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ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

darepublic 4y ago
ML and AI has been one of the least overhyped things in the tech industry. Chatgpt is the fruit of a lot of that underhyped work and the acclaim it's getting is based on real merit unlike crypto
- lamp987 4y ago
  it will be the next financial bubble like dot-com, im calling it
m348e912 4y ago
Sigh. This guy can chirp about how "ChatGPT doesn't understand what it's been asked" as much as he wants but he is missing the forest for the trees. I'll use myself as example. ChatGPT can write better than me, it can summarize better than me, it can research quicker than I can, and it is more creative than I can ever be. I don't care if it "understands" in a way that would satisfy Nabil Alouani, its ability to produce useful output is a game-changer.
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  Yeah boring, god of the gaps. Imagine being the 10000th person to give this uninspired take. > Cats have a representation of the world that help them navigate it. They also have instincts programmed into their brains, allowing them to act with relative logic. In contrast, GPT and Co only have patterns of human-written text devoid of meaning. This is wrong. To say chatgpt doesn't represent the world instead it only has patterns is distinction without difference. This is the new dualism. There is "real understanding" and AI can't do that by definition because "understanding" isn't anything except being a human and acting apparently. The Loki thought experiment is laughable.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    It's always tech-adjacent types that drop these crap takes from what I've seen. Maybe they're threatened as SWEs are last to go when LLMs can generate code - someone has to check it; we just won't need two PMs, scrum lord and a BI attaché for that... ChatGPT has allowed me to explore programming topics where there is, otherwise, very little useful information - it won't produce good code verbatim but it doesn't have to - it's my robotic rubber duck.
    - fzeroracer 4y ago
      If there is otherwise very little information then where do you think ChatGPT is pulling that information from? It does not pull stuff out of the void, it's only as accurate as the data shoved into it and that data can be very wrong. People get into a state of false confidence using ChatGPT for things they cannot easily fact check.
      - intelVISA 4y ago
        Absolutely, it's comically wrong most of the time but it's still a useful tool to solidify understanding in a way that's hard to do organically.
- diceduckmonk 4y ago
  Was this your opinion or ChatGPT’s?
  - m348e912 4y ago
    The fact that you're asking that sort of proves my point. (I know you're probably trying to be funny though)
- khmii 4y ago
  The amusing thing to me is the article just made me think of the people in the 80s that would argue rap isn't music but just a form of noise and how rappers aren't even singing! I actually don't understand how someone thinks we understand understanding well enough to write this article.
- choeger 4y ago
  > ChatGPT can write better than me, it can summarize better than me, Probably. But you still need to give some input about what to write and proof-read the output. > it can research quicker than I can I don't think so. AFAIK, it doesn't research at all right now. When google and bing add such models to their search engines, I doubt they will be able to research quicker than a human mind. Most research queries are not responded by plain text: Search for a hotel price in a specific room for a specific date, for instance, or check the weather in a specific place at a specific time. Language models will help you to ingest and query large volumes of text, but that's something we don't do that often. All in all, Chat-GPT is a tool to work with text. It certainly can be useful in that context, but I don't see any world-changing properties.
version_five 4y ago
I agree that chatGPT et al are way overhyped, and don't represent any fundamental advances beyond product development. That said, this article's a bit of a strawman, hinging way too much on a pedantic definition of "understand". He's correct, but it's not really the crux, and unfortunately this will all be very easy to dismiss
- rtwrtdfgd3 4y ago
  I don't really agree that much with this idea, "..any fundamental advances beyond...", ok, technically chatGPT is just somewhat a reshuffle of pretty well known models, but the implementation is king, always. And first, some weeks ago you have all these powerful secret models behind corporate firewalls, inside some secure lab, now most of those owners are rushing to reshuffle their respective models to catch on with chatGPT and now with Bing + chatGPT. Hence, the implementation is what did the trick, the tech was there for sometime already (more than a year? I'll ask chatGPT). And now other public facing applications of this technology are on the table too. Because, the rabbit is out the hat already, if you don't use your technology, somebody else will have the upper hand in other reachable markets, just like Microsoft is now running away a good million miles ahead of the rest of the Search market competitors.
cheeselip420 4y ago
These articles are all the same. It's like complaining how the Ford Model T couldn't drive you to England in the early 20th century while ignoring how it would revolutionize cities and life within America. Whether you believe it's 'real' or not is irrelevant. It's here, it's useful and the world will not be the same as it was.
- ofrzeta 4y ago
  What about the fact that it's not reliable? Seems unusable to me if you are not a domain expert that just gets help from the system and who is able to judge whether its advice is true or made up.
  - roboy 4y ago
