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This is the first time I have heard Yoshua Bengio described as "dumb". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of AI is: >the theory and de

This is the first time I have heard Yoshua Bengio described as "dumb". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of AI is: >the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. Clearly GPT-3 fits that. You are welcome to have your own definition, but you can't just claim that everyone else is wrong just because they are instead using the standard one. >2. Goals for LLM development were set for the personified attributes, and not the actual functionally of the real thing. OpenAI brags about how GPT4 scores at human tests: as if that has any bearing on the model itself, and not simply its content. Yeah, evaluating language models is extremely difficult. Hence OpenAI Evals, etc. >3. The success of an LLM at a personified goal is determined by magic. Does the black box output what I am hoping it will? How do I improve it? Weights? Better training corpus? Not sure what you mean by magic, but it is certainly hard to predict what they can and can't achieve. I suspect if you asked a panel of experts in 2020 when we would see something that can achieve what GPT-4 was almost all of them would have been wrong, but I am open to evidence to the contrary. >4. An LLM is understood to be a person in a black box, and we could not possibly understand what that person will do next. Danger! No serious person believes this.

thomastjeffery 4y ago
> This is the first time I have heard Yoshua Bengio described as "dumb". I was being cheeky: I meant it to mean "unable to speak". By feeding the personification narrative into itself, nothing is truly being said about what the model itself is and does: only the results of using it. Anyone who has based their understanding on that personified narrative is effectively "blind" to the true nature of the tech itself. I admit I was also being rude, and that was intentional. To spend so much effort studying a thing, and base all of your conclusions on its output...I think it's absurd to then call oneself an expert. Expert of what? A black box you never even opened? The LLM itself can only perform inference, but we aren't held back by that limitation! > the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. That is an excellent definition for the field of science that is AI. "An AI technology" "Working in AI" These statements use "AI" as a category of pursuit. It's not a great definition for an AI. Those words already define themselves. Artificial Intelligence: That means it was created intentionally, and it thinks for itself. No one needs to search a dictionary to know what "an AI" is. If "Intelligence" is an adjective, the definition you provided fits. If "Intelligence" is the noun, then it better be "an intelligence". > Yeah, evaluating language models is extremely difficult. Hence OpenAI Evals, etc. I wasn't trying to say that it's wrong to evaluate what an LLM does when prompted with the text from a test. I think that can provide valuable data and insights. The score we would give to a human taking the test is not valuable data. The behavior being measured does not align to any part of the LLM's process. We don't have to approach this blindly. We can have an explicit understanding to base research on. That doesn't mean making assumptions about the results, but it does mean better understanding the process that leads to them. >> 4. An LLM is understood to be a person in a black box, and we could not possibly understand what that person will do next. Danger! > No serious person believes this. Not literally, but narratively many do.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

> This is the first time I have heard Yoshua Bengio described as "dumb". I was being cheeky: I meant it to mean "unable to speak". By feeding the personification narrative into itself, nothing is truly being said about what the model itself is and does: only the results of using it. Anyone who has based their understanding on that personified narrative is effectively "blind" to the true nature of the tech itself. I admit I was also being rude, and that was intentional. To spend so much effort studying a thing, and base all of your conclusions on its output...I think it's absurd to then call oneself an expert. Expert of what? A black box you never even opened? The LLM itself can only perform inference, but we aren't held back by that limitation! > the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. That is an excellent definition for the field of science that is AI. "An AI technology" "Working in AI" These statements use "AI" as a category of pursuit. It's not a great definition for an AI. Those words already define themselves. Artificial Intelligence: That means it was created intentionally, and it thinks for itself. No one needs to search a dictionary to know what "an AI" is. If "Intelligence" is an adjective, the definition you provided fits. If "Intelligence" is the noun, then it better be "an intelligence". > Yeah, evaluating language models is extremely difficult. Hence OpenAI Evals, etc. I wasn't trying to say that it's wrong to evaluate what an LLM does when prompted with the text from a test. I think that can provide valuable data and insights. The score we would give to a human taking the test is not valuable data. The behavior being measured does not align to any part of the LLM's process. We don't have to approach this blindly. We can have an explicit understanding to base research on. That doesn't mean making assumptions about the results, but it does mean better understanding the process that leads to them. >> 4. An LLM is understood to be a person in a black box, and we could not possibly understand what that person will do next. Danger! > No serious person believes this. Not literally, but narratively many do.