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Humans get smart by absorbing language produced by other humans. It's what raises us above animals. A human who doesn't have that becomes feral, so much of what
by visarga 5y ago
Humans get smart by absorbing language produced by other humans. It's what raises us above animals. A human who doesn't have that becomes feral, so much of what we consider to be human is learned culturally.
Humans also overfit to the training data. We all know some kids just learn how to apply a specific method for solving math problems and the moment the problem changes a bit, they are dumbfounded. They only learn the surface without understanding the essence, like language models.
Some learn foreign languages this way, and as a result they can only solve classroom exercises, they can't use it in the wild (Japanese teachers of English, anecdotally).
Another surprising human limitation is causal reasoning. If it were so easy to do it, we wouldn't have the anti-vax campaigns, climate change denial, religion, etc. We can apply causal reasoning only after training and in specific domains.
Given these observations I conclude that there is no major difference between humans and artificial agents with language models. GPT-3 is a language model without embodiment and memory so it doesn't count as an agent yet.
- 9dev 5y agoI think we probably agree here, but I'd like to make an adjacent point: Animals have been known for a while to communicate, and even have languages of their own. Mutes are no feral humans either. It's definitely more nuanced than that, and I follow that actual intelligence consists of more than just the ability to form coherent sentences.
- visarga 5y agoOne essential ingredient I think - "skin". The agent got to have skin in the game, to have something to win or lose, something that matters. For humans it is life, survival, reproduction. The necessities of life made us what we are now.
- veilrap 5y agoHumans don't just generate language out of the void. The use of language is grounded by various other inputs (senses, previous knowledge/understanding). So when a human is constructing sentences those sentences aren't just using earlier elements of the conversation to generate the next sentence (as language models do) but rather a vast wealth of resources previously accumulated. AI that wants to actually generate language with human-like intelligence needs more inputs than just language to its model. Sure that information can also be overfit, but the lack of other inputs goes beyond just the computer model overfitting it's data.