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> There is no "intelligence" going on here. It's not "thinking". But it can still perform calculus by just stochastically emulating how average text on the inte

> There is no "intelligence" going on here. It's not "thinking". But it can still perform calculus by just stochastically emulating how average text on the internet looks. It always annoys me when people say this, I’ll try to explain why. There are two possible definitions of “intelligence” you could use here; the ability to process information to get something done, and something hand-wavy about human consciousness. GPT-4 clearly has some ability to process information to get something done. You might say that by this definition [insert trivial thing] is intelligent, but it doesn’t have to be a binary thing of intelligent or not. I think it’s fine to say maybe a calculator has very low intelligence (but not necessarily nothing), GPT-4 is more intelligent than that and humans are much more intelligent again. GPT-4 has many limitations compared to humans, but I think that just makes it less intelligent, rather than disqualifying it from having intelligence at all. Sure, it’s just predicting text, but that’s a task that requires a level of intelligence. You might say it’s not general like humans, but I’d say it has a much better ability to generalise than something like an image labelling AI, so that feels like it’s at least getting somewhere. The second definition is useless for practical purposes because it’s not measurable or observable in any way, so it’s not useful to use that. So I feel like this is something people say to reassure themselves that it can never get to human level, and is fundamentally different to human intelligence, whereas I think it’s somewhat similar but at a lower level.

fhd2 3y ago
Yeah, it's just arguing semantics. We do need better vocabulary and stop it with the anthromorphism IMHO. Intelligence is already ambiguous in humans, see IQ tests. It's just not linear, much less binary. Whether something is deterministic or stochastic and what the error rate for a specific task is, those are more useful questions to me.
larryfreeman 3y ago
I suspect that there is something else going on than intelligence which will become obvious over the next few years. There was a horse, "Clever Hans" who appeared to have the ability to answer surprisingly complicated mathematical questions. Did "Clever Hans" have mathematical intelligence. Not at all. He was responding to a cue unknowingly being given by his trainer. I suspect the same thing is happening with ChatGPT. What if all that is happening is that the text is being formulated to very complicated cues that are implicit in the very complicated, statistical analysis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
- H8crilA 3y ago
  Clever Hans is just a proxy. ChatGPT and other LLMs obviously can process information on their own. These two have nothing in common, even GPT-3 would have noticed this.
  - larryfreeman 3y ago
    Let us disagree on what is "obvious". Given an input and an output, you believe that the complexity of the output proves that intelligence takes place. I agree that ChatGPT is more than a proxy. Unlike Clever Hans, it is processing the content of the question asked. But it is like Clever Hans in that the query is processed by looking for a signal in the content of the data used to train ChatGPT. The real question is where this intelligent behavior comes from? Why does statistical processing lead to these insights? I believe that the processing is not intelligent primarily because I see that holes in the data available leads to holes in reasoning. The processing is only as good as the dynamics of the content that it being processed. This is the part that I believe will become obvious over time.
    - H8crilA 3y ago
      I just said that they process information on their own, and this is indeed obvious - you can download and run LLaMA on an airgapped machine.
      - larryfreeman 3y ago
        Agreed. LLMs process information on their own. I thought you were saying it was "obvious" that the processing demonstrated intelligence. My point was the level of intelligence shown is relative the quality and quantity of the data used for training. The data is where the intelligence is and the model is a compression of that latent intelligence.
- gwd 3y ago
  A month or so ago I was doing some analysis on our mailing list traffic. I had a complex SQL query (involving tables mapping variations of email addresses to names, and then names to companies they worked for within specific date ranges), that I'd last modified a year previously (the last time I was doing the same sort of analysis), and didn't feel like wrapping my head around the SQL again; so I pasted it into GPT-4 and asked it, "Can you modify this query to group all individuals with less than 1% total contributions into a single 'Other' category?" The query it spat out worked out of the box. Whatever it's doing, at least for code, it's not a glorified Markov chain -- there's some sort of a model in there.
deleted 3y ago
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fhd2 3y ago

Yeah, it's just arguing semantics. We do need better vocabulary and stop it with the anthromorphism IMHO. Intelligence is already ambiguous in humans, see IQ tests. It's just not linear, much less binary. Whether something is deterministic or stochastic and what the error rate for a specific task is, those are more useful questions to me.

larryfreeman 3y ago

I suspect that there is something else going on than intelligence which will become obvious over the next few years. There was a horse, "Clever Hans" who appeared to have the ability to answer surprisingly complicated mathematical questions. Did "Clever Hans" have mathematical intelligence. Not at all. He was responding to a cue unknowingly being given by his trainer. I suspect the same thing is happening with ChatGPT. What if all that is happening is that the text is being formulated to very complicated cues that are implicit in the very complicated, statistical analysis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

H8crilA 3y ago
Clever Hans is just a proxy. ChatGPT and other LLMs obviously can process information on their own. These two have nothing in common, even GPT-3 would have noticed this.
- larryfreeman 3y ago
  Let us disagree on what is "obvious". Given an input and an output, you believe that the complexity of the output proves that intelligence takes place. I agree that ChatGPT is more than a proxy. Unlike Clever Hans, it is processing the content of the question asked. But it is like Clever Hans in that the query is processed by looking for a signal in the content of the data used to train ChatGPT. The real question is where this intelligent behavior comes from? Why does statistical processing lead to these insights? I believe that the processing is not intelligent primarily because I see that holes in the data available leads to holes in reasoning. The processing is only as good as the dynamics of the content that it being processed. This is the part that I believe will become obvious over time.
  - H8crilA 3y ago
    I just said that they process information on their own, and this is indeed obvious - you can download and run LLaMA on an airgapped machine.
    - larryfreeman 3y ago
      Agreed. LLMs process information on their own. I thought you were saying it was "obvious" that the processing demonstrated intelligence. My point was the level of intelligence shown is relative the quality and quantity of the data used for training. The data is where the intelligence is and the model is a compression of that latent intelligence.
gwd 3y ago
A month or so ago I was doing some analysis on our mailing list traffic. I had a complex SQL query (involving tables mapping variations of email addresses to names, and then names to companies they worked for within specific date ranges), that I'd last modified a year previously (the last time I was doing the same sort of analysis), and didn't feel like wrapping my head around the SQL again; so I pasted it into GPT-4 and asked it, "Can you modify this query to group all individuals with less than 1% total contributions into a single 'Other' category?" The query it spat out worked out of the box. Whatever it's doing, at least for code, it's not a glorified Markov chain -- there's some sort of a model in there.

deleted 3y ago

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