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> I know that some people manipulate words in their heads, others images, I manipulate sounds and images. Language is just a noisy medium through which we commu

> I know that some people manipulate words in their heads, others images, I manipulate sounds and images. Language is just a noisy medium through which we communicate the internal state of our brain or its outputs to other people / humans and ourselves. We are in agreement here. I think you are only strengthening my argument that language is too imprecise and restrictive for LLMs to be fundamentally equivalent to human thinking. > GPT4 does just fine in some cases and extrapolates just fine in others "just fine" is not very persuasive here. A nine-year-old can do much better than "just fine" after learning some very simple rules with very minimal examples. And I conjecture that if you removed a lot of the mathematical examples from GTP's training corpus, to be more equivalent to what a nine-year-old has seen, it would do even worse. And it's fundamentally because it cannot break out of its linear language limits and understand numbers as abstract symbols that can be manipulated before converting back into language. > I don't think that is correct. The human might provide a justification for something but that doesn't mean it is the true reason they reached a conclusion. Sometimes, yes. What I meant here is that a human can (sometimes - when it is acting intelligently) specifically repeat information they learned and specifically recall the source of that information. This is how our entire scientific process works; we can go back and look up exactly how we derived any piece of our collective knowledge, verify or repeat it if necessary, or build on it further. You're proving my point by the citations you are giving me! (thank you for them) As an intelligent human, you do not "hallucinate" sources, you can provide real ones and provide them directly. And you can do this because - to go back to my original argument - your intelligence is fundamentally different than an LLM. (That's not an argument that AI is impossible, only that we work differently somehow than what we've seen so far.)

PartiallyTyped 4y ago
The fact that GPT understands how to use tools suggests that not only does it understand the meaning of numbers, it also understands its own limitations. By all means, the argument around numeracy is bogus, as lots of people have numeracy issues but they know how to use a calculator. The fact that so many people seem stuck up over the inability to write perfect math when it can do in context learning of a novel programming language, do addition over groups where addition is not defined as a+b but as a+b+c where c is a constant is incredible. If we held humans to the same standard we hold GPT3.5+ models, the vast majority pf humans would fail. The fact that it needs as much data as it does is simply an architectural issue and not inherent to the model itself. As for hallucinations; I will point to whole thing that religion is, a mass psychosis, Eagleman's book goes into great detail on how we hallucinate our reality.
- joshuahedlund 4y ago
  I don't feel like you're responding to the arguments I'm making. Yes, people have numeracy issues or suffer from mass psychosis, but we generally consider those signs of less intelligence. I'm not holding GTP to the same standards; I'm arguing that human intelligence/thinking is not fundamentally the same as an LLM (e.g. reasoning in flexible symbols rather than language), which is why LLMs appear highly intelligent in some ways but much less intelligent in other ways (like grade-school numeracy or the ability to cite sources that exist)

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

The fact that GPT understands how to use tools suggests that not only does it understand the meaning of numbers, it also understands its own limitations. By all means, the argument around numeracy is bogus, as lots of people have numeracy issues but they know how to use a calculator. The fact that so many people seem stuck up over the inability to write perfect math when it can do in context learning of a novel programming language, do addition over groups where addition is not defined as a+b but as a+b+c where c is a constant is incredible. If we held humans to the same standard we hold GPT3.5+ models, the vast majority pf humans would fail. The fact that it needs as much data as it does is simply an architectural issue and not inherent to the model itself. As for hallucinations; I will point to whole thing that religion is, a mass psychosis, Eagleman's book goes into great detail on how we hallucinate our reality.

joshuahedlund 4y ago
I don't feel like you're responding to the arguments I'm making. Yes, people have numeracy issues or suffer from mass psychosis, but we generally consider those signs of less intelligence. I'm not holding GTP to the same standards; I'm arguing that human intelligence/thinking is not fundamentally the same as an LLM (e.g. reasoning in flexible symbols rather than language), which is why LLMs appear highly intelligent in some ways but much less intelligent in other ways (like grade-school numeracy or the ability to cite sources that exist)