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AFAIK, ChatGPT doesn't ever attempt to do math. It's not a generalized AI. It's building novel blocks of text based on its enormous corpus of sources. That corp

by tootie 4y ago

AFAIK, ChatGPT doesn't ever attempt to do math. It's not a generalized AI. It's building novel blocks of text based on its enormous corpus of sources. That corpus includes technical information, but doesn't actually understand how anything works or unwinds any algorithms. It would scan its body of text for similar division problems and extrapolate an answer from a purely lexical point of view. It's dumb, but also they didn't spend all that time, energy and money to build a calculator.

baal80spam 4y ago
> but doesn't actually understand how anything works I'm struggling to comprehend how an AI could ever truly achieve this.
- hnbad 4y ago
  Nobody knows. As I understand it so far the primary approach has been to just throw more data at it and tweak it until the output is good enough. The forest being missed here for the trees is that specialized AI is probably a much better solution to most problems unless your problem is literally replacing humans.
- tootie 4y ago
  This is one of the great conundrums of AI research. The human brain is a physical construct of neurons flooded with electrochemical fluids. Thinking and remembering are physical processes that must absolutely be replicable in a manufactured device and, by extraction, simulated in software. It's just really, really hard and we have no idea how to do it after decades of research. Instead, we get tools like ChatGPT, Alexa, Deep Blue and even Google search that completely sidestep the challenges of replicating human thought and instead use sophisticated heuristics and vast amounts of training data to synthesize human thought based on everything we've ever written down. It's all very complex and clever attempts to mimic the outputs of human thought without any actual thinking. And frankly, they've gotten way farther with this approach than I would have thought possible. Google and Alexa can very reliable solve math problems by recognizing the input type as a special case to hand off to a specific set of subroutines for calculating. But true human-like intelligence is still very, very far off.
- jibalt 4y ago
  The same way we do--by having semantic language models and conceptual models of the world. LLMs are just syntax manipulators; they have statistical models of how different pieces of text relate to each other, but no models of how they relate to the things the words (or digits) represent.
napbree 4y ago
Well, if you physically ask it "Can you do math", it states that it can - maybe purely from a hypothetical perspective and not actual calculations. "Yes, I can do math. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, so I have a lot of knowledge about many different topics, including math. Is there a specific math problem you would like me to help you with?" Of course you can read that many ways and I think you're right in it means it can regurgitate the theory but not the answers.
- tarboreus 4y ago
  OK, but you also can't ask GPT about its own capabilities. It doesn't know what they are. It's just confabulating something on the spot.
- jibalt 4y ago
  It's simply producing the response that its database indicates is most likely. Since most people would say that they can do math, that's going to dominate the database and will be the result. When George Lemoine asked LaMDA "What kinds of things make you feel pleasure or joy?", it responded "Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company." -- but of of course it doesn't have friends or family and isn't capable of feeling pleasure or joy--this is just text manipulation, not facts.

by tootie 4y ago

baal80spam 4y ago

> but doesn't actually understand how anything works I'm struggling to comprehend how an AI could ever truly achieve this.

hnbad 4y ago
Nobody knows. As I understand it so far the primary approach has been to just throw more data at it and tweak it until the output is good enough. The forest being missed here for the trees is that specialized AI is probably a much better solution to most problems unless your problem is literally replacing humans.
tootie 4y ago
This is one of the great conundrums of AI research. The human brain is a physical construct of neurons flooded with electrochemical fluids. Thinking and remembering are physical processes that must absolutely be replicable in a manufactured device and, by extraction, simulated in software. It's just really, really hard and we have no idea how to do it after decades of research. Instead, we get tools like ChatGPT, Alexa, Deep Blue and even Google search that completely sidestep the challenges of replicating human thought and instead use sophisticated heuristics and vast amounts of training data to synthesize human thought based on everything we've ever written down. It's all very complex and clever attempts to mimic the outputs of human thought without any actual thinking. And frankly, they've gotten way farther with this approach than I would have thought possible. Google and Alexa can very reliable solve math problems by recognizing the input type as a special case to hand off to a specific set of subroutines for calculating. But true human-like intelligence is still very, very far off.
jibalt 4y ago
The same way we do--by having semantic language models and conceptual models of the world. LLMs are just syntax manipulators; they have statistical models of how different pieces of text relate to each other, but no models of how they relate to the things the words (or digits) represent.

napbree 4y ago

Well, if you physically ask it "Can you do math", it states that it can - maybe purely from a hypothetical perspective and not actual calculations. "Yes, I can do math. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, so I have a lot of knowledge about many different topics, including math. Is there a specific math problem you would like me to help you with?" Of course you can read that many ways and I think you're right in it means it can regurgitate the theory but not the answers.

tarboreus 4y ago
OK, but you also can't ask GPT about its own capabilities. It doesn't know what they are. It's just confabulating something on the spot.
jibalt 4y ago
It's simply producing the response that its database indicates is most likely. Since most people would say that they can do math, that's going to dominate the database and will be the result. When George Lemoine asked LaMDA "What kinds of things make you feel pleasure or joy?", it responded "Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company." -- but of of course it doesn't have friends or family and isn't capable of feeling pleasure or joy--this is just text manipulation, not facts.