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I too agree with Chomsky. It's concerning to see people piling onto GPT/LLMs as an extractive tool - something it does okay at, but in the end, something it's n

by z3c0 4y ago

I too agree with Chomsky. It's concerning to see people piling onto GPT/LLMs as an extractive tool - something it does okay at, but in the end, something it's not made for. So many companies rushing to use it as such is going to result in some colossal problems for some. The potential for completely false assertions is not something one should be in a hurry to productionize. There's already a myriad of extractive NLP solutions available that organizations could be utilizing (like any simpler BERT-based model.) Unfortunately, they don't come with the veneer of misleading ethos that GPT/LLMs pretend to have. Personally, I see some potential for customer-facing uses, but that's because customers like novelties.

bundie 4y ago
Do you think AGI will be achieved if this trend continues?
- z3c0 4y ago
  Not really, no, but that's not to say that LLMs couldn't be a useful shell through which an AGI could interact with the rest of the world. But to herald LLMs as the coming of AGI would be to put the cart before the horse. A rudimentary intelligence capable of basic object-recognition and permanence* would be an actual step towards AGI over LLMs, in my professional (but still fallible) opinion. Something as basic as an insect, or hell, even protozoa, is all we would need to say that we're on the way. Once we have that, tying it with an LLM to give it denotative capabilities would be the boom we're all hoping for/terrified of. [*] this is key, but we don't need to codify this so much as find a way for the object-recognition to build up to it. Even children take a while to develop object permanence (hence peek-a-boo being fun for them - you really are disappearing.)
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    I really don’t understand why it isn’t plausible that LLMs are weak AGI. If we’d been wise enough to create benchmarks for them a decade ago, I’m sure they would have exceed our expectations. The generality of the intelligence is unquestionable, at least in a language domain. Discounting it as AGI because a fly is better at being a fly seems besides the point.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      Because they don't do anything but generate text when prompted, while humans are walking around doing things. I would expect at least two things from an AGI, weak or strong: 1. It has agency. 2. It can move about and manipulate the world in a general as opposed to predefined sense.
      - Dzugaru 4y ago
        I'm not so sure about this. Text is the universal interface to almost anything imaginable. You can easily embed ChatGPT into a robot, describe the robot text-based API to it and give it a task you like - and it will walk around doing things. Will it do a good job, that's a whole another question - in it's current state it may easily hallucinate something disastrous, but that's because the text-generating "intelligence" is weak (in some sense, we cannot describe it precisely, we don't know what it lacks - abstraction, reflection capabilities or something else)
    - z3c0 4y ago
      The generality of its intelligence within text is still spurious at best. Context-switching is practically nonexistent, and whenever it appears to do so, it's only because your prompt pushed it towards statistically appearing to switch context. And frankly, computers have been exceeding our benchmarks for some time - Turing mistakenly thought that appearing human was a sufficient marker of intelligence, but chatbots have been passing the Turing Test for about a decade now. Saying it would surpass our benchmarks only illustrates how little we understand intelligence, not that LLMs are anything close to intelligence. Edit: that final point is why I propose an in-to-out approach over an out-to-in approach (which is what LLMs are). Let the intelligence make itself, instead of us trying to make intelligence.
      - dr_dshiv 4y ago
        “ not that LLMs are anything close to intelligence.” Well, that’s ridiculous out of hand. What makes you say something like that? If they feel intelligent, pass intelligence benchmarks and are designed to be intelligent— why not ascribe to them intelligence? Is it because they aren’t wet?

by z3c0 4y ago

bundie 4y ago

Do you think AGI will be achieved if this trend continues?

z3c0 4y ago
Not really, no, but that's not to say that LLMs couldn't be a useful shell through which an AGI could interact with the rest of the world. But to herald LLMs as the coming of AGI would be to put the cart before the horse. A rudimentary intelligence capable of basic object-recognition and permanence* would be an actual step towards AGI over LLMs, in my professional (but still fallible) opinion. Something as basic as an insect, or hell, even protozoa, is all we would need to say that we're on the way. Once we have that, tying it with an LLM to give it denotative capabilities would be the boom we're all hoping for/terrified of. [*] this is key, but we don't need to codify this so much as find a way for the object-recognition to build up to it. Even children take a while to develop object permanence (hence peek-a-boo being fun for them - you really are disappearing.)
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  I really don’t understand why it isn’t plausible that LLMs are weak AGI. If we’d been wise enough to create benchmarks for them a decade ago, I’m sure they would have exceed our expectations. The generality of the intelligence is unquestionable, at least in a language domain. Discounting it as AGI because a fly is better at being a fly seems besides the point.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    Because they don't do anything but generate text when prompted, while humans are walking around doing things. I would expect at least two things from an AGI, weak or strong: 1. It has agency. 2. It can move about and manipulate the world in a general as opposed to predefined sense.
    - Dzugaru 4y ago
      I'm not so sure about this. Text is the universal interface to almost anything imaginable. You can easily embed ChatGPT into a robot, describe the robot text-based API to it and give it a task you like - and it will walk around doing things. Will it do a good job, that's a whole another question - in it's current state it may easily hallucinate something disastrous, but that's because the text-generating "intelligence" is weak (in some sense, we cannot describe it precisely, we don't know what it lacks - abstraction, reflection capabilities or something else)
  - z3c0 4y ago
    The generality of its intelligence within text is still spurious at best. Context-switching is practically nonexistent, and whenever it appears to do so, it's only because your prompt pushed it towards statistically appearing to switch context. And frankly, computers have been exceeding our benchmarks for some time - Turing mistakenly thought that appearing human was a sufficient marker of intelligence, but chatbots have been passing the Turing Test for about a decade now. Saying it would surpass our benchmarks only illustrates how little we understand intelligence, not that LLMs are anything close to intelligence. Edit: that final point is why I propose an in-to-out approach over an out-to-in approach (which is what LLMs are). Let the intelligence make itself, instead of us trying to make intelligence.
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      “ not that LLMs are anything close to intelligence.” Well, that’s ridiculous out of hand. What makes you say something like that? If they feel intelligent, pass intelligence benchmarks and are designed to be intelligent— why not ascribe to them intelligence? Is it because they aren’t wet?