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Philosophers on GPT-3
- freediver 6y agoChalmers: "As for consciousness, I am open to the idea that a worm with 302 neurons is conscious, so I am open to the idea that GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters is conscious too."
- skissane 6y agoI think consciousness is something dynamic – constantly learning from and reacting to your environment, constantly changing your environment and being changed by it in turn. And that's what biological neural networks do. By contrast, systems like GPT-3 still have a hard boundary between two different modes of operation – learning and application of that learning – which makes them much more static. And that makes me doubt their consciousness. I think, if some future system could get rid of the boundary between training and runtime, so that training happened continuously – then it would be closer to consciousness in my view. (It would also mean that different instances of the system would begin to diverge and become unique individuals, because even if the initial training was identical, the ongoing operation would be different, and the networks would diverge over time.)
- WClayFerguson 6y agoYour definition of consciousness drags in a lot that is not required. You are conflating it with intelligence too much. Consciousness is what it feels like to have a thought, an emotion, an idea, in that exact moment while you are feeling it. It can happen in a brain at a moment, during a single second of time, and doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with learning, reacting to environments, or any of that other stuff the normally goes along with life. Consciousness itself is the actual experience itself. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is why we think anything with a brain has some kind of consciousness. If anything it's likely more related to quantum mechanics and waves than it is to "information processing" which is the common misconception even AI experts have.
- nickelpro 6y agoYour royal "we" is casting a pretty wide net here, Chalmer's openness to animal consciousness is by no means a universal opinion.
- Stupulous 6y agoIt seems unlikely to me that consciousness wouldn't be tied to intelligence. If consciousness had no direct involvement with intelligence, there would be no reason for pain to hurt or pleasure to feel good. An irrelevant consciousness could present as anything at all, but we have one that presents us with a coherent reality that at least resembles the one our bodies exist in. It must be either a side effect of intelligence or something that human intelligence uses to an end. Either consciousness is something composed of information processing, or it is something inherent to the universe that has some evolutionarily efficient use towards information processing. I favor the former. I believe this very strongly. That said, the subject matter is a personal obsession, and I would love to hear counterpoints.
- WClayFerguson 6y agoI agree intelligence emerges from consciousness, but not the other way around. I define intelligence as the ability to use experiences and memories to construct useful mental models that can be used to predict the future based on the past, solve problems, discover correlations between patterns, and things like that. So intelligence uses memories as it's building blocks for recombining and recognizing patterns, but as you'll see in a nearby reply in this comment thread by me, I have a theory about memory which is that it's not "stored" but your brain accesses essentially the 'actual' event thru spacetime, and that the 'accessing' of these past events and merging those 'wave-forms' and entangling them with the present brain state, is what we call consciousness, regardless of whether any intelligent processing is happening.
- amarte 6y agoI've heard consciousness described as "the felt presence of immediate experience," which I've found to be an excellent description of the experience of being embodied in the world -- of being conscious. If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, meaning if there are atoms flying around spontaneously assembling into more and more complex forms of order until some critical point of complexity is reached and consciousness appears, what's the point of "being conscious" at all? If the assembling of particles into forms of order is what's fundamental, surely that process could just go on and on without any bit of it feeling embodied. It seems to me like the universe could be exactly the same without "the felt presence of immediate experience"/consciousness. Atoms would be whizzing around, people would be pontificating, GPT-3 would be chugging away. It would all just be kind of "empty" -- all surface no substance. I don't need to feel embodied for the world to be the way it is, yet I do, and I struggle to understand why that is.
- roywiggins 6y agoIf you woke up tomorrow as a brain in a vat with no sensory input, you'd expect to be conscious, at least for a while.
- skissane 6y agoIn your scenario, although I wouldn't at that moment be having the experience of two-way interaction with my environment, I would have had it in the past. And, since I temporarily lack that interaction when I dream, it is clear that one can be conscious without having that interaction right now. But just because I can have consciousness without having that right now, it doesn't necessarily follow that I can have consciousness having never had that. And that's a fundamental difference between conscious biological life and GPT-3. Conscious biological life experiences a two-way interaction with its environment, in which organism and environment act on each other simultaneously. GPT-3's experience of that is very limited. It has experienced the environment act on it (training), and it has experienced itself act on the environment (runtime), but those two experiences are largely siloed off from each other. (It effectively does have some runtime memory, so to a very limited degree it can dynamically react to the environment, but it can't actually learn anything at runtime.) Now is that experience, which humans and animals have, but which GPT-3 lacks, essential to consciousness? Who really knows. The fact is, we don't really know what consciousness is, or what are the conditions for its existence. Maybe at least some history of that kind of two-way interaction is essential for consciousness, in which case GPT-3 can't have it (but some future successor system might). Maybe not. Nobody really knows.
