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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 seem
by 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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y agoA huge step forward- to what? To building an uncontrollable firehose of bullshit? What, exactly, is that going "forward" towards? In any case, I'm no clairvoyant and I can't see the future. What I see right now is a huge mess and a gigantic marketing bubble. So I'll just sit tightly and wait to see what will happen in a few years. I do have to note though that, so far, all the large hype models that have come out of OpenAI's research -GPT-2, GPT-3, now ChatGPT- have not really been useful in anything but parlor tricks: generating silly poems and malfunctioning code, and the like. They're great entertainment, but not very useful all. As indeed have been earlier overhyped results. I wonder if anyone remembers the Neural Translation Machine in Google Translate and how it invented its own "interlingua"? >> It seems clear that, in light of the quote from Winograd, that simply isn't true. You're right, my comment exaggerates the achievement in SHRDLU. So let's say, not "absolute precision" but "unprecedented precision" and precision not since achieved again. Certainly not by any statistical language model. Or, I mean, I don't know. People have controlled robots with code created by GPT-3 etc (I've been in a couple of conferences where people from MIT were showing off some research to that point). Can you show me an example of an interaction like the one in Winograd's thesis? Personally, I haven't seen any so far. Edit: I'm re-reading my comments to make sure the tone is civil. Please let me know if you don't think it's OK.
- slibhb 4y agoI've used ChatGPT once for work to write a regular expression. The expression needed to use unicode properties (like \p{L}, which I didn't know existed). I had googled around and couldn't find the solution. ChatGPT gave me something close that I was able to quickly verify and use with small changes. That was enough to convince me that it has potential. Whether LLMs are more or less revolutionary than google search remains to be seen. I predict they'll be somewhere in that ballpark. > Or, I mean, I don't know. People have controlled robots with code created by GPT-3 etc (I've been in a couple of conferences where people from MIT were showing off some research to that point). Can you show me an example of an interaction like the one in Winograd's thesis? Personally, I haven't seen any so far. I don't know of anything. Will be interesting to see how far they get with that. I don't mind your tone. I think it's civil but, frankly, I enjoy a little incivility now and then.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago>> I don't mind your tone. I think it's civil but, frankly, I enjoy a little incivility now and then. I'll do my best :P