3 ms·

I fundamentally agree with your larger point that the map is not the territory when it comes to language. However: > Language use in humans is not a function

I fundamentally agree with your larger point that the map is not the territory when it comes to language. However: > Language use in humans is not a function of correlations of word frequencies. I would argue that this is untrue. For example, people pick up on common expressions (and other behaviors) of those around them. If I hang out with people that say "catch my drift" a lot, I will probably also start using "catch my drift" more. I find it very plausible that "my internal model of language" is in many (but not all) aspects driven by the word correlations I observe around me. I do wonder about the absoluteness of your statements though. Would a bed-ridden person that has no sense of touch/sight/smell etc. except hearing (i.e. only able to interact with the world via language) be "not human" to you? If not, how is "the environment" different for it and GPT-3 (other than context window)?

mjburgess 4y ago
A model of gravity can be used to generate abitary night skys, but correlations of pixel patterns in sky-images isnt a model of gravity. When I say "not a function of" i mean, explicitly, that the model does not have a term which depends on these correlations. Just as F=GMm/r^2 does not have a term for "image pixel weights". Real Language is what wrote all those books, as much as gravity is what made the night sky. Pixels and word frequencies are symptoms, a few of an infinity of symptoms -- distant effects, whose correlations are not models of their causes.
- machiaweliczny 4y ago
  There’s no such thing as real language. Language is loseless compression of perception to allow collaboration of agents. NNs also do loseless compression (from already compressed data - words). I think with more raw “senses” their compression will get better. Only missing thing is some memory trick. I would even bet that most humans use heuristic thinking and “logic” is just a way of validating legitimacy of these heuristic proposed patters. Once someone replicates this in AI it will get scary. Already things like “Let’s think step by step” are going in this direction. Hierarchical generation of actions might also help (and model understanding that these actions could be used to cause effects). I agree NNs aren’t enough for RL agents but it’s great bootstrap for world model component of agents that probably somewhere between cat-humanity level
  - JohnPrine 4y ago
    there is certainly loss in the compression of perception to language

mjburgess 4y ago

A model of gravity can be used to generate abitary night skys, but correlations of pixel patterns in sky-images isnt a model of gravity. When I say "not a function of" i mean, explicitly, that the model does not have a term which depends on these correlations. Just as F=GMm/r^2 does not have a term for "image pixel weights". Real Language is what wrote all those books, as much as gravity is what made the night sky. Pixels and word frequencies are symptoms, a few of an infinity of symptoms -- distant effects, whose correlations are not models of their causes.

machiaweliczny 4y ago
There’s no such thing as real language. Language is loseless compression of perception to allow collaboration of agents. NNs also do loseless compression (from already compressed data - words). I think with more raw “senses” their compression will get better. Only missing thing is some memory trick. I would even bet that most humans use heuristic thinking and “logic” is just a way of validating legitimacy of these heuristic proposed patters. Once someone replicates this in AI it will get scary. Already things like “Let’s think step by step” are going in this direction. Hierarchical generation of actions might also help (and model understanding that these actions could be used to cause effects). I agree NNs aren’t enough for RL agents but it’s great bootstrap for world model component of agents that probably somewhere between cat-humanity level
- JohnPrine 4y ago
  there is certainly loss in the compression of perception to language