- tgv 6y agoI believe it was Minsky who said, somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s: consciousness is simply a feedback loop. It's of course much too simple, but I too am convinced consciousness can't exist without it.
- visarga 6y agoGPT-3 was dynamic and learning constantly during the training phase. Now it is in its afterlife, speaking with us but not learning anymore.
- throwaw4y-plate 6y agoThat is some straight up magical thinking
- bdamm 6y agoI still cling to the belief that there is something we don't understand about biological processes that is allowing our unified sense of self and sense of consciousness that a machine simply cannot ever have. Unless of course we find out what that is and engineer a machine to have it. But it might end up being something deep within us, like particle spin within our DNA, for example.
- haecceity 6y agoIt's OK to be open to that idea as long as you are open to various definitions of consciousness.
- golergka 6y agoI'm still not convinced that consciousness is something that actually exists.
- tgv 6y agoThat path leads to a world of hurt: what does "actually exist" mean? Isn't it enough that we can perceive consciousness or its absence in ourselves and others? Isn't it enough to define it (my words, not very carefully thought out) as something that at least entails the capability to think about a situation, real or hypothetical, including your own state and thoughts and communications, understanding some of the consequences of action in such a state, choosing an action, accepting responsibility, etc., up to philosophy, meta-cognition and beyond? The fact that it's hard to define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
- mdemare 6y agoWe can perceive the absence of consciousness in others?
- tgv 6y agoWell, rocks aren't conscious, and I can't see it in a nematode either. But consciousness isn't on or off. If you've met e.g. Alzheimer patients, you can see it fade away. Scans of such patients show lack of activity associated with consciousness, but it's no proof.
- IshKebab 6y agoIt sounds like he is a victim of most people's love of labels and inability to deal with continuums. Consciousness is clearly a continuum (think about when you've been really drunk or half awake) and a worm is clearly so barely on the scale it would be silly to say it is conscious.
- mellosouls 6y agoChalmers is an important figure in the recent study of consciousness, in particular illuminating the distinction between consciousness and cognition. You should consider familiarising yourself with the ideas before dismissing then as silly.
- IshKebab 6y agoAs far as I know we still have literally no idea what consciousness is. History has shown that when we have no evidence about something, philosophers like to just make stuff up that they thing sounds compelling and consistent. Nobody can prove them wrong so they can write entire volumes on their idea! Forgive me for not wasting time familiarising myself with his made up distinction between consciousness and cognition.
- mellosouls 6y agoIf you have such contempt for philosophers and refuse to open your mind to their ideas (even if just to critique them) - perhaps best not to comment on them at all.
- IshKebab 6y agoI could say the same thing about Flat Earthers, QAnon, and so on. Do you read the blogs? Of course not. Does that mean you can't criticise them?
- dj_mc_merlin 6y agoAlthough your wording is pretty rough, I agree with the idea in general. With no way to really evaluate an idea beyond "it sounds good" or "lots of people agree with it", most philosophers are just very wordy circlejerkers.
- minimaxir 6y agoI'm not fond of both the recurring philosophical and the Skynet/AGI angles that keep popping up regarding GPT-3. "But to [analyze statistical distributions of text] really well, some capacities of general intelligence are needed" isn't correct either; no one would call attention mechanisms used in Transformer models as evidence of intelligence, it's math. It's easier to argue it's not GPT-3 that's advanced, but it's humans that are simple.
- boltzmann_ 6y agoso what's intelligence then? it seems like you're saying humans are not intelligent?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- VikingCoder 6y ago"no one... it's math." Brains are structures in the physical world and you can model their behavior with math. ("Model" is not the same as "perfectly model." Imagine a three-body problem where you can come up with plausible solutions. That's not the same as an exact solution.)
- GreenHeuristics 6y agois a mountain in Nepal a google maps url?
- VikingCoder 6y agoIs your brain my brain? No, two distinct physical things are two distinct physical things. What happens when you multiply 2 times 5? You got 10? That's the same answer I got! Thoughts are executed by a brain, which can be modeled and executed by a mechanical brain.
