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>> Those who deny that ChatGPT understands have to move their goalposts every few weeks; OpenAI’s release schedule seems to be slightly faster, so in time it se

>> Those who deny that ChatGPT understands have to move their goalposts every few weeks; OpenAI’s release schedule seems to be slightly faster, so in time it seems even the fastest-moving goalposts will be outrun by the LLMs. No, they don't. It doesn't matter how many releases OpenAI makes, there is still no alternative explanation needed for the behaviour of their systems than the fact that their systems are language models trained to reproduce their training corpus. And btw, the people who point that out, like me for example, are not "denying" anything, just like atheists are not "denying" the existence of god, just because there are people who believe in it. It's the people who believe that a language model can "understand" who are _asserting_ that LLMs understand, and it is they who have to explain how. Which so far has not been done. All we have is exclamations of strong belief, and waving of the hands.

fwlr 4y ago
Comparing this to atheism is very illuminating, actually. In some ways this topic is very different to atheism/theism. In the ‘belief in god’ debate both sides are trying to take away the other side’s belief; it’s important to atheists to stop people believing in God, while to believers it’s important to stop people disbelieving in God, so there’s a lot of convincing being attempted, people seeking each other out to tell them that they cannot or must not hold a certain belief, and so forth. This topic is very different! If I want to go off and believe LLMs can understand and reason and think, you don’t really care; likewise, when you believe that, although it might be producing a novel rephrasing, the information in that rephrasing is merely reproduced from the training corpus, I don’t really care. (Beyond active engagements in discussion threads, anyhow - not trying to imply either of us don’t care about the discussion we’re having right now!) But in other ways it is very similar to the atheism/theism debate. For a time I used to argue God exists because the idea of God controls and causes very specific behaviors from a great many people; a naive diagram of the situation has this God figure and He’s telling these little people figures to do certain things and they do exactly those things (which is why “pointing out that certain figures are hypocritically not doing those things” feels important and like it might be evidence against), and the atheist argument that you can’t actually detect God’s existence is like erasing the God figure from the diagram: it leaves a conspicuous hole in the diagram, and the hole is shaped like God, and if you were to naively fill in the hole in the diagram to explain what’s causing the people to behave that way, the precise shape of the hole forces you to end up re-drawing God (this argument was very unconvincing to atheists for multiple reasons and I’m not trying to re-litigate it here). It became clear to me that atheists were not interested in this level of proof, it had to be physical existence; some ‘God-stuff’ that you could grab a handful of and hold up to the light and say “here it is”. This topic is very similar! For me, it is enough that the diagram of an LLM’s capabilities has a hole shaped exactly like “it understands” and I’m happy to fill in the obvious blank; for you, there needs be an actual process of understanding somewhere in the code and the weights that we could hold up to the light and say “here is the understanding” (and that is how you can claim that no matter how good LLMs get they will never be understanding - all of their processes are already fully described and explained, there’s nowhere for a process of understanding to hide).
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  Just to clarify, I am an atheist and I don't mind taht people believe in god. Sorry, _God_. I respect the decision to believe and to worship. It's a fundamental element of humanity. I'm not against it at all. I just don't think that those beliefs are real, that's all. The last thing I would ever try to do is to convince someone that God doesn't exist. Why would I ever do that? As to LLMs, they are not supernatural beings that are the subject of belief, or even disbelief. They are technological artifacts created by humans, machines that perform a task they were created to perform. We created the machines, we know how they are made, and we know what they can do. For example, if you were to argue that a car can understand transport, or an airplane, flight, just because they are very complex technological artifacts and they behave in ways that are not easy to predict, or even explain, then I'd have to say, similar to what I say about LLMs: "an airplane is a machine designed to fly, not understand flight, so if you think it understands flight it's up to you to show me how its mechanisms allow it to do that". In particular I would ask you this because I am just now polishing up a PhD in AI (although not the kind you read in the news) so this is my field of expertise and I believe it is reasonable for me to have questions, when someone makes assertions about the functioning of systems that I have studied. In short, it's my job to know and to understand how those systems work, and if you say they 're working somehow otherwise, then of course I'd like to know why you say that. So, yes, I'm going to want to know where "understanding" has been hiding from me all this time, and I'd like very precise instructions to find it myself, please, otherwise I'm going to assume you're making it up as you go along. No offense meant. I have to do that as part of my job (i.e. reviews). Perhaps it's a "deformation professionelle", eh?
  - fwlr 4y ago
    I’m not an AI researcher so my answer won’t be satisfying, but I’m pretty confident that meaning is stored in the embeddings, and gun to my head I would say understanding is hiding in the weights. My handwavey argument is that the map of activation weights between layers of neurons can store understanding, in the same way that a complete log of every transaction can store bank account balances (even though there’s no actual “this amount is in this account at this time” information anywhere in that log).
rstuart4133 4y ago
I agree there is a connection between ChatGPT, god and atheists but I don't think it's the one you point out. The commonality "general intelligence" and "god" share is there is no agreed definition of either. Science has forced a steady retreat in the number of things that can be attributed to god. But that shouldn't worry theists, because Godel's incomplete theorem means there are some things we will can never understand in a finite series of steps, so there will always be room for god. God explains the "rest". I suspect the "rest" is infinite, so that leaves a lot of room for god. Whether LLM's are intelligent or sentient falls into the same category. As intelligent and sentient don't have a formal definition you can always change their definitions, and that's exactly what seems to be happening. A task is put up as "only humans can do this" (like the Turing test, or a captcha) then it's solved, then the goal posts are moved. Again, because of Godel's theorem I can say with certainty this is a game we can continue to play forever. I debated on the atheists "team" in forums for a decade or two before it dawned I was effectively arguing about how many angles will fit onto the head of a pin. It's a peculiar game. Godel's theorem effectively says there is a no finitely sized rule that can describe a system of infinite states. As we are finite it's possible (in theory) we could one day find a rule that can predict every situation we could see, which means in the "atheists vs theists" game we win every battle because we've explained (or predict even) everything we experience. But the universe is infinite, so while we can explain everything we've experienced we can't explain everything there is. So we can win every battle - but still never disprove god because we can never experience everything. Thus we lose the war. In other words I lost the "there is no god" debate. But it wasn't because I now think there is no god. It's because I realised I could never prove it, which to me is the same as losing it. The situation is exactly the same with "AI's are intelligent" debate, which makes it's just as pointless.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  I don't know if you lost any debates there. If you were having those debates for a long time, you may have heard of Russel's Teapot: Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot So there's nothing there to disprove. Anyone who wants to convince you of the existence of the Gods they believe in, that person has the responsibility to convince you. Not you, them. But I think it's a bad idea to try to convince people to believe, or disbelieve things anyway. Why do that? Faith is a great thing to have, life is hard and there's horrible things that happen during it. There's nothing more powerful than knowing in your heart of hearts that there's someone big, and almighty, watching over you. Leave people believe. You're not doing them a favour by trying to refute their faith.

