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In a recent conversation regarding colors, my three year old explained to me that clear:color as silent:sound. I thought this showed a pretty good grasp of me

In a recent conversation regarding colors, my three year old explained to me that clear:color as silent:sound. I thought this showed a pretty good grasp of meaning between these concepts. I have no idea if he came up with this "meaning" himself or if he learned it from some input corpus(likely the netflix kids show corpus). Later he related that because noises become quieter when they are far away, colors become more transparent when they are far away. This one I am pretty sure he came up with himself, as it is conflating "small angular size" with "transparent". My point is it not so easy to tell when humans are behaving as stochastic parrots, or when they produce language based on meaning. Indeed, this may be a distinction without a difference.

tsimionescu 6y ago
I think this is a perfect example of the difference, in fact. The first, corect, example could be either, but the second example shows a kind of mistake that couldn't really be made by a language model. Your son used (faulty) inference to deduce (1) silence:sound as clear:color, (2) distance => silence, therefore (3) distance => transparency. Premises 1 and 2 may be in the language training corpus, but conclusion 3 is definitely not, but still he produced this sentence. Another example is that human language use is clearly related to non-verbal situations. You can show me two fruit and I can say which is bigger without any language prompting. It may be true that our language faculty is in fact acting similarly to these LMs, but the overall human mind must somehow include a component that translates from our senses to language and back to motor control. There may or may not be other components as well, but this part is definitely required, and highly non-trivial.
ineedasername 6y ago
You may be underestimating the possibility that your son has actual x-ray vision but just hasn't learned to fully control it yet.

tsimionescu 6y ago

I think this is a perfect example of the difference, in fact. The first, corect, example could be either, but the second example shows a kind of mistake that couldn't really be made by a language model. Your son used (faulty) inference to deduce (1) silence:sound as clear:color, (2) distance => silence, therefore (3) distance => transparency. Premises 1 and 2 may be in the language training corpus, but conclusion 3 is definitely not, but still he produced this sentence. Another example is that human language use is clearly related to non-verbal situations. You can show me two fruit and I can say which is bigger without any language prompting. It may be true that our language faculty is in fact acting similarly to these LMs, but the overall human mind must somehow include a component that translates from our senses to language and back to motor control. There may or may not be other components as well, but this part is definitely required, and highly non-trivial.

ineedasername 6y ago

You may be underestimating the possibility that your son has actual x-ray vision but just hasn't learned to fully control it yet.