    It’s reliable for many many use cases (e.g. anything that transforms text into a different representation), but not for a few others (e.g. anything that requires logical reasoning) - a F1 car is great on race tracks, we don’t see people taking them on gravel roads and then complain they’re unreliable …
    - ofrzeta 4y ago
      I'd say it's unreliable if you can't decide apriori for which use cases it's reliable. For instance take this example where it makes contradictory assertions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34288209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34288209
  - yCombLinks 4y ago
    How reliable was it a few years back? Oh yeah, it didn't exist! AI is improving at breakneck speeds and will only get better
  - cheeselip420 4y ago
    Humans aren't reliable either. This is why we write tests, have code reviews, fact-checking/editing, etc.
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rcme 4y ago
> Models don’t understand anything Are people really so unaware of themselves? What is understanding? I'm not going to even attempt to define that, but I will posit that the only way we have of verifying understanding, regardless of what definition you use, is validating the correct output for a given input. For instance, when we teach children, we validate their understanding by giving them a test. Are we able to look into their brain and pinpoint exactly where that understanding comes from? No. So why do we apply a different standard for an algorithm? Clearly LLMs understand a lot. That doesn't mean the algorithm is conscious or sentient, but it has understanding.
- raincole 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure that ChatGPT doesn't "understand" things as humans do. But does it mean that it has no ability to understand things? For example, assume there is an alien species that can only see ultraviolet, but not any other lightwave in human's visual spectrum. They don't "see" things as humans do. But we'll still consider they to have ability to see things.
  - anon7725 4y ago
    Philosophically, it matters whether LLMs understand something or merely act like they do. Practically, it doesn’t matter.
  - khmii 4y ago
    Per chatGPT "According to Wittgenstein, understanding is not just a matter of having the right information or knowledge, but also involves the ability to use language in a way that is appropriate to the context and situation."
- tekno45 4y ago
  that would mean a gear has understanding of torque?
fintechie 4y ago
> Both Google and Microsoft are pulling the same shady technique [...] They will ship free bullshit-generators and say it’s up to everyday people to sift through the mess. Can't really understand the meltdown some people are having... Honestly, what you get from well trained GPTs doesn't seem that different than getting search results and and sifting through human-generated bs yourself... including biased mainstream newspapers, stupid StackOverflow answers, self-made wikipedia articles, opinionated blogposts, and a long etc that you need to double-check anyways. That probably makes LLMs more human xD, at least at this early stage. They should get better with time (hopefully).
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Aperocky 4y ago
I've find two groups of people on this subject, first one has taken a graduate level stat course and/or ML course, and may have work experience in machine learning/data science. The latter camp is more numerous and did not do those things. The latter group are far more hyped about ChatGPT et al, despite explanation by the first group. Don't get me wrong, ChatGPT is very exciting, just not in the way it is frequently portrait to be, in particular, development on this model will not lead to General Intelligence, which is not a data training/stat problem altogether. With how the ML field is shaping up to be today, it doesn't even look to be a Machine Learning problem.
- fintechie 4y ago
  > first one has taken a graduate level stat course and/or ML course, and may have work experience in machine learning/data science I think it's just a few people getting salty because they understand "how it works" but don't understand "why is getting popular". So they start to shout from their ivory tower without realising the tectonic shift under way. Sort of, you know how to build a stupid mobile video/photo app, but fail to make it popular like facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc. The tech used is certainly not transformative on the surface, but the implications of mass adoption and impact at a societal level are huge. I for one I'm excited about its usefulness and how this is going to speed up the AI race. The genie is out of the bottle.
  - Aperocky 4y ago
    I'm also very excited about how useful it is, after years of mostly academic papers and poor industrial attempt to utilize it, there's finally something that truly showed the power of the LLM model to the masses. It's the iPhone 4 of language models. But iPhone 4 isn't fusion energy. It's incredibly useful and a tectonic shift in the cellphone industry, but it's not producing energy. The analogy might sound completely insane, but that's how different machine learning of today and general intelligence is. This will replace humans in certain jobs - just like McDonald's touch order machines and 100000 other times when a machine of either digital or mechanical contraption replaces humans in history. This is not however the beginning of singularity where the AI gets a mind of its own and start a symbiotic or adversarial relationship with human civilization, this isn't even a step in that direction, this is closer to the internet or wikipedia than that.
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jetsnoc 4y ago