fwlr 4y ago

Comparing this to atheism is very illuminating, actually. In some ways this topic is very different to atheism/theism. In the ‘belief in god’ debate both sides are trying to take away the other side’s belief; it’s important to atheists to stop people believing in God, while to believers it’s important to stop people disbelieving in God, so there’s a lot of convincing being attempted, people seeking each other out to tell them that they cannot or must not hold a certain belief, and so forth. This topic is very different! If I want to go off and believe LLMs can understand and reason and think, you don’t really care; likewise, when you believe that, although it might be producing a novel rephrasing, the information in that rephrasing is merely reproduced from the training corpus, I don’t really care. (Beyond active engagements in discussion threads, anyhow - not trying to imply either of us don’t care about the discussion we’re having right now!) But in other ways it is very similar to the atheism/theism debate. For a time I used to argue God exists because the idea of God controls and causes very specific behaviors from a great many people; a naive diagram of the situation has this God figure and He’s telling these little people figures to do certain things and they do exactly those things (which is why “pointing out that certain figures are hypocritically not doing those things” feels important and like it might be evidence against), and the atheist argument that you can’t actually detect God’s existence is like erasing the God figure from the diagram: it leaves a conspicuous hole in the diagram, and the hole is shaped like God, and if you were to naively fill in the hole in the diagram to explain what’s causing the people to behave that way, the precise shape of the hole forces you to end up re-drawing God (this argument was very unconvincing to atheists for multiple reasons and I’m not trying to re-litigate it here). It became clear to me that atheists were not interested in this level of proof, it had to be physical existence; some ‘God-stuff’ that you could grab a handful of and hold up to the light and say “here it is”. This topic is very similar! For me, it is enough that the diagram of an LLM’s capabilities has a hole shaped exactly like “it understands” and I’m happy to fill in the obvious blank; for you, there needs be an actual process of understanding somewhere in the code and the weights that we could hold up to the light and say “here is the understanding” (and that is how you can claim that no matter how good LLMs get they will never be understanding - all of their processes are already fully described and explained, there’s nowhere for a process of understanding to hide).

