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I think people parroting the 'stochastic parrot' view of these large language models are failing to understand the scope for complex emergent behavior when thes
by jacknews 4y ago
I think people parroting the 'stochastic parrot' view of these large language models are failing to understand the scope for complex emergent behavior when these models have 100s of billions of parameters.
It's like saying 'it's just atoms and molecules bouncing off each other and sometimes splitting or joining', what do you mean 'storms, clouds, rain', or 'collections of them can make copies of themselves', etc.
It's Searle's old Chinese-room argument. That the machine doesn't really understand the words it's manipulating.
The standard argument (or maybe just my argument) against the chinese room is that if the 'symbols' are at lower level, audio, video stimuli, etc, and you have enough scale, then you can imagine intelligence emerging somehow, like flocking birds.
LLMs are trained at the language level, but even then, I think with big enough scale, they do in fact 'learn' concepts and form a 'world model' from the material they are trained on. How else are you able to ask for something in one language and it can output the results in another.
In some ways we can be grateful. Imagine trying to impose ethics on an 'intelligent insect', trained on much lower level inputs. These LLMs are being trained directly on human culture as input, and if we're careful with the input they will reflect the best of it.
- miraculixx 4y ago"emergent behavior" is probably the most misunderstood concept ever. It does NOT mean "this thing is intelligent". It simply means "a property of the system that none of its components have" In other words, any engineered systems displays emergent behavior.
- jacknews 4y agoIt does NOT NECCESSARILY mean it is intelligent, of course. But my point is there is scope for surprising behavior when the scale is large enough, and I'd argue that's what we're seeing with these models. In fact it seems self-evident, they are giving intelligent responses way beyond what you'd expect from even the most sophisticated autocomplete.
- miraculixx 4y agoNo, it is not surprising. The models have been designed and trained for exactly this behavior. Also "emergent" does not mean suprising or unexpected. It just means the system has properties that none of its components have. That's it.
- lou1306 4y agoThe "world model" is still completely, utterly syntactic -- the machine may very well learn that the word "sun" is related to "warm", "light", "day", but cannot ground these words into reality. This is also why it can easily end up making contradictory or inconsistent statements.
- jacknews 4y agoIt's reality is the text it's trained on. That's where the confusion is coming in. Sure it has no idea what the 'sun' is, 'in reality' as you put it. It has not sat under it's heat or seen it's golden glow. But that's our reality. It's reality is the text - it's surely formed a model of the sun from the the billions of words it's ingested, which includes that the sun is hot, has a golden glow at sunset, etc. It has a 'world model', just not one at the same level as ours, and that's why is frequently makes mistakes, from our pov.
- akasakahakada 4y agoAnd surely human do not know what is Sun or what is warm. What human know is electricity spikes come from eyes and skin.
- jacknews 4y agoExactly, the 'sensors' are just at different levels between these models (abstract text) and humans (retinal cones firing, etc).
- akasakahakada 4y agoThe idea that 0101 electricity cannot create complex thing is same as saying that H and O and physical forces cannot create complex structure like H2O. I never understood the rationale behind this argument.
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- wruza 4y agoThe standard argument against the chinese room is that if the 'symbols' are at lower level, audio, video stimuli, and you have enough scale, then you can imagine intelligence, emerging somehow. Qualian chauvinism. The ‘observer’ field doesn’t have to be locally or real-ly connected. E.g. a current is real, but it doesn’t flow through a real-connected surface. Chinese room is conscious and intelligent by definition if the above is true, just not human-like conscious and intelligent. The juice of this question is that we may want to determine it in a practical binary sense, when there may be a spectrum or an entire space of it. Sadly it can all boil down to a boring “shut up and interact” principle again.