One might argue that intuition and understanding are simply complex cognitive processes that occur within the brain. In a similar vein, I think ChatGPT will evolve to understand and intuit through integrating with additional advanced machine learning models. Think of ChatGPT having side-car machine-learning models guiding it and having it edit the outputs as it writes. Similar to how we correct ourselves or rephrase something. I don't know what these look like but maybe they would be models for cultural norms (select your 'culture'), social norms, math, sciences and morality. Weighted decisions are made based on "values." Cognitive processes as we think and speak are constantly refining our thoughts and understanding. Refining our outputs. I believe that is what comes next to advance ML. There might be a lot of hype right now but ChatGPT is a reminder in how far we have come and a small preview of what the future looks like. Disclaimer: - I don't know anything about anything. - I already find ChatGPT useful. - I might be biased, I was a Loopt user as far back as 2007. I will buy about anything sama sells.
seydor 4y ago
> ChatGPT, summarize the article No true Scotsman. Flamebait
labrador 4y ago
> Just like clients have an edge over waiters, OpenAI’s CEO had an edge over his listeners — and what he did was take every single one of them for a fool. It's funny that the author writes about Sam taking people for fools and then treats his readers as fools > Large Language Models don’t understand anything I'm not sure who the intended audience for this is, but I'm fairly certain HN readers don't think LLMs "understand" anything
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  I do! So long as we don’t appeal to consciousness as the basis for understanding but measure it with benchmarks, LLMs understand many things. Maetschke, S., Iraola, D. M., Barnard, P., Shafiei Bavani, E., Zhong, P., Xu, Y., & Yepes, A. J. (2021). Understanding in artificial intelligence. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.06573.
  - labrador 4y ago
    I saw this example on Twitter today which shows ChatGPT doesn't understand: Mike's mother had 4 kids; 3 of them are named Luis, Drake and Matilda. What is the name of the 4th kid? I'm sorry, but I don't have information about the fourth kid. The information you provided is that Mike's mother has 4 kids, and three of them are named Luis, Drake, and Matilda. However, the name of the fourth child is not specified in the information you gave. But thanks for the paper. I'm reading as much as I can.
    - smallnix 4y ago
      I perceive that as: misunderstood a riddle, but understood the language
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      I had to read that 3-4 times before I understood that it was a riddle. So I put it in GPT3–and it got the answer right away: “Mike's mother had 4 kids; 3 of them are named Luis, Drake and Matilda. What is the name of the 4th kid? The fourth kid is Mike.” So, maybe they just needed to try again.
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faeriechangling 4y ago
People who can’t understand ChatGPT hype would have not used calculators when they came out on the grounds they didn’t understand mathematical proofs.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  like the high school teacher who insisted multiplication be done with a slide rule?
- ofrzeta 4y ago
  I wouldn't have used a calculator that sometimes miscalculates things and claims them to be correct.
- lamp987 4y ago
  Calculator that computes that 3 + 2 is 8 should indeed not be trusted much. Do you know any such calculators?
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dhruvkalaria 4y ago
> he sees them the same way you see Indian/Japanese/Arab characters without being able to tell what they mean. Lost me at Indian characters, only if he asked chatGPT Indian isn't a language.
- carlmr 4y ago
  Indian characters could be the superset of multiple character sets from the Indian subcontinent. There's nothing inherently wrong about it.
  - dhruvkalaria 4y ago
    Agreed, i got that too. But i would like to people start noticing and not use general terms often. Nothing wrong with it. Indians are people, same as Americans. Proper way to represent characters of languages originating from Indian subcontinent is Indic and/or dravidian languages. With Scandinavian language speaking countries we know who they are, maybe we use a similar context. :)
bigmattystyles 4y ago
Someone page DesCartes. How do I know everyone in the world is actually real, actual intelligences and consciousnesses distinct from my own? All these articles lack a severe lack of imagination or just try to apply a very narrow definition of intelligence. It's good to be grounded and not hop on every bandwagon but to deride ChatGpt because it can't convince the author it is mimicking the way we think we think is a bit daft. ChatGpt for me has been amazing - I use it to get started. My biggest stumbling block, at anything, is getting started. ChatGpt can get me started by generating boilerplate code, etc... and yea sometimes it is not quite right (though more often than not, it's pretty damn close) and guess what, it did it in seconds. It would have taken me hours to get to that same 'not quite right' level. ChatGpt is an elevator for that initial step function of resistance to my productivity. It gets me going when motivation or the willingness to focus is not there. They can charge $20/month, they can charge $100/month, I'll happily pay it. (edit: they just launched the plus for $20/month - shut up and take my money)
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  your experience absolutely matches mine with the getting started hurdle. and yeah i just subscribed today
simon_000666 4y ago
I think the real innovation that underpins chatgtp is not the LLM but the UI. The large companies have finally woken up to the fact that a simple chat interface is superior to most people than having to filter and scroll a bunch of Google links and description text - it removes a barrier to the original intent (find out the answer to X). It’s value is utility and as long as it’s correct 80%? Of the time - people won’t care. It’s the same phenomenon as when you are working on a tech team and are new. It’s easier to ask the guy who’s been there a couple of years where a piece of code is rather than go hunt for it yourself, even if he doesn’t always know the correct answer.