- jdietrich 6y ago>It's easier to argue it's not GPT-3 that's advanced, but it's humans that are simple. Many of the arguments made by GPT sceptics are alarmingly close to the intelligent design argument against evolution. If a really dumb process with countless billions of iterations can produce human beings, why couldn't a different dumb process eventually produce human-level machine intelligence? Until the curve of progress shows some signs of flattening, I'm not going to speculate about what GPT-4 or GPT-5 will or won't be able to do.
- wrnr 6y agoI think GPT-3 is a technical marvel but it did not reveal anything about language that wasn't already known by linguists for at least a 100 years. I've read this funny dialog generated by GPT-3 between Bezos and Page, but even that was edited by the "author". At the end of the day it nothing more than an advanced form of Dada poetry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada#Poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada#Poetry
- jcims 6y ago>I think GPT-3 is a technical marvel but it did not reveal anything about language that wasn't already known by linguists for at least a 100 years. Yet. It's so incredibly sensitive to input conditions I would say that we really don't know exactly how to explore it fully. I would also argue that we don't really understand a single language until we understand many, and until we tag and classify the inputs I would say we don't even really understand what we passed through the system at all.
- runawaybottle 6y agoIt’s manipulative power is more what I’m interested in. I want to see what percentage of the general population can be manipulated by it. Could care less if it’s a pure design that simulates mastery of a language. I have a hunch it will work on 50% of people. I’m willing to bet your average 13 year old would gobble up gpt articles without knowing any better.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThat depends the population's knowledge more than the machine itself used. According to accounts Christopher Columbus scammed surrender of natives through exploiting astronomy. If they had better local knowledge he would have been mocked at best and at worst would have become a lost expedition.
- entropea 6y agoI'm actually quite worried about its abilities and effect it may have on the internet in more anonymous settings. It can easily trick humans not really paying attention and looking for issues. How can you tell what is real and isn't without taking time to really look at everything thats written, more than just simply reading the text in full? I already have this problem, and GPT-3 honestly breaks the entire internet of discussion for me. It's great technology, but I worry we'll know even less is real.
- hirundo 6y ago"GPT-3 on Philosphers" could be more interesting. I would like to read a response by GPT-3 to these essays. It's only fair.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dougmwne 6y agoThis is not exactly cherry picked, but I did play with the prompts till I could get GPT-3 to write an article in the first person in response to the article, instead of other random output. This is the first successful attempt. GPT-3 on Philosphers by GTP-3 https://pastebin.com/3AEtjv35 https://pastebin.com/3AEtjv35
- fermienrico 6y agoMy god. That's astonishing.
- teruakohatu 6y agoCan you share the prompt?
- dougmwne 6y agohttps://pastebin.com/N6m6hJv7 https://pastebin.com/N6m6hJv7 I'm not special so I don't have access to the API yet. Prompt was submitted through the paid version of aidungeon.io with the settings changed over to GTP-3. I tried doing the full article text, but it was crashing so settled for a few paragraphs.
- minimaxir 6y agoHere's an interesting output based on that prompt from the API itself, w/ "I am GPT-3" added as a prompt helper: https://gist.github.com/minimaxir/29442b7eaae927863d1a2f016f0b1b9b https://gist.github.com/minimaxir/29442b7eaae927863d1a2f016f...
- sroussey 6y agoDoes GPT-3 actually exist? I only see stories about it, but don’t see it or access to it at all. Maybe it’s hanging out on Clubhouse...
- est31 6y agoaccess exists through a closed beta program who also can only send queries to it, not download the model. This site contains links to a google form to get onto the wait list of beta user candidates: https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/
- Lambdanaut 6y agoThere are also certain users that do have access to that API that provide public access to it through their own user interface.
- 2bitencryption 6y agocan you list any? I know about AI Dungeon, but are there any others? Do they all impose some type of filter (like AI Dungeon does) that shapes your input, or do any provide "raw" access? I just want to get my hands on GPT-3 so bad...
- Lambdanaut 6y agoLook at AI Dungeon again. Notice the Custom option.
- zaptrem 6y agoHas anyone published the documentation online or described how apps like AIDungeon have fine-tuned it?
- typeformer 6y agoThis comment was not composed by GPT-3 but you probably couldn’t tell if it was...
- ggm 6y agoThe correct use of the apostrophe is a strong determinant you cannot be human.
- kangnkodos 6y agoIt could be Lore, but not Data.
- perl4ever 6y agoI just had a thought...what if you asked GPT-3 to write a script for ELIZA, given e.g. DOCTOR as an example?
