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> But nobody knows how GPT works. They know how it was trained, because the training scheme was designed by humans, but the algorithm that is executed during in
by efxhoy 4y ago
> But nobody knows how GPT works. They know how it was trained, because the training scheme was designed by humans, but the algorithm that is executed during inference was not intelligently designed but evolved, and it is implicit in the structure of the network, and interpretability has yet to mature to the point where we can draw a symbolic, abstract, human-readable program out of a sea of weights.
Nobody knows how the human mind really works either. And we’ve been trying to understand ourselves for thousands of years. I suspect we will take a while to figure out how the “mind” of GPT works too.
- doctor_eval 4y agoAnd what I think we'll find is that we are, essentially, stochastic parrots. (I'm OK with that. It is what it is).
- rain1 4y agosometimes. :) sometimes we are so much more.
- doctor_eval 4y agoI often think about this problem and I keep returning to the thought that maybe we're close to understanding how consciousness works, maybe these LLMs are actually getting us closer to understanding this thing. But some people are going to be disappointed because it will remove all doubt about how un-special humans are. We're just a bunch of neurons, which are made out of physics. But I'm not disappointed. This stochastic parrot is amazed! Nature has created a system which is able to understand itself! That's absolutely incredible.
- ivxvm 4y agoI think the whole concept of "consciousness" might get old in nearby future. ANNs and brains will get better understood and people start questioning not what consciousness and reasoning are, but rather why they feel their "now" as they do, whether they are full of energy and in sharp mental state or they drunk to half death and can't really reason and form sentences normally yet still perceiving their "now" in the same way and feeling like they are still them. I don't know if there is a better word for this concept, but it definitely feels like the word "consciousness" shifts away from this meaning each day.
- doctor_eval 4y agoYes. It turns out that the brain consists of white matter, grey matter, and dark matter. The dark matter is consciousness. Once we understand it, the the word consciousness will no longer be mysterious. I can’t wait!