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Guys guys! Stop talking about LLMs a minute and look at this! I gave my phone's calculator app this very hard multiplication problem and it got it right! Look!

Guys guys! Stop talking about LLMs a minute and look at this! I gave my phone's calculator app this very hard multiplication problem and it got it right! Look! 2398794857945873 * 10298509348503 = 2.47040112696963e+28 My calculator can do arithmetic! But only humans can do arithmetic! Therefore, my calculator must understand arithmetic! And I bet it always gets it right, too! That means it must understand arithmetic better than LLMs understand language, because LLMs make mistakes, but my calculator never does! Right? That makes so much sense: the rate of error of a machine tells us something important about its ability to understand, not about the design of the machine! A perfect machine u n d e r s t a n d s!!!! This is amaxing! Philip K. Dick was right all along! AGI is real! It is in my pocket, right now and it is going to take all our jobs and turns us all into paperclips if we forget not to ask it to calculate all the decimal digits of pi! We live in interesting times. I wish Galileo was here, you'd see what he would have to say about all this. Automated machines that do arithmetic? Mind blowing! (Cue the "but that's not the same as language modelling because ..." some convoluted equivalent to "I'm used to calculators but it's the first time I see a language model")

lovvtide 4y ago
Don't you think there's a difference between solving well-defined problems and very open-ended problems?
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  Which problems are you talking about?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - quantum_mcts 4y ago
    Euclid’s proof in form of a poem. In style of Shakespeare.
PoignardAzur 4y ago
Wow, being sarcastic about AI! I bet you're the first person to come up with that idea! Man, I wish we could all be so smart and clear-seeing.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  To be clear, I'm not being sarcastic about AI. I am pointing out that there are many examples of systems that can perform calculations that humans can also perform because we understand calculation, but (those systems) do not understand calculation, or what they are calculating, or that they are calculating anything at all. Yet, nobody is surprised that a calculator can perform arithmetic operations without understanding arithmetic, but here we are, with a whole bunch of people surprised that a language model can calculate the probability of a string in a natural language without understanding language.
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    I have no intention of defending the article's thesis, but I think your comparison of these language models to a calculator stops just when it is getting interesting. Sure, it is unsurprising that a language model can calculate the probability of a string in a natural language without understanding language, but what I find surprising about it is that this alone quite often results in responses that could pass as human-generated. When I write something, it does not feel as if I am just picking the next word to follow what I have written so far. Instead, it feels like I am working on several different but hierarchically-related goals simultaneously, with next-word choice being the least demanding. It seems implausible that probabilities derived from a large corpus of unrelated text, and, furthermore, by a process that does not understand language, would be useful in achieving my particular goals. Maybe I am overrating the abilities of these models, despite not wanting to. Maybe my impressions have been skewed by seeing too many cherry-picked examples. Maybe I am being overly generous in my reading of the models' responses - or maybe my intuitions about how we humans come to say what we do is mistaken. Whatever is behind my surprise, I am confident that the scientific method will lead to explanations.
    - 4y ago
ithkuil 4y ago
Perhaps you calculator understands arithmetic indeed! Surely it can't talk to you about how it feels about it's understanding of arithmetic, well because arithmetic is all it understands. Not language, nor introspection. Perhaps we don't understand what understanding means. Or at least we can't really talk about our understanding of understanding, well be because being human is all what we know of.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  >> Perhaps you calculator understands arithmetic indeed! Well, perhaps it does. But that depends on a definition of "understands" that we can all agree covers humans, calculators, and large language models, alike. And what about cats and dogs and other mammals? Surely whales "understand" something, say, about fishing, even if they can't do arithmetic? How about insects? Does a cockroach understand anything? To be honest, I doubt we can have some kid of a priori definition of "understands" capable of convering all of the above. I think we have to wait for a lot longer until we can really say for sure what "understand" even means in humans, in the first place, let alone everything else.

lovvtide 4y ago

Don't you think there's a difference between solving well-defined problems and very open-ended problems?

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
Which problems are you talking about?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- quantum_mcts 4y ago
  Euclid’s proof in form of a poem. In style of Shakespeare.

PoignardAzur 4y ago

Wow, being sarcastic about AI! I bet you're the first person to come up with that idea! Man, I wish we could all be so smart and clear-seeing.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
To be clear, I'm not being sarcastic about AI. I am pointing out that there are many examples of systems that can perform calculations that humans can also perform because we understand calculation, but (those systems) do not understand calculation, or what they are calculating, or that they are calculating anything at all. Yet, nobody is surprised that a calculator can perform arithmetic operations without understanding arithmetic, but here we are, with a whole bunch of people surprised that a language model can calculate the probability of a string in a natural language without understanding language.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  I have no intention of defending the article's thesis, but I think your comparison of these language models to a calculator stops just when it is getting interesting. Sure, it is unsurprising that a language model can calculate the probability of a string in a natural language without understanding language, but what I find surprising about it is that this alone quite often results in responses that could pass as human-generated. When I write something, it does not feel as if I am just picking the next word to follow what I have written so far. Instead, it feels like I am working on several different but hierarchically-related goals simultaneously, with next-word choice being the least demanding. It seems implausible that probabilities derived from a large corpus of unrelated text, and, furthermore, by a process that does not understand language, would be useful in achieving my particular goals. Maybe I am overrating the abilities of these models, despite not wanting to. Maybe my impressions have been skewed by seeing too many cherry-picked examples. Maybe I am being overly generous in my reading of the models' responses - or maybe my intuitions about how we humans come to say what we do is mistaken. Whatever is behind my surprise, I am confident that the scientific method will lead to explanations.
  - 4y ago

ithkuil 4y ago

Perhaps you calculator understands arithmetic indeed! Surely it can't talk to you about how it feels about it's understanding of arithmetic, well because arithmetic is all it understands. Not language, nor introspection. Perhaps we don't understand what understanding means. Or at least we can't really talk about our understanding of understanding, well be because being human is all what we know of.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
>> Perhaps you calculator understands arithmetic indeed! Well, perhaps it does. But that depends on a definition of "understands" that we can all agree covers humans, calculators, and large language models, alike. And what about cats and dogs and other mammals? Surely whales "understand" something, say, about fishing, even if they can't do arithmetic? How about insects? Does a cockroach understand anything? To be honest, I doubt we can have some kid of a priori definition of "understands" capable of convering all of the above. I think we have to wait for a lot longer until we can really say for sure what "understand" even means in humans, in the first place, let alone everything else.