- ggm 6y agoonce the bill hit, you would convert to PARRY very quickly
- gmaster1440 6y agoI also wrote a short piece[1] on philosophical implications of GPT-3. Noticed some comments are quick to dismiss all philosophical implications entirely since GPT-3 is just dumb algorithms. Open to debating any coherent arguments. [1] - https://www.markfayngersh.com/post/the-thinking-placebo https://www.markfayngersh.com/post/the-thinking-placebo
- freediver 6y agoI was trying to find the right analogy for GPT3 in the real world. Impressive when working but mostly unreliable. The first thing that came to mind was Tesla's Autopilot. The closest "non-AI" I could come up with was the supplement industry (second one was 'a mistress'). Now, love or hate GPT3 there are two things to consider: - Supplement industry, with all its flaws, is a huge part of modern society so GPT3 or its derivatives might become too - GPT4 is again likely to be 10x 'stronger' than its predecessor. Where will that leave us?
- andrewprock 6y ago"Where will that leave us?" With spam generators so good they can fool everyone?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- simplify 6y agoI was pretty hype on GPT-3, but got doused when considering its cost. Aside from the $4-12 million to train, just how much energy does it cost to run a query?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mensetmanusman 6y agoI was waiting for ‘this post was written by GTP3’ near the end
- ggm 6y agoAh. so we are now hunting for "last post" status. The problem being unlike first post, its always losable. Which reminds me of "the game" and if anyone forgot they are playing it: I just reminded you, and by definition: you lost [edit: and by definition I will too, and just did maybe]
- ggm 6y agoKeep focussing on the word mindless and then ask yourself semantically, why mindless and intelligent feels like a contradiction in terms. (I do not personally ascribe any intelligence to GPT-3 and this is not the start of the singularity. There is no evident free-will, nor new knowledge synthesised as theorems from existing knowledge, no introspection, no understanding)
- doubleunplussed 6y agoHumans do not have free will either. What we call free will is just a useful abstraction over systems that are hard to predict and traffic that respond to incentives. GPT-3 can add arbitrary four digit numbers (with low error rate), it knows how addition works despite the numbers it's adding not being in its training data. I think you need other criteria to rule out GPT-3 as a 'mind'
- ggm 6y ago[edit: I pass over the free-will vs determinism. I think its not fruitful for what GPT-3 Is compared to what we are. If I am wrong, if I missed a nuance, do elaborate.] I think you need other criteria to include GPT-3 than the (admitedly really interesting) point that it has constructed addition from the training data. I would have a lot of subsidiary questions around that, and I note you said "knows" which is kind of red-rag-to-a-bull here. What is the "knowing" of its basis to have constructed addition from the training? The main questions here would be: 1) did it also "intuit" subtraction and why not? what did it do when it hit negative numbers and can it add negative numbers to positive numbers and negative numbers to negative numbers? b) has it shown any inductive logic outcome and got to multiplication and division? Even just integer.. 4) can it detect implied sequence order even when the textual labels are wrong?
- visarga 6y agoThere are examples of other language models that learned to do hard math problems such as symbolic integration which are difficult even for professionals empowered with dedicated (non learning) software.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoI’m glad OpenAI hasn’t released this into the wild. It is a component of a super weapon. If all information was to be free, we would all be dead.
- haecceity 6y agoAs for consciousness, I am open to the idea that a worm with 302 neurons is conscious, so I am open to the idea that GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters is conscious too. I would expect any consciousness to be far simpler than ours, but much depends on just what sort of processing is going on among those 175 billion parameters. How can he say that without defining what he means by conscious first?
- robertk 6y agoBecause he has spent an academic lifetime studying that question, and recognizing the unique obstinacy of that word, in that you cannot pre-commit to define it despite some intuitive consensus on what it may mean. https://iep.utm.edu/hard-con/ https://iep.utm.edu/hard-con/
- haecceity 6y agoIf he thinks GPT-3 is a simple consciousness then any language model would be a simple consciousness. That doesn't make intuitive sense.
- ccozan 6y agoMaybe language itself is an attribute of conciousness? Means, the image of self and the image of the environment, must some how reflect back, and this reflexion is expressed by .. language? Be it, sound , gestures, visual, chemical.
- Zedmor 6y agoAre those essays GPT-3 generated?