matchagaucho 4y ago
I find it amusing that some people expect factual responses from ChatGPT. Meanwhile, my script writing friends are having a heyday, and Hollywood is set to green light several new all GPT-enabled scripts. Ad copywriting is forever changed. And GPT codex can generate Javascript/Java boilerplate faster than you can search on StackExchange.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
The author says: “Large Language Models don’t understand anything — and they can’t get better at something they can’t do.” Yet, LLM’s can understand (unless one claims that understanding requires consciousness): https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06573 https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06573 And, strangely enough, LLM’s can get better at something they can’t do. https://news.mit.edu/2023/large-language-models-in-context-learning-0207 https://news.mit.edu/2023/large-language-models-in-context-l... https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15661.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15661.pdf
benlivengood 4y ago
The article doesn't understand large language models. It makes an assumption about how they work and uses that assumption to draw a conclusion. Most likely, as found in small models [0], large autoregressive transformers understand machine learning algorithms well enough to apply them to their inputs to achieve in-context learning (few-shot prompting) by performing gradient descent within the overall network [1]. This is fundamentally different from static predictors; LLMs are dynamic modelers that learn from context in order to better predict tokens. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15661 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15661 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07677 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07677
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senectus1 4y ago
I agree, but that doesn't make it any less amazing.
LesZedCB 4y ago
have people not seen the videos of Gato? it's pretty mind blowing. it's ability is beyond belief, and it's not even the scaled up version, since there have been clear demonstrations that scaling improves model performance. to me, Gato is pure proof that tranformers are waaaaaay more capable of emergent understanding than people seem to be willing to admit. https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-interactive-agents-in-video-game-worlds https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-interactive-agents-in...
placebo 4y ago
>If you want to know what a person is really like, watch how they treat the staff in a restaurant. Power reveals the true character of those who hold it. This is the only part of the article I am in total agreement with. The rest is just another variant of the Chinese room argument (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). My own take on this is that people are searching for the magical in the wrong place ("we are so special") rather than seeing things are magical by their very existence
johlits 4y ago
It's the perfect product for the average non-technical user.
clauderoux 4y ago
Gary Marcus has been incredibly vocal against LLM for quite a while now. The problem is that the guy does not understand that modern LLM are no longer just classifiers, as the article seems to imply. The underlying transformer architecture has completly transformed the field. For instance, training an AI to recognize cats has nothing to do with training a LLM, texts are fed to the machine without any labels. Attention is where these models take their strenght. It is a way to learn how to predict the next token by learning which elements are connected between the input and the output so far. These architectures model a sequence, which is very different than simply finding the next token with a basic probabilities as ancient approaches did.
HeyZuess 4y ago
I don't know how I feel about this article, especially around the definition of understanding. I have two children under 6, and if you watch their learning patterns they follow a very much the same path, and mimicry is part of that. They learn the subject matter at hand through repetition, and that then build comprehension which is the basis for understanding. I think ChatGPT has learnt and started to understand language based on the data given to it, it has built some understanding how language is structured as it is able to regurgitate language. It has contextual understanding at some level and contextual awareness. One of the next logical questions would be, does it have intelligence and that I don't think is the case. It understanding is based on its understanding of the language. I think the bike example is a great example, my son is learning to ride a bike. He has no understanding of balance as the article states, he has awareness of it, he knows he needs to peddle to move forward but he has no understanding of inertia, he has to steer but he has no understanding of physics, but he understands all of these components are required and he knows that via data "the experience of learning". I think it would be difficult without prompting to get him to explain his "understanding". Now understanding is great, you can apply learned information and apply it to another subject. So we can use what we have learned from ridding a bike and apply it to a motorbike. I am unsure if this cross domain transfer of understanding is something which ChatGPT can do, but it does a great job of extrapolating data and apply it to learnt rules.
sound_and_form 4y ago
This article was written by ChatGPT.
BaldWriter 4y ago
Hey it's the author, Nabil Alouani, and I have something to say to all the unproductive (and often toxic) feedback: KEKW. Shoutout to the one who caught the "Indian" characters mistake. I just corrected it. Thanks!

