4 ms·

Wonder where the goalposts will be moved now by the "stochastic parrot" parroters.

lgessler 3y ago
Idk if this work really bears on that argument. I can imagine Bender reacting to this by observing that this is a clever way of finding the needle (a good heuristic algorithm for an NP hard problem) in a haystack (millions of other heuristic algorithms that are bad, very bad, or maybe not even syntactically well-formed), and then saying that the fact that the model still produced so much garbage is proof that the LLM still doesn't really know how to reason or access meaning. And I think that'd be a good argument. OTOH, this system is not just an LLM, but an LLM and a bunch of additional components on top of it, and there might be different things to say about this system considered as a whole.
- airstrike 3y ago
  We don't need LLMs to reason or to access meaning for them to be useful
  - lgessler 3y ago
    Sure, but I don't think even Bender or Marcus would deny their potential for practical utility, right? I think they mean to say that LLMs are not exactly as miraculous as they might seem, and very capable of misbehavior.
    - cbb330 3y ago
      your mind also conjectures many unreasonable and illogical solutions to things. then separately your mind has an "evaluator" to deduce a set of solutions down to things that make sense. Is anyone saying LLMs in isolation and without contextual tooling are miraculous? Even the text box for chatGPT is a form of wrapping LLM in a UX that is incrementally more miraculous.
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      Bender and Marcus don’t get to decide what can be useful for people. LLMs are useful, although their imperfections limit their usefulness. But the bar for usefulness is a lot lower than “perfection”.
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  I'm not sure why people always want to consider the LLM in isolation. Like if someone built an apparently fully sentient android which completely mimics the behavior of a sentient human in every respect, but it was comprised of a bunch of LLMs and other systems wired together, would you say that it's not intelligent because the LLMs aren't fully sentient?
marmakoide 3y ago
A stochastic parrot used to generate variation of a program, to do hill climbing on programs. The magician lose some its charm when you know his trick. The Earth used to be the center of the universe, now it's circling an average star. Intelligence used to be a sacred mystical thing, we might be in our way to make it less sacred.

Idk if this work really bears on that argument. I can imagine Bender reacting to this by observing that this is a clever way of finding the needle (a good heuristic algorithm for an NP hard problem) in a haystack (millions of other heuristic algorithms that are bad, very bad, or maybe not even syntactically well-formed), and then saying that the fact that the model still produced so much garbage is proof that the LLM still doesn't really know how to reason or access meaning. And I think that'd be a good argument. OTOH, this system is not just an LLM, but an LLM and a bunch of additional components on top of it, and there might be different things to say about this system considered as a whole.

airstrike 3y ago
We don't need LLMs to reason or to access meaning for them to be useful
- lgessler 3y ago
  Sure, but I don't think even Bender or Marcus would deny their potential for practical utility, right? I think they mean to say that LLMs are not exactly as miraculous as they might seem, and very capable of misbehavior.
  - cbb330 3y ago
    your mind also conjectures many unreasonable and illogical solutions to things. then separately your mind has an "evaluator" to deduce a set of solutions down to things that make sense. Is anyone saying LLMs in isolation and without contextual tooling are miraculous? Even the text box for chatGPT is a form of wrapping LLM in a UX that is incrementally more miraculous.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    Bender and Marcus don’t get to decide what can be useful for people. LLMs are useful, although their imperfections limit their usefulness. But the bar for usefulness is a lot lower than “perfection”.
empath-nirvana 3y ago
I'm not sure why people always want to consider the LLM in isolation. Like if someone built an apparently fully sentient android which completely mimics the behavior of a sentient human in every respect, but it was comprised of a bunch of LLMs and other systems wired together, would you say that it's not intelligent because the LLMs aren't fully sentient?

marmakoide 3y ago

A stochastic parrot used to generate variation of a program, to do hill climbing on programs. The magician lose some its charm when you know his trick. The Earth used to be the center of the universe, now it's circling an average star. Intelligence used to be a sacred mystical thing, we might be in our way to make it less sacred.