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Of course it counts for something, but if I can vent another frustration, it is possible for GPT to be a useful tool for some tasks or for it to do impressive t

Of course it counts for something, but if I can vent another frustration, it is possible for GPT to be a useful tool for some tasks or for it to do impressive things or for it to exhibit really interesting behavior without it being comparable to a human being. I think the comparisons between GPT and humans and the common insistence I see on HN that GPT does understand the world in the same way that humans do is both reductive and unimaginative. It's reductive in the sense that it oversimplifies human behavior and reasoning, and its unimaginative in the sense that it seems to be stemming from this idea that GPT's behavior only "counts for something" if it can be compared to a human being. If GPT is playing chess at 1800 elo without understanding the rules, that is fundamentally interesting and it extremely "counts for something." It doesn't become less interesting if we say that GPT doesn't understand the rules of chess, if anything it becomes more interesting. It is extremely interesting that it appears at least at first glance like GPT might be able to get decent human-level performance at a game using a set of heuristics that may not be based on the rules of the game. That is very different from how humans approach tasks, and seeing an extremely different approach to reasoning that yields decent or at least decent-ish results is fascinating. Forcing it into a human framework and pushing the idea that GPT is understanding the game like a human -- it's honestly kind of limiting, it's closing off a lot of interesting discussion about non-human approaches to accomplishing goals. There is (in general, not saying from you specifically) an attitude on HN that pointing out that LLMs are not like humans and that they don't approach reasoning the same way and that they very often aren't reasoning about tasks in a way that maps to commonly used definitions of human reasoning -- that it means that LLMs are useless or they don't count for anything. But that's just not the case. Clearly the LLM is doing something interesting, is it so important that we claim that it understands the task the same way that a human does? Is it really a problem if we acknowledge that there is a lot of evidence that LLMs are accomplishing tasks using orthogonal approaches that don't map to human understanding? That doesn't make them any less interesting.

famouswaffles 3y ago
Apparently I massively misremembered the move rate. 5 (potentially less) illegal moves in 8205. So 1 in ~1650. Uh..oops. https://github.com/adamkarvonen/chess_gpt_eval https://github.com/adamkarvonen/chess_gpt_eval A plane is comparable to a bird because they both fly even if they do it very differently. Replace plane with bee and it's the same thing. GPT is obviously comparable to a human regardless of how similar whatever internal processes it uses are. I've never once said GPT was playing chess exactly the same way as a human. I wouldn't know. It is playing it though and it does understand the game.
- danShumway 3y ago
  > A plane is comparable to a bird because they both fly even if they do it very differently. Replace plane with bee and it's the same thing. I think this is exactly where we're differing. I would not say that a bird and a plane should be compared in that way. Definitely not a bird and a bee. They don't even have the same number of wings, the mechanisms and capabilities diverge very quickly. The outcome is similar, but the methodology is extremely different, and that difference in methodology matters because it allows us to make predictions and to reason about when the output between the two systems is going to subtly differ -- which it does, GPT and humans don't perform identically on all tasks and we don't struggle at the same things. There are things birds can do while flying that planes can't do, and vice-versa. I think you're setting yourself up for failure if you engage with a system only looking at its outputs and not considering how its processes influence those outputs. > I've never once said GPT was playing chess exactly the same way as a human. I wouldn't know. My assertion is, you should know. You don't have to know exactly how GPT works or how humans work to look at both and say, "huh, these things exhibit very different strengths and weaknesses, and those strengths and weaknesses fit into consistent patterns, almost as if they're using separate strategies to accomplish tasks." If you look at a bee and an airplane both flying, you don't have to know how either of them fly to realize that they aren't flying the same way.

famouswaffles 3y ago

Apparently I massively misremembered the move rate. 5 (potentially less) illegal moves in 8205. So 1 in ~1650. Uh..oops. https://github.com/adamkarvonen/chess_gpt_eval https://github.com/adamkarvonen/chess_gpt_eval A plane is comparable to a bird because they both fly even if they do it very differently. Replace plane with bee and it's the same thing. GPT is obviously comparable to a human regardless of how similar whatever internal processes it uses are. I've never once said GPT was playing chess exactly the same way as a human. I wouldn't know. It is playing it though and it does understand the game.

danShumway 3y ago
> A plane is comparable to a bird because they both fly even if they do it very differently. Replace plane with bee and it's the same thing. I think this is exactly where we're differing. I would not say that a bird and a plane should be compared in that way. Definitely not a bird and a bee. They don't even have the same number of wings, the mechanisms and capabilities diverge very quickly. The outcome is similar, but the methodology is extremely different, and that difference in methodology matters because it allows us to make predictions and to reason about when the output between the two systems is going to subtly differ -- which it does, GPT and humans don't perform identically on all tasks and we don't struggle at the same things. There are things birds can do while flying that planes can't do, and vice-versa. I think you're setting yourself up for failure if you engage with a system only looking at its outputs and not considering how its processes influence those outputs. > I've never once said GPT was playing chess exactly the same way as a human. I wouldn't know. My assertion is, you should know. You don't have to know exactly how GPT works or how humans work to look at both and say, "huh, these things exhibit very different strengths and weaknesses, and those strengths and weaknesses fit into consistent patterns, almost as if they're using separate strategies to accomplish tasks." If you look at a bee and an airplane both flying, you don't have to know how either of them fly to realize that they aren't flying the same way.