ML and AI has been one of the least overhyped things in the tech industry. Chatgpt is the fruit of a lot of that underhyped work and the acclaim it's getting is based on real merit unlike crypto

lamp987 4y ago
it will be the next financial bubble like dot-com, im calling it

m348e912 4y ago

Sigh. This guy can chirp about how "ChatGPT doesn't understand what it's been asked" as much as he wants but he is missing the forest for the trees. I'll use myself as example. ChatGPT can write better than me, it can summarize better than me, it can research quicker than I can, and it is more creative than I can ever be. I don't care if it "understands" in a way that would satisfy Nabil Alouani, its ability to produce useful output is a game-changer.

nh23423fefe 4y ago
Yeah boring, god of the gaps. Imagine being the 10000th person to give this uninspired take. > Cats have a representation of the world that help them navigate it. They also have instincts programmed into their brains, allowing them to act with relative logic. In contrast, GPT and Co only have patterns of human-written text devoid of meaning. This is wrong. To say chatgpt doesn't represent the world instead it only has patterns is distinction without difference. This is the new dualism. There is "real understanding" and AI can't do that by definition because "understanding" isn't anything except being a human and acting apparently. The Loki thought experiment is laughable.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  It's always tech-adjacent types that drop these crap takes from what I've seen. Maybe they're threatened as SWEs are last to go when LLMs can generate code - someone has to check it; we just won't need two PMs, scrum lord and a BI attaché for that... ChatGPT has allowed me to explore programming topics where there is, otherwise, very little useful information - it won't produce good code verbatim but it doesn't have to - it's my robotic rubber duck.
  - fzeroracer 4y ago
    If there is otherwise very little information then where do you think ChatGPT is pulling that information from? It does not pull stuff out of the void, it's only as accurate as the data shoved into it and that data can be very wrong. People get into a state of false confidence using ChatGPT for things they cannot easily fact check.
    - intelVISA 4y ago
      Absolutely, it's comically wrong most of the time but it's still a useful tool to solidify understanding in a way that's hard to do organically.
diceduckmonk 4y ago
Was this your opinion or ChatGPT’s?
- m348e912 4y ago
  The fact that you're asking that sort of proves my point. (I know you're probably trying to be funny though)
khmii 4y ago
The amusing thing to me is the article just made me think of the people in the 80s that would argue rap isn't music but just a form of noise and how rappers aren't even singing! I actually don't understand how someone thinks we understand understanding well enough to write this article.
choeger 4y ago
> ChatGPT can write better than me, it can summarize better than me, Probably. But you still need to give some input about what to write and proof-read the output. > it can research quicker than I can I don't think so. AFAIK, it doesn't research at all right now. When google and bing add such models to their search engines, I doubt they will be able to research quicker than a human mind. Most research queries are not responded by plain text: Search for a hotel price in a specific room for a specific date, for instance, or check the weather in a specific place at a specific time. Language models will help you to ingest and query large volumes of text, but that's something we don't do that often. All in all, Chat-GPT is a tool to work with text. It certainly can be useful in that context, but I don't see any world-changing properties.

version_five 4y ago

I agree that chatGPT et al are way overhyped, and don't represent any fundamental advances beyond product development. That said, this article's a bit of a strawman, hinging way too much on a pedantic definition of "understand". He's correct, but it's not really the crux, and unfortunately this will all be very easy to dismiss

rtwrtdfgd3 4y ago
I don't really agree that much with this idea, "..any fundamental advances beyond...", ok, technically chatGPT is just somewhat a reshuffle of pretty well known models, but the implementation is king, always. And first, some weeks ago you have all these powerful secret models behind corporate firewalls, inside some secure lab, now most of those owners are rushing to reshuffle their respective models to catch on with chatGPT and now with Bing + chatGPT. Hence, the implementation is what did the trick, the tech was there for sometime already (more than a year? I'll ask chatGPT). And now other public facing applications of this technology are on the table too. Because, the rabbit is out the hat already, if you don't use your technology, somebody else will have the upper hand in other reachable markets, just like Microsoft is now running away a good million miles ahead of the rest of the Search market competitors.

cheeselip420 4y ago

These articles are all the same. It's like complaining how the Ford Model T couldn't drive you to England in the early 20th century while ignoring how it would revolutionize cities and life within America. Whether you believe it's 'real' or not is irrelevant. It's here, it's useful and the world will not be the same as it was.

