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Why has the term grokking been formalized like this? Honest question. Why can't we stick with normal words like "learning" or "understanding"? It just seems lik
by Solvency 3y ago
Why has the term grokking been formalized like this? Honest question. Why can't we stick with normal words like "learning" or "understanding"? It just seems like a slow creep of needless semantic complexity in an already esoteric and niche space.
- dkarl 3y agoI'm going to guess that in AI those terms have been so cheapened by now that they are useless.
- urthor 3y agoBecause if you've spent 80 hours a week researching, you want some fun in the 85th hour of your work week spent writing the research up.
- twic 3y agoA stronger hypothesis: the main goal of most AI researchers is to make other AI researchers think they are cool, and using a word from classic science fiction helps do that.
- bmacho 3y agoThat seems obviously false to me, according to what I know about people in general, and researchers in general.
- tomrod 3y agoGrokking comes from Heinlein, and it is more than a synonym for both of those words. Good intro here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok
- ska 3y agoThe term "grokking" has been used for something like "deep understanding" for many decades now, after it's introduction in an early 1960's novel. Perhaps not falling into completely general use, but popular within a large swath of technical communities, certainly. I'm not sure it's particularly well targeted here, but they are going for something deeper than "learning" which already has a standard usage in the field.
- joe_the_user 3y agoBut this paper isn't using "Grok" in that standard slang fashion but in a very specific fashion, which I think the gp can reasonably complain about.
- ryanklee 3y agoHow would using common words suggested by ggp avoid this issue? It's a usual occurrence for terms of art to be repurposed words having somewhat related usages elsewhere. It all sounds like an empty complaint.
- boyka 3y agoGrokking in ML has been around for quite a while. First heard the term being used at a conference in 2017.
- chaxor 3y agoThe term classifies a different type of characteristic of the learning trajectory, so just using 'learning' would be missing that distinction. There needs to be a separate term for 'long stretch of epochs for which there is a large, almost perfect, separation between train and test accuracy' ... and I would hate to write that over and over again, so there's a single term for it. In some respects, it's maybe problematic for causing a namespace conflict for grokking in this sense, vs grokking in the more 'normal, human' sense.
- billfruit 3y agoOr 'comprehension'.
- breck 3y agoCalling these spikes "epiphanies" might be a better term. I think grok is nice b/c it's only 4 letters.
- mellosouls 3y agoIt's also problematic because it implies a subjective "feeling" that we associate with sentience (a property of AGI) - not AI systems.
- j16sdiz 3y agobecause, in highly technical research area, there are zillons of somewhat similar effects. Some are interesting, some are not. They need a word for each interesting effect. Sometimes they make up new words, sometime they reuse a rarely used word
- avgcorrection 3y agoYeah, this gratuitous use of fancy words induces cognitive load for me.