- woah 6y agoIn a lot of these, you get the sense that the philosopher has not spent a lot of time or any time interacting with gpt-3
- Baeocystin 6y agoI'm starting to think Scott Alexander's 2018 essay 'Sort by Controversial' is in danger of losing its 'epistemic status: fiction' label, and I'm not joking when I say that. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
- ggm 6y agoEpistemology is under-rated. Fiction becomes fact more rarely than people think, because the components of fiction which are factualised are hypotheses couched as fiction about potential reality. That said, this is a great comment and if we were in reddit I would gold you fast. I always sort by "new"
- Animats 6y agoGPT-3 demonstrates that a huge volume of what's written is mostly bullshit. This is very upsetting to some. See "The Digital Zeitgeist Ponders Our Obsolescence" in the linked article. What comes out of this system is better than most comments on political blogs, and sometimes better than the articles. On what would this approach do badly? "How-to" material, I suspect. Trained on auto repair manuals, it could generate new, plausible, but useless, auto repair manuals. This gives us an insight into what's wrong. It lacks adequate ties to the real world. This is the "common sense" problem I've discussed previously. Figuring out what's going to happen next in the real world is often not a problem in word space. It's a problem in a different kind of space. The shape of that space is a big unsolved problem in AI.
- visarga 6y ago> Figuring out what's going to happen next in the real world is not a solved problem for humans either. If it were, people would know when to invest and when to get out of the stock market, would know which startup will become a unicorn or not, would know which chemical reaction out of millions is best for solving a medical or industrial problem.
- logicchains 6y agoIt's not a solveable problem in general due to some systems having https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#Chaotic_dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#Chaotic_dynamics . "Small differences in initial conditions, such as those due to errors in measurements or due to rounding errors in numerical computation, can yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction of their behavior impossible in general.[6] This can happen even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior follows a unique evolution[7] and is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[8] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable."
- dcow 6y agoOne could argue that hidden variables and poor resolution are to blame for chaotic systems.
- iamgopal 6y agoImagine someone making propoganda news generator out of it.
- randomsearch 6y agoOne consequence of GPT-3 is that I am now highly sceptical of the human provenance of any HN comment on an article about GPT-3. It has made my HN experience objectively less enjoyable, because I’m constantly expending effort to spot nonsense and avoid wasting time reading it. Perhaps most worrying is not how “human-like” GPT-3 can be, but how “GPT-3 like” humans can be. When I am in “nonsense-detection” mode, I drill down into paragraphs to spot non-sequiturs etc and I find plenty of HN comments are rambling, contradictory, or I just can’t ascertain the meaning of the text. If anyone gets this far through my comment, you may now be wondering if I’m hilariously posting a GPT-3 output (I am not). I wonder how a human might seek to convince others that they are not GPT-3. I think using unusual exotic rarely-encountered vocabulary or word combinations or sentence structure that GPT-3 is unlikely to pick up would help. Or referring to current events in a way that makes sense (that lockdown in Greater Manchester would be an example for people in the U.K.). It certainly has the power to ruin HN and other forms of debate online. Perhaps one consequence will be more video chat and audio calls (until deep fakes become great) and then a retreat to the physical world for serious discussion.
- zzleeper 6y agoMaybe is for the best? GPT-3 is a lot of bla bla bla without actually conveying anything useful. And now it's shedding light on the reality that most of our words and sentences are just fillers. Before, I used to have low patience about prose that was too verbose. But now with GPT3 more people will start doing so, amd commenters will hace to start beong succinct in order to be read.
- therein 6y agoYour comment would have been incredible if you had ended with: > Before, I used to have low patience about prose that was too verbose. But now with GPT3 more people will start doing so, amd commenters will hace to start introducing typos to beong perceived as a human.
- LdSGSgvupDV 6y agoCould GPT-3 generate wrong typing words? Maybe in the future we need to use wrong grammar and mistyped word to convince others we are hhuman.
- hooande 6y agoI keep thinking...what is GPT-5 going to look like? It might be a lot like the movie "Her". And that's what, maybe five years away? Obviously they can't just keep scaling up the number of parameters or working memory size. And the way it displays new behaviors in response to specifically worded prompts is still a little weird. But this is already very close to having applications that we could only dream of. GPT-3 is definitely over hyped. But there is something real happening here. I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it.
- logicchains 6y ago>Obviously they can't just keep scaling up the number of parameters or working memory size. If they manage to scale it to just a hundred times bigger, and the qualitative increase in "intelligence" is the same as that gained by the previous 100x increase in scale, that might be good enough for "real" intelligence. And 100x scaling is certainly feasible within five years, if people keep throwing resources at it.
