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>> In this piece Chomsky, the intellectual godfather of an effort that failed for 60 years to build machines that can converse in ordinary language, condemns th

>> In this piece Chomsky, the intellectual godfather of an effort that failed for 60 years to build machines that can converse in ordinary language, condemns the effort that succeeded. Chomsky never had anything to do with any sort of effort "to build machines that can converse in ordinary language". I have no idea where that came from in Aaronson's article. Chomsky was a great influence to cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, in particular in its early years, but he has nothing to do with chatbots. At. all. That's just plain nuts, to open an article against "Chomskyism" (bad form, that title) with such a complete fabrication. Moreover, Chomsky's influence on AI did very much lead to systems that could "converse in ordinary language" - but with which Chomsky had nothing to do, personally, or as a researcher. The "influence" I mention refers to Chomsky's work on formal grammars, and how they have been used for a long time in NLP to model language. For a couple historically notable examples: ELIZA: Joseph Wizenbaum's chatbot pretending to be a Rogerian psychologist. I think at this point in the conversation, everyone has heard about ELIZA and how it drew people in and made them ascribe human qualities to it, just like ChatGPT and friends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA SHRDLU: the doctoral thesis of Terry Winograd, written in 1968-70. SHRDLU was a natural language interface to a virtual robotic arm manipulating coloured bricks in a "brick world". It was based on a natural language grammar created by Winograd, and could support intricate instructions that the system then executed with precision. The wikipedia article on SHRDLU has an example, from which I quote: Person: Is there a large block behind a pyramid? Computer: YES, THREE OF THEM: A LARGE RED ONE, A LARGE GREEN CUBE, AND THE BLUE ONE. Person: Put a small one onto the green cube which supports a pyramid. Computer: OK. Person: Put the littlest pyramid on top of it. Computer: OK. Person: Does the shortest thing the tallest pyramid's support supports support anything green? Computer: YES, THE GREEN PYRAMID. Person: What color is it? Computer: BY "IT", I ASSUME YOU MEAN THE SHORTEST THING THE TALLEST PYRAMID'S SUPPORT SUPPORTS. Computer: RED Person: How many things are on top of green cubes? Computer: I'M NOT SURE WHAT YOU MEAN BY "ON TOP OF "IN THE PHRASE "ON TOP OF GREEN CUBES " . DO YOU MEAN: 1 - DIRECTLY ON THE SURFACE 2 - ANWHERE ON TOP OF ? Person: 2 Computer: THREE OF THEM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU Now, if you've seen discussions with ChatGPT and earlier large language models you'll know that the above is beyond the capabilities of modern systems; including ones trained specifically to manipulate robotic arms etc. ChatGPT, faced with instructions like the above, will soon start to hallucinate objects that don't exist, then hallucinate moving them, and make a pig's meal of the entire state of the blocks world. SHRDLU, confined as it was in its virtual, toy world, could still follow the instructions of its user with absolute precision. We still have nothing that can repeat this feat. Why? Because "Chomskyism" was abandoned, and everyone turned to statistical NLP, after the AI winter of the '90s crushed AI research funding, that's why.

