4 ms·
> LLM are not intelligence because they're just statistical models This is exactly it for me.
by sublinear 3y ago
> LLM are not intelligence because they're just statistical models
This is exactly it for me.
- xigency 3y agoAre you intelligent or just a bunch of cells? Given that I can query it for all sorts of information that I don’t know, I would consider LLMs to, at the very least, contain and present intelligence…artificially.
- vel0city 3y agoI can query Wikipedia or IMDB for all sorts of information I don't know. I wouldn't consider the search box of either site to be "intelligent", so I don't know "query it for all sorts of information" is a generally good rubric for intelligence.
- ericd 3y agoAnd if your brain is mostly a statistical model of the world, with action probabilities based on what parts of it happen to be excited at the moment?
- jmopp 3y agoHow do we know that the brain is a statistical model of the world? It sounds like explaining an unknown phenomenon using the technology du jour - just 10/20 years ago, the brain was a computer.
- JohnFen 3y agoThis touches on a dichotomy that has fascinated me for decades, from the very beginning of my interest in AI. One side of the dichotomy asserts that "if it walks like a duck..." that is, if a computer appears to be intelligent to us, then it must be intelligent. This is basically the Turing Test crowd (even though Turing himself didn't approve of the Turing Test as an actual test of AI). On the other side, you have people who assert that the human mind is really just a super-complicated version of "X", where "X" is whatever the cool new tech of the day is. I have no conclusions to draw from this sort of thing, aside from highlighting that we don't know what intelligence or consciousness actually are. I'm just fascinated by it.
- sublinear 3y agoThe general notion is called "lumpers" and "splitters". From the perspective of software, the lumpers are pretty much always wrong except for when they get a lucky guess. Think of a pointy-haired boss who weaponizes his wishful thinking with a brutal dismissal of all implementation details and imposes ignorantly firm deadlines, or an architecture astronaut who writes and forces upon everyone cruel interfaces and classes that are thoroughly out of touch with reality. As they say: "it's more easy to lump splits than split lumps". The people who insist the statistical models have emergent behavior, or even worse, equate them with human brains are "lumpers" who lack imagination and have no desire to truly understand and model these things. They naively seek out oversimplifications and falsely believe they're applying Occam's Razor, but they're actually just morons. "Splitters" are by their very definition always technically correct, but create complex distinctions that either represent much deeper knowledge than necessary, or hallucination. Either way, both types are needed, and of course, society values the lumpers far more for essentially playing the lottery with their reputations by telling people what they want to hear. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters
- pixl97 3y agoSo conversely, is the brain magic? And if so, if we look at the evolutionary lineage of neural networks, at which point did it become so?
- jmopp 3y agoI wouldn't say the brain is magic, just that we still don't know what consciousness and intelligence is. Could the complex emergent behaviour we call intelligence emerge from a statistical model? Maybe. Can we gain more insights on what intelligence is by studying these models? Definitely. On the other hand — Are there limits to large language models' capabilities that we haven't reached yet?
- ericd 3y agoI don’t think we know that. The point of my comment is to poke a bit at human exceptionalism. I think we’re going to see something that’s hard to deny is intelligent come out of a combination of a world model and an RL agent within the next decade. But I’m sure some will try to keep moving the goalposts.
- layer8 3y agoThe brain carries state and is self-modifying, which is something that can‘t be said about mere statistical models.
- hospitalJail 3y agoIts interesting to see what it thinks about some ideas, like I ask, what 5 companies are best at marketing. My goal here is to be hypercritical of the companies it says because they are masters at manipulation. GPT3.5 was awful and confused advertising and marketing. GPT4 was perfect (Apple, Nike, Coke, Amazon, P&G) As much as chatgpt doesnt want to give you answers because the fuzziness, it has the ability to make judgements on things like "This is the best" or "This is the worst". Ofc with bias.
- nathan_compton 3y agoDoes it have the ability or is it just generating text similar to what it has seen before? The two things are very different.
- hospitalJail 3y agoIn this examples, it likely took that those companies are often praised about their marketing in the same sentence marketing is mentioned. LLMs don't repeat text its seen before, it links words/tokens/phrases that are related. Its prediction, but the prediction isnt just copypasting a previous webpage. Have you use chatgpt yet? I wouldn't delay. Heck you are here on HN, you basically have a responsibility to test it.
- nathan_compton 3y agoI've used it extensively. GPT4 is great, but it is not intelligent. I think its really weird and also totally understandable that people think it is.