4 ms·
It doesn't reason, it produces output that better conforms to your expectations of a reasoning actor.
by ttpphd 4y ago
It doesn't reason, it produces output that better conforms to your expectations of a reasoning actor.
- PopePompus 4y agoThe models are showing emergent behavior. You can't say with certainty that they aren't able to reason, just because they were not designed to do so.
- ttpphd 4y agoI can confidently say that you do not have a theory of rationality which explains the workings of an LLM.
- PopePompus 4y agoOn that point we agree.
- SanderNL 4y agoIf it quacks like a duck.. Really, if it always produces output that conforms to "expectations of a reasoning actor", isn't that defacto a "reasoning actor"? What's the use of making the distinction?
- ttpphd 4y agoBecause of all the ways in which it's obviously not a reasoning actor, starting from the design of the system, and all the ways in which it is literally engineered, by design, to output text that sounds like a human wrote it, based on consuming the Internet.
- SanderNL 4y agoIn all ways except .. its output? Which is the only thing that matters? What if you were engineered? Would that invalidate your abilities? I apologize for being difficult.
- DonaldPShimoda 4y ago> In all ways except .. its output? Which is the only thing that matters? Who decided that this was the only thing that matters? The thing that concerns me isn't that it answers questions in a way that resembles a human. What concerns me is that some people think it thinks like a human, which it does not, and writing about it in an anthropomorphic way exacerbates this problem. The issue at hand is not the observable output of the system, but the way in which the system works — which we have knowledge of. It's not magic, it's not emergent, it's not sentient, and it's certainly not intelligent. It's a (very fancy and impressive!) predictive text system. Imbuing it with extra properties is disingenuous.
- ttpphd 4y agoMy rationality and agency is not a question of you interpreting the words and letters that appear in a textbox on a screen. The same is not true of a large language model. You do not have a rigorous theory of rationality and agency with which to interrogate a large language model.