ofrzeta 4y ago
What about the fact that it's not reliable? Seems unusable to me if you are not a domain expert that just gets help from the system and who is able to judge whether its advice is true or made up.
- roboy 4y ago
  It’s reliable for many many use cases (e.g. anything that transforms text into a different representation), but not for a few others (e.g. anything that requires logical reasoning) - a F1 car is great on race tracks, we don’t see people taking them on gravel roads and then complain they’re unreliable …
  - ofrzeta 4y ago
    I'd say it's unreliable if you can't decide apriori for which use cases it's reliable. For instance take this example where it makes contradictory assertions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34288209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34288209
- yCombLinks 4y ago
  How reliable was it a few years back? Oh yeah, it didn't exist! AI is improving at breakneck speeds and will only get better
- cheeselip420 4y ago
  Humans aren't reliable either. This is why we write tests, have code reviews, fact-checking/editing, etc.
4y ago

rcme 4y ago

> Models don’t understand anything Are people really so unaware of themselves? What is understanding? I'm not going to even attempt to define that, but I will posit that the only way we have of verifying understanding, regardless of what definition you use, is validating the correct output for a given input. For instance, when we teach children, we validate their understanding by giving them a test. Are we able to look into their brain and pinpoint exactly where that understanding comes from? No. So why do we apply a different standard for an algorithm? Clearly LLMs understand a lot. That doesn't mean the algorithm is conscious or sentient, but it has understanding.

raincole 4y ago
I'm pretty sure that ChatGPT doesn't "understand" things as humans do. But does it mean that it has no ability to understand things? For example, assume there is an alien species that can only see ultraviolet, but not any other lightwave in human's visual spectrum. They don't "see" things as humans do. But we'll still consider they to have ability to see things.
- anon7725 4y ago
  Philosophically, it matters whether LLMs understand something or merely act like they do. Practically, it doesn’t matter.
- khmii 4y ago
  Per chatGPT "According to Wittgenstein, understanding is not just a matter of having the right information or knowledge, but also involves the ability to use language in a way that is appropriate to the context and situation."
tekno45 4y ago
that would mean a gear has understanding of torque?

fintechie 4y ago

> Both Google and Microsoft are pulling the same shady technique [...] They will ship free bullshit-generators and say it’s up to everyday people to sift through the mess. Can't really understand the meltdown some people are having... Honestly, what you get from well trained GPTs doesn't seem that different than getting search results and and sifting through human-generated bs yourself... including biased mainstream newspapers, stupid StackOverflow answers, self-made wikipedia articles, opinionated blogposts, and a long etc that you need to double-check anyways. That probably makes LLMs more human xD, at least at this early stage. They should get better with time (hopefully).

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Aperocky 4y ago

I've find two groups of people on this subject, first one has taken a graduate level stat course and/or ML course, and may have work experience in machine learning/data science. The latter camp is more numerous and did not do those things. The latter group are far more hyped about ChatGPT et al, despite explanation by the first group. Don't get me wrong, ChatGPT is very exciting, just not in the way it is frequently portrait to be, in particular, development on this model will not lead to General Intelligence, which is not a data training/stat problem altogether. With how the ML field is shaping up to be today, it doesn't even look to be a Machine Learning problem.

fintechie 4y ago
> first one has taken a graduate level stat course and/or ML course, and may have work experience in machine learning/data science I think it's just a few people getting salty because they understand "how it works" but don't understand "why is getting popular". So they start to shout from their ivory tower without realising the tectonic shift under way. Sort of, you know how to build a stupid mobile video/photo app, but fail to make it popular like facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc. The tech used is certainly not transformative on the surface, but the implications of mass adoption and impact at a societal level are huge. I for one I'm excited about its usefulness and how this is going to speed up the AI race. The genie is out of the bottle.
- Aperocky 4y ago
  I'm also very excited about how useful it is, after years of mostly academic papers and poor industrial attempt to utilize it, there's finally something that truly showed the power of the LLM model to the masses. It's the iPhone 4 of language models. But iPhone 4 isn't fusion energy. It's incredibly useful and a tectonic shift in the cellphone industry, but it's not producing energy. The analogy might sound completely insane, but that's how different machine learning of today and general intelligence is. This will replace humans in certain jobs - just like McDonald's touch order machines and 100000 other times when a machine of either digital or mechanical contraption replaces humans in history. This is not however the beginning of singularity where the AI gets a mind of its own and start a symbiotic or adversarial relationship with human civilization, this isn't even a step in that direction, this is closer to the internet or wikipedia than that.

