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> You cannot make accurate predictions without understanding the world that gave rise to these words. I think you must either admit that chatgpt does exactly
by ineptech 3y ago
> You cannot make accurate predictions without understanding the world that gave rise to these words.
I think you must either admit that chatgpt does exactly this, or else give up our traditional connotation of "understand". Chatgpt has never seen a sunset, felt pain, fallen in love, etc, yet it can discuss them coherently; to call that understanding the world is to implicitly say that the world can be understood solely through reading about it and keeping track of which words follow which. It's amazing that generating text from statistical relationships about tokens in a corpus, which generated nonsensical-but-grammatical sentence fragments at smaller scales, can expand to concepts and essays with more compute, but it is just a difference in scale.
> I’d be careful calling it simple.
I'm not calling it simple, I'm calling us simple! I'm saying that chatgpt is proof that natural language processing is much easier than I previously thought.
- SanderNL 3y agoOk, but billions upon billions of “statistical relationships”.. I mean at some point the term “simple” loses its meaning. I get your point though. It is not pure magic.
- ineptech 3y agoYeah, "simple" as in we didn't have to make something that can learn general concepts, and then teach it language. It feels like a hack, doesn't it? Like you were working on a problem you thought was NP-hard and then you stumble over a way to do it in O(n^2).
- SanderNL 3y agoYeah, I think we get sidetracked by how it “feels” to us when we learn. We forget that is just a convenient story that our mind tells itself. We are incapable or at least severely handicapped when it comes to raw experience and the knowing of it. Somehow this approach to ML feels kind of natural to me, but it’s hard to articulate why.