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Very interesting, but this blog's conclusion misses the point though.. The fantastic part is its ability to work at the concept level. This technology proved t
by bsaul 3y ago
Very interesting, but this blog's conclusion misses the point though..
The fantastic part is its ability to work at the concept level. This technology proved to be efficient at building some graph of concepts and relations simply be feeding it huge amounts of token. For example with the moon hoax, it is able to synthesize in two sentences the main points of the hoax theory.
It still has limitations, but that's the major step everyone is impressed with.
Saying "but it's just a markov chain underneath, it's not intelligence" would be like discovering electric signals in the brain and concluding it can't be intelligence because it's just electricity.
- IIAOPSW 3y agoThere's people out there that actively do this, though its mostly traditional belief in a soul laundered through modern academic phrasing.
- somewhereoutth 3y agoIt works at the level of patterns in the training corpus. That those patterns might correlate somewhat with underlying real concepts should be no great surprise - but it is not 'working' at that level.
- diablozzq 3y agoThis describes humans in a nutshell. This is why people vary wildly in ability... But we consider humans intelligent.
- mahathu 3y ago>This describes humans in a nutshell. This is why people vary wildly in ability... Can you expand on that a little?
- Sunhold 3y agoMore than 80% of college students get the following question wrong.[1] I'd say this is an example of naive pattern matching with no real reasoning. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable? a) Linda is a bank teller. b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy
- andsoitis 3y ago> I'd say this is an example of naive pattern matching with no real reasoning. It is an example of lack of mathematical (really probability) know how, not naïve pattern matching.
- bsaul 3y agoI'd say it's an example of misphrased questions that people will intuitively make sense of, and thus produce strictly incorrect answer. Obviously, people rephrase the question into : is there more chance that she's a feminist or that she isn't ?
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoWell, it's multiple-choice. So the "a" answer excludes the "b" answer by convention, and thus implies she isn't a feminist. Rephrase the question to remove that implication and I expect far more people will pick the "a" answer.
- qayxc 3y agoI'd say this is the very definition of "overthinking it" instead of pattern matching. Pattern matching would lead you straight to the correct answer - joint probability is always ≤ single probability. Meaning the information given in the question is just fluff. Pattern matching reduces to "Which is more probable: just A or else A ^ B?" at which point the correct answer becomes obvious.
- somewhereoutth 3y agoNo, no it doesn't. Not even slightly. If you fed a human child only text from the internet you'd not produce a competent adult (by competent I mean able to feed themselves etc). That some tech people think that human intelligence can be reduced to such "textural mechanics" betrays a lack of depth of understanding and even appreciation of the deep and complex world within which we find ourselves. Our written corpus is but a particular reflection of this reality - the shadows on the wall in Plato's cave if you will.
- darkerside 3y agoFeed themselves? You mean pick up a burger from the local McDonald's? There's got to be a better Turing test.
- kqr 3y agoAre you making the argument that children do not come with an innate ability to read text and thus cannot learn from it, or are you making the argument that the internet does not contain, among other things, fairly detailed instructions on various ways to feed oneself?
- somewhereoutth 3y agoI'm saying that without the context of experiencing the underlying reality, text of itself is meaningless. What is a 'spoon' anyway??
- kqr 3y agoSo you're saying one needs some sort of reference for which words refer to which real-world sensory experiences such as "the thing that looks like this is a spoon", and text models do not have sensory associations?
- z7 3y agoIsn't "meaning" just how a word is used within a specific context? I think that was one of Wittgenstein's points. The word "dog" doesn't need to reference the underlying reality to have meaning. Its meaning emerges from its usage in relation to all other words. Language isn't a mirror of the external world, which is probably one of the reasons LLMs are so successful.
- School-Cotton 3y agoHow do you know?
- somewhereoutth 3y agoBecause that is all there is. By conservation of information you can't get out more than what you put in. If it were interacting with the real world in some way (i.e. had 'eyes' and 'hands'), with a learning reward system, then maybe deeper patterns could get encoded.
- thumbuddy 3y agoDon't you dare start bringing reality and applying theory to these matters! - someone somewhere
- School-Cotton 3y agoThat sounds like nonsense. What is “conservation of information”; can you define it precisely?
- rifty 3y agoThis might not be fully convincing or rigorous, but here is one of the interactions i've had which make me lean towards patterns not concepts... I have some unique synonyms I know which are not in dictionaries or commonly used but I know when I have used them in conversation they understand. I ask the LLM to provide definitions for WordA and WordB. -They come back essentially the same. I ask the LLM if the two definitions are synonymous. -The LLM responds with yes. I then ask if WordA is synonymous with WordB. -It replies no. To me through this and other interactions they don't actually conceptually hold things like the definition as the word. It responds DefinitionA is WordAs definition, it responds DefinitionB is WordBs definition. It follows that DefinitionA of WordA is synonymous with DefinitionB of WordB but not that WordA is synonymous with WordB... I expect the above is solvable through pattern recognition with tokens. I think given enough information it becomes effectively indistinguishable and practically the same to us. The above is just a testament to how it is getting there... Since it delivers intellect it will be called intelligent, but it doesn't appear to me to be approaching it like human intelligence. Though maybe given enough information, or through different modalities, like the real world as the other commenter says, it will model some deeper coherency.
- namaria 3y agoI find this debate fascinating, and I'm excited for more people realizing that a) We have a very, very blurry definition of intelligence, and b) As more people get convinced there is some intelligence in software, more people get convinced there is (or there might be) intelligence in animals. Whatever the bottom line on current LLMs is, the cultural change they might foster makes me smile.
- _xnmw 3y agoI would say you are missing the point. Intelligence isn't just about being able produce sentences. I would say that dogs are intelligent, but LLMs are not.
- weebull 3y agoThe ability to speak does not make you intelligent. -- Some silly movie
- bsaul 3y agoproducing sentence wasn't what i referring to. Producing meaningful sentence was. Dogs have behavior, which hints at them understanding some concepts (threat, food, etc). LLVM neural nets can only express sentences, but that's not the interesting part.
- circuit10 3y agoThey both have some form of intelligence but in different tasks
- anothernewdude 3y ago> Saying "but it's just a markov chain underneath, it's not intelligence" would be like discovering electric signals in the brain and concluding it can't be intelligence because it's just electricity. What a terrible analogy. It would be like finding the brain is run by entirely random sampling processes and lacks any memory.
- circuit10 3y agoThat wouldn’t make us not intelligent any more, it would mean that the brain is able to work really well within those limitations
- strogonoff 3y agoLLM does not manipulate concepts, it only manipulates symbols/tokens. Its manipulation of concepts is a product of human imagination and anthropomorphism that we like to imbue everything around with. Concluding that electric signals in the brain can't be intelligence because it's just electricity is a typical pitfall if one does not realize that electric signals in the brain are about as likely to be caused by intelligence as they are to be causing it. Those signals is just one model offered by physics nowadays, which says nothing about the causal direction between those and things like consciousness.
- flangola7 3y ago> LLM does not manipulate concepts, it only manipulates symbols/tokens. Its manipulation of concepts is a product of human imagination and anthropomorphism that we like to imbue everything around with. Do you have proof of this? Who is to say we aren't anthropomorphizing other humans? They're just manipulating electrical charges after all. Phrased another way, if LLMs actually did manipulate concepts, how would their performance differ? What is a tangible example of the former and of the latter?
- strogonoff 3y agoWe know this because we built the LLM and we know exactly how it works.