same way we do, but this clearly goes beyond memorization of the kind implied by that thought experiment. There's completely novel things that can be expressed.
arrrg 6y ago
That‘s just a philosophical argument, it‘s not like there is some magical property that turns something from a Chinese room into something else. How do you know you are not a Chinese room? Or I am?
- roenxi 6y ago
  Or the lawyers. Both as an anti-lawyer joke but also from the quite practical observations that there are a bunch of human endeavours, law springing to mind, where humans have to act as a Chinese room on purpose and reason about things they have little practical experience with using only words.
- the8472 6y ago
  The issue with the chinese room thought experiment is that it does not take algorithmic complexity into account. The experiment describes a dumb lookup table, the table size would grow exponentially with the number of input output combinations. While NNs encodings allowing them to store the same information in a sub-exponential manner. The most efficient manner to translate chinese is to understand chinese including every-day nuances that might be relevant to the translations. Just like a human translator can benefit from knowledge in the field about the text which he is translating. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.136.116&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.136...
CuriouslyC 6y ago
You think we understand the question, but what if "understanding" is just what the algorithm to solve the problem feels like. If it could, the computer would probably experience some sort of understanding too.

GPT-3 is impressive, but is still "a Chinese Room" (1). It does not understand the questions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

foota 6y ago

It may not understand in the same way we do, but this clearly goes beyond memorization of the kind implied by that thought experiment. There's completely novel things that can be expressed.

arrrg 6y ago

That‘s just a philosophical argument, it‘s not like there is some magical property that turns something from a Chinese room into something else. How do you know you are not a Chinese room? Or I am?

roenxi 6y ago
Or the lawyers. Both as an anti-lawyer joke but also from the quite practical observations that there are a bunch of human endeavours, law springing to mind, where humans have to act as a Chinese room on purpose and reason about things they have little practical experience with using only words.
the8472 6y ago
The issue with the chinese room thought experiment is that it does not take algorithmic complexity into account. The experiment describes a dumb lookup table, the table size would grow exponentially with the number of input output combinations. While NNs encodings allowing them to store the same information in a sub-exponential manner. The most efficient manner to translate chinese is to understand chinese including every-day nuances that might be relevant to the translations. Just like a human translator can benefit from knowledge in the field about the text which he is translating. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.136.116&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.136...

CuriouslyC 6y ago

You think we understand the question, but what if "understanding" is just what the algorithm to solve the problem feels like. If it could, the computer would probably experience some sort of understanding too.