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jetsnoc 4y ago

One might argue that intuition and understanding are simply complex cognitive processes that occur within the brain. In a similar vein, I think ChatGPT will evolve to understand and intuit through integrating with additional advanced machine learning models. Think of ChatGPT having side-car machine-learning models guiding it and having it edit the outputs as it writes. Similar to how we correct ourselves or rephrase something. I don't know what these look like but maybe they would be models for cultural norms (select your 'culture'), social norms, math, sciences and morality. Weighted decisions are made based on "values." Cognitive processes as we think and speak are constantly refining our thoughts and understanding. Refining our outputs. I believe that is what comes next to advance ML. There might be a lot of hype right now but ChatGPT is a reminder in how far we have come and a small preview of what the future looks like. Disclaimer: - I don't know anything about anything. - I already find ChatGPT useful. - I might be biased, I was a Loopt user as far back as 2007. I will buy about anything sama sells.

seydor 4y ago

> ChatGPT, summarize the article No true Scotsman. Flamebait

labrador 4y ago

> Just like clients have an edge over waiters, OpenAI’s CEO had an edge over his listeners — and what he did was take every single one of them for a fool. It's funny that the author writes about Sam taking people for fools and then treats his readers as fools > Large Language Models don’t understand anything I'm not sure who the intended audience for this is, but I'm fairly certain HN readers don't think LLMs "understand" anything

dr_dshiv 4y ago
I do! So long as we don’t appeal to consciousness as the basis for understanding but measure it with benchmarks, LLMs understand many things. Maetschke, S., Iraola, D. M., Barnard, P., Shafiei Bavani, E., Zhong, P., Xu, Y., & Yepes, A. J. (2021). Understanding in artificial intelligence. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.06573.
- labrador 4y ago
  I saw this example on Twitter today which shows ChatGPT doesn't understand: Mike's mother had 4 kids; 3 of them are named Luis, Drake and Matilda. What is the name of the 4th kid? I'm sorry, but I don't have information about the fourth kid. The information you provided is that Mike's mother has 4 kids, and three of them are named Luis, Drake, and Matilda. However, the name of the fourth child is not specified in the information you gave. But thanks for the paper. I'm reading as much as I can.
  - smallnix 4y ago
    I perceive that as: misunderstood a riddle, but understood the language
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    I had to read that 3-4 times before I understood that it was a riddle. So I put it in GPT3–and it got the answer right away: “Mike's mother had 4 kids; 3 of them are named Luis, Drake and Matilda. What is the name of the 4th kid? The fourth kid is Mike.” So, maybe they just needed to try again.

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faeriechangling 4y ago

People who can’t understand ChatGPT hype would have not used calculators when they came out on the grounds they didn’t understand mathematical proofs.

readthenotes1 4y ago
like the high school teacher who insisted multiplication be done with a slide rule?
ofrzeta 4y ago
I wouldn't have used a calculator that sometimes miscalculates things and claims them to be correct.
lamp987 4y ago
Calculator that computes that 3 + 2 is 8 should indeed not be trusted much. Do you know any such calculators?

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dhruvkalaria 4y ago

> he sees them the same way you see Indian/Japanese/Arab characters without being able to tell what they mean. Lost me at Indian characters, only if he asked chatGPT Indian isn't a language.

carlmr 4y ago
Indian characters could be the superset of multiple character sets from the Indian subcontinent. There's nothing inherently wrong about it.
- dhruvkalaria 4y ago
  Agreed, i got that too. But i would like to people start noticing and not use general terms often. Nothing wrong with it. Indians are people, same as Americans. Proper way to represent characters of languages originating from Indian subcontinent is Indic and/or dravidian languages. With Scandinavian language speaking countries we know who they are, maybe we use a similar context. :)

bigmattystyles 4y ago

Someone page DesCartes. How do I know everyone in the world is actually real, actual intelligences and consciousnesses distinct from my own? All these articles lack a severe lack of imagination or just try to apply a very narrow definition of intelligence. It's good to be grounded and not hop on every bandwagon but to deride ChatGpt because it can't convince the author it is mimicking the way we think we think is a bit daft. ChatGpt for me has been amazing - I use it to get started. My biggest stumbling block, at anything, is getting started. ChatGpt can get me started by generating boilerplate code, etc... and yea sometimes it is not quite right (though more often than not, it's pretty damn close) and guess what, it did it in seconds. It would have taken me hours to get to that same 'not quite right' level. ChatGpt is an elevator for that initial step function of resistance to my productivity. It gets me going when motivation or the willingness to focus is not there. They can charge $20/month, they can charge $100/month, I'll happily pay it. (edit: they just launched the plus for $20/month - shut up and take my money)