- ThalesX 6y agoExactly what I was talking with a friend about yesterday. I really believe we're two orders of magnitude away from having really useful smart home assistants. The kind that 'understand' your intent. And it's a bit mind boggling that we're brute forcing understanding, but it seems to be working great. Recently I've been really into AI Dungeon with the GPT-3 model. I'll give you an example of a snippet from a story I played and it's not a singular example, plenty of insightful / amusing encounters. I'll go so far as to even say that it's more fun than interacting with a lot of people I know... > "You follow the Fool through the village. It's fairly large, but in poor condition. The buildings are all thatched roof cottages and most of them look like they're about to fall down. There are people walking around, but they all look miserable. > 'Are you happy?' the Fool turns, and asks a woman standing at an alleyway. She's pale and dressed in rag. > 'No' she responds. > 'Do you want to be happy?' the Fool asks, pulling a bright red flower from his bag. > 'Yes' she says, cautiously accepting the flower. > 'That's so sweet,' you say. (this is me writing) > 'No, it isn't," the Fool says. 'It's lazy. Happy people don't ask to be happy. They just are.'" -- I looked this quote on Google to make sure it wasn't just taken as a whole: No results found for "Happy people don't ask to be happy. They just are.". -- I was really impressed with the depth of it.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago>> Why the hype? As is turns out, GPT-3 is unlike other natural language processing (NLP) systems, the latter of which often struggle with what comes comparatively easily to humans: performing entirely new language tasks based on a few simple instructions and examples. Instead, NLP systems usually have to be pre-trained on a large corpus of text, and then fine-tuned in order to successfully perform a specific task. GPT-3, by contrast, does not require fine tuning of this kind: it seems to be able to perform a whole range of tasks reasonably well, from producing fiction, poetry, and press releases to functioning code, and from music, jokes, and technical manuals, to “news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans”. I have to stop at this before going on with the rest of the text. GPT-3 is, indeed, "pre-trained", on a huge corpus of unstructured text. The "range of tasks" in the passage above are actually all just one task, language generation. In fact, GPT-3 is specifically "pre-trained" on exactly that task, generating language. It doesn't need to be fine-tuned any further. I think what the article is trying to say is that GPT-3 can perform some tasks that aren't usually thought of as strictly language generation tasks, such as machine translation or question answering, without having been specifically trained to do those things. "Not specifically trained to do those things" means that, e.g. instead of being trained with examples of sentences in one language and their translation in another, GPT-3 is trained with examples of arbitrary text respresenting a snapshot of many, diverse uses of language. Presumably, these diverse uses of language include translation, so GPT-3 also picked up the ability to do some translation. The same goes for question answerning etc. However, it should be noted that GPT-3 on the whole does not score very highly on metrics designed to measure performance on such let's say side-tasks. It certainly scores nowhere near as highly as specialised systems e.g. for machine translation etc. This is before looking at what those metrics actually try to measure which is usually only a very loosely defined sense of success [1]. Anyway I suppose I'll go on with the rest of the article, but I just wanted to flag this inconsistency up because it's a typical example of the subtle misunderstandings that circulate in the lay press about systems like GPT-3. Ultimately, for anyone who wishes to understand what systems like GPT-3 are, the best source is the relevant research and of course a bit of background in the subject and history of AI. If that sounds like a tall order, well tough. You can't replace knowledge of a field of research with more than 50 years of history with a quick read of five or six online articles and a dozen tweets. _________________ [1] https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/state_of_nmt https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/state_of_nmt
- novalis78 6y ago“ GPT-3 does not look much like an agent. It does not seem to have goals or preferences beyond completing text, for example. It is more like a chameleon that can take the shape of many different agents. Or perhaps it is an engine that can be used under the hood to drive many agents.” Maybe the worm is a GPT3 analogue with the difference that a desire to replicate and seek nutrients is built into its nano-robotic physical shape thanks to a set of genes. So then what if one could train on massive amounts of data of physical worm-world interactions - perhaps they resultant robot would appear ‘conscious’ and like a true ‘agent’ simply because it’s in a body now and capable of navigating an environment...
- Animats 6y agoWell, we finally have The Great Automatic Grammatizator. (1953) [1] "No, sir, honestly, it’s true what I say. Don’t you see that with volume alone we’ll completely overwhelm them! This machine can produce a five-thousand-word story, all typed and ready for dispatch, in thirty seconds. How can the writers compete with that? I ask you, Mr Bohlen, how?’" The story is amusing. They buy out all the hack writers and crank out content under their names. The very few good writers they leave alone; they're not a significant part of the market. [1] http://www.bookophile.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/8/6408830/the_great_automatic_grammatizator_and_ot_-_roald_dahl.pdf http://www.bookophile.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/8/6408830/the...
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