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
Just to clarify, I am an atheist and I don't mind taht people believe in god. Sorry, _God_. I respect the decision to believe and to worship. It's a fundamental element of humanity. I'm not against it at all. I just don't think that those beliefs are real, that's all. The last thing I would ever try to do is to convince someone that God doesn't exist. Why would I ever do that? As to LLMs, they are not supernatural beings that are the subject of belief, or even disbelief. They are technological artifacts created by humans, machines that perform a task they were created to perform. We created the machines, we know how they are made, and we know what they can do. For example, if you were to argue that a car can understand transport, or an airplane, flight, just because they are very complex technological artifacts and they behave in ways that are not easy to predict, or even explain, then I'd have to say, similar to what I say about LLMs: "an airplane is a machine designed to fly, not understand flight, so if you think it understands flight it's up to you to show me how its mechanisms allow it to do that". In particular I would ask you this because I am just now polishing up a PhD in AI (although not the kind you read in the news) so this is my field of expertise and I believe it is reasonable for me to have questions, when someone makes assertions about the functioning of systems that I have studied. In short, it's my job to know and to understand how those systems work, and if you say they 're working somehow otherwise, then of course I'd like to know why you say that. So, yes, I'm going to want to know where "understanding" has been hiding from me all this time, and I'd like very precise instructions to find it myself, please, otherwise I'm going to assume you're making it up as you go along. No offense meant. I have to do that as part of my job (i.e. reviews). Perhaps it's a "deformation professionelle", eh?
- fwlr 4y ago
  I’m not an AI researcher so my answer won’t be satisfying, but I’m pretty confident that meaning is stored in the embeddings, and gun to my head I would say understanding is hiding in the weights. My handwavey argument is that the map of activation weights between layers of neurons can store understanding, in the same way that a complete log of every transaction can store bank account balances (even though there’s no actual “this amount is in this account at this time” information anywhere in that log).

rstuart4133 4y ago

I agree there is a connection between ChatGPT, god and atheists but I don't think it's the one you point out. The commonality "general intelligence" and "god" share is there is no agreed definition of either. Science has forced a steady retreat in the number of things that can be attributed to god. But that shouldn't worry theists, because Godel's incomplete theorem means there are some things we will can never understand in a finite series of steps, so there will always be room for god. God explains the "rest". I suspect the "rest" is infinite, so that leaves a lot of room for god. Whether LLM's are intelligent or sentient falls into the same category. As intelligent and sentient don't have a formal definition you can always change their definitions, and that's exactly what seems to be happening. A task is put up as "only humans can do this" (like the Turing test, or a captcha) then it's solved, then the goal posts are moved. Again, because of Godel's theorem I can say with certainty this is a game we can continue to play forever. I debated on the atheists "team" in forums for a decade or two before it dawned I was effectively arguing about how many angles will fit onto the head of a pin. It's a peculiar game. Godel's theorem effectively says there is a no finitely sized rule that can describe a system of infinite states. As we are finite it's possible (in theory) we could one day find a rule that can predict every situation we could see, which means in the "atheists vs theists" game we win every battle because we've explained (or predict even) everything we experience. But the universe is infinite, so while we can explain everything we've experienced we can't explain everything there is. So we can win every battle - but still never disprove god because we can never experience everything. Thus we lose the war. In other words I lost the "there is no god" debate. But it wasn't because I now think there is no god. It's because I realised I could never prove it, which to me is the same as losing it. The situation is exactly the same with "AI's are intelligent" debate, which makes it's just as pointless.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
I don't know if you lost any debates there. If you were having those debates for a long time, you may have heard of Russel's Teapot: Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot So there's nothing there to disprove. Anyone who wants to convince you of the existence of the Gods they believe in, that person has the responsibility to convince you. Not you, them. But I think it's a bad idea to try to convince people to believe, or disbelieve things anyway. Why do that? Faith is a great thing to have, life is hard and there's horrible things that happen during it. There's nothing more powerful than knowing in your heart of hearts that there's someone big, and almighty, watching over you. Leave people believe. You're not doing them a favour by trying to refute their faith.