LesZedCB 4y ago
your experience absolutely matches mine with the getting started hurdle. and yeah i just subscribed today

simon_000666 4y ago

I think the real innovation that underpins chatgtp is not the LLM but the UI. The large companies have finally woken up to the fact that a simple chat interface is superior to most people than having to filter and scroll a bunch of Google links and description text - it removes a barrier to the original intent (find out the answer to X). It’s value is utility and as long as it’s correct 80%? Of the time - people won’t care. It’s the same phenomenon as when you are working on a tech team and are new. It’s easier to ask the guy who’s been there a couple of years where a piece of code is rather than go hunt for it yourself, even if he doesn’t always know the correct answer.

matchagaucho 4y ago

I find it amusing that some people expect factual responses from ChatGPT. Meanwhile, my script writing friends are having a heyday, and Hollywood is set to green light several new all GPT-enabled scripts. Ad copywriting is forever changed. And GPT codex can generate Javascript/Java boilerplate faster than you can search on StackExchange.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

The author says: “Large Language Models don’t understand anything — and they can’t get better at something they can’t do.” Yet, LLM’s can understand (unless one claims that understanding requires consciousness): https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06573 https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06573 And, strangely enough, LLM’s can get better at something they can’t do. https://news.mit.edu/2023/large-language-models-in-context-learning-0207 https://news.mit.edu/2023/large-language-models-in-context-l... https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15661.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15661.pdf

benlivengood 4y ago

The article doesn't understand large language models. It makes an assumption about how they work and uses that assumption to draw a conclusion. Most likely, as found in small models [0], large autoregressive transformers understand machine learning algorithms well enough to apply them to their inputs to achieve in-context learning (few-shot prompting) by performing gradient descent within the overall network [1]. This is fundamentally different from static predictors; LLMs are dynamic modelers that learn from context in order to better predict tokens. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15661 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15661 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07677 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07677

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senectus1 4y ago

I agree, but that doesn't make it any less amazing.

LesZedCB 4y ago

have people not seen the videos of Gato? it's pretty mind blowing. it's ability is beyond belief, and it's not even the scaled up version, since there have been clear demonstrations that scaling improves model performance. to me, Gato is pure proof that tranformers are waaaaaay more capable of emergent understanding than people seem to be willing to admit. https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-interactive-agents-in-video-game-worlds https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-interactive-agents-in...

placebo 4y ago

>If you want to know what a person is really like, watch how they treat the staff in a restaurant. Power reveals the true character of those who hold it. This is the only part of the article I am in total agreement with. The rest is just another variant of the Chinese room argument (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). My own take on this is that people are searching for the magical in the wrong place ("we are so special") rather than seeing things are magical by their very existence

johlits 4y ago

It's the perfect product for the average non-technical user.

clauderoux 4y ago

Gary Marcus has been incredibly vocal against LLM for quite a while now. The problem is that the guy does not understand that modern LLM are no longer just classifiers, as the article seems to imply. The underlying transformer architecture has completly transformed the field. For instance, training an AI to recognize cats has nothing to do with training a LLM, texts are fed to the machine without any labels. Attention is where these models take their strenght. It is a way to learn how to predict the next token by learning which elements are connected between the input and the output so far. These architectures model a sequence, which is very different than simply finding the next token with a basic probabilities as ancient approaches did.

HeyZuess 4y ago

I don't know how I feel about this article, especially around the definition of understanding. I have two children under 6, and if you watch their learning patterns they follow a very much the same path, and mimicry is part of that. They learn the subject matter at hand through repetition, and that then build comprehension which is the basis for understanding. I think ChatGPT has learnt and started to understand language based on the data given to it, it has built some understanding how language is structured as it is able to regurgitate language. It has contextual understanding at some level and contextual awareness. One of the next logical questions would be, does it have intelligence and that I don't think is the case. It understanding is based on its understanding of the language. I think the bike example is a great example, my son is learning to ride a bike. He has no understanding of balance as the article states, he has awareness of it, he knows he needs to peddle to move forward but he has no understanding of inertia, he has to steer but he has no understanding of physics, but he understands all of these components are required and he knows that via data "the experience of learning". I think it would be difficult without prompting to get him to explain his "understanding". Now understanding is great, you can apply learned information and apply it to another subject. So we can use what we have learned from ridding a bike and apply it to a motorbike. I am unsure if this cross domain transfer of understanding is something which ChatGPT can do, but it does a great job of extrapolating data and apply it to learnt rules.

sound_and_form 4y ago

This article was written by ChatGPT.

BaldWriter 4y ago

Hey it's the author, Nabil Alouani, and I have something to say to all the unproductive (and often toxic) feedback: KEKW. Shoutout to the one who caught the "Indian" characters mistake. I just corrected it. Thanks!