slibhb 4y ago
> In a 1991 interview, Winograd said about SHRDLU:[3] > [...] the famous dialogue with SHRDLU where you could pick up a block, and so on, I very carefully worked through, line by line. If you sat down in front of it, and asked it a question that wasn't in the dialogue, there was some probability it would answer it. I mean, if it was reasonably close to one of the questions that was there in form and in content, it would probably get it. But there was no attempt to get it to the point where you could actually hand it to somebody and they could use it to move blocks around. And there was no pressure for that whatsoever. Pressure was for something you could demo. Take a recent example, Negroponte's Media Lab, where instead of "perish or publish" it's "demo or die." I think that's a problem. I think AI suffered from that a lot, because it led to "Potemkin villages", things which - for the things they actually did in the demo looked good, but when you looked behind that there wasn't enough structure to make it really work more generally. Unlike "Chomskyian efforts," statisical NLP actually allows the machine to interact with natural language.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  The whole conversation with Winograd is here: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107717/oh237taw.pdf https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107717/oh... In that passage you quoted, Winograd is saying that SHRDLU was essentially an academic demo, something created only for the purpose of passing a thesis examination, even as a tech demo is something created only to show off at a showroom. That's well known. But SHRDLU, academic demo that it was, was a program hand-crafted by a single PhD student in a few months. It didn't have behind it a team of 30+ people, or a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars, like GPT-3 -and who knows about ChatGPT! And yet it still worked better than ChatGPT has ever worked, even though just for the purpose of moving virtual blocks around a virtual world. >> Unlike "Chomskyian efforts," statisical NLP actually allows the machine to interact with natural language. Sure. And do what? Go off the rails like a crazy train, most of the time.
  - slibhb 4y ago
    You originally wrote: > SHRDLU, confined as it was in its virtual, toy world, could still follow the instructions of its user with absolute precision. It seems clear that, in light of the quote from Winograd, that simply isn't true. > But SHRDLU, academic demo that it was, was a program hand-crafted by a single PhD student in a few months. It didn't have behind it a team of 30+ people, or a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars, like GPT-3 -and who knows about ChatGPT! Do you have some idea in mind how we might scale up from SHRDLU's approach? Does Winograd? It seems pretty clear to me that no one does; it was a one-off toy that didn't solve any fundamental problems. > And yet it still worked better than ChatGPT has ever worked, even though just for the purpose of moving virtual blocks around a virtual world. There are plenty of questions remaining concerning LLMs. We don't know what they will be used for, where they will succeed and fail. But they are absolutely a huge step forward from earlier attempts and it's utterly bizarre to deny that.

slibhb 4y ago

> In a 1991 interview, Winograd said about SHRDLU:[3] > [...] the famous dialogue with SHRDLU where you could pick up a block, and so on, I very carefully worked through, line by line. If you sat down in front of it, and asked it a question that wasn't in the dialogue, there was some probability it would answer it. I mean, if it was reasonably close to one of the questions that was there in form and in content, it would probably get it. But there was no attempt to get it to the point where you could actually hand it to somebody and they could use it to move blocks around. And there was no pressure for that whatsoever. Pressure was for something you could demo. Take a recent example, Negroponte's Media Lab, where instead of "perish or publish" it's "demo or die." I think that's a problem. I think AI suffered from that a lot, because it led to "Potemkin villages", things which - for the things they actually did in the demo looked good, but when you looked behind that there wasn't enough structure to make it really work more generally. Unlike "Chomskyian efforts," statisical NLP actually allows the machine to interact with natural language.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
The whole conversation with Winograd is here: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107717/oh237taw.pdf https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107717/oh... In that passage you quoted, Winograd is saying that SHRDLU was essentially an academic demo, something created only for the purpose of passing a thesis examination, even as a tech demo is something created only to show off at a showroom. That's well known. But SHRDLU, academic demo that it was, was a program hand-crafted by a single PhD student in a few months. It didn't have behind it a team of 30+ people, or a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars, like GPT-3 -and who knows about ChatGPT! And yet it still worked better than ChatGPT has ever worked, even though just for the purpose of moving virtual blocks around a virtual world. >> Unlike "Chomskyian efforts," statisical NLP actually allows the machine to interact with natural language. Sure. And do what? Go off the rails like a crazy train, most of the time.
- slibhb 4y ago
  You originally wrote: > SHRDLU, confined as it was in its virtual, toy world, could still follow the instructions of its user with absolute precision. It seems clear that, in light of the quote from Winograd, that simply isn't true. > But SHRDLU, academic demo that it was, was a program hand-crafted by a single PhD student in a few months. It didn't have behind it a team of 30+ people, or a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars, like GPT-3 -and who knows about ChatGPT! Do you have some idea in mind how we might scale up from SHRDLU's approach? Does Winograd? It seems pretty clear to me that no one does; it was a one-off toy that didn't solve any fundamental problems. > And yet it still worked better than ChatGPT has ever worked, even though just for the purpose of moving virtual blocks around a virtual world. There are plenty of questions remaining concerning LLMs. We don't know what they will be used for, where they will succeed and fail. But they are absolutely a huge step forward from earlier attempts and it's utterly bizarre to deny that.