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I enjoy antirez's work, and I enjoyed this essay, but I disagree with many of its conclusions. In particular: > this goal forces the model to create some form

I enjoy antirez's work, and I enjoyed this essay, but I disagree with many of its conclusions. In particular: > this goal forces the model to create some form of abstract model. This model is weak, patchy, and imperfect, but it must exist if we observe what we observe. Is a completely fallacious line of reasoning, and I'm surprised that he draws this conclusion. The whole reason the "problem of other minds" is still a problem in philosophy is precisely because we cannot be certain that some "abstract model" exists in someone's head (man or machine, do you argue it does? show it to me) simply because an output meeting certain constraints exists. This is exactly the problem of education. A student that studies to answer questions correctly on a test may not have an abstract model of the subject area at all. Even they may not be conducting what we call reasoning. If a student aces a test, can you confidently say they actually understand a domain? Or did they simply ace a test? Furthermore, LLM's lack of consistency and inability to answer basic mathematical questions, and their limitation to purely text based areas of concern and representation are all much stronger arguments for siding with the notion that they really are just sophisticated, stochastic, machines, incapable of what we'd normally call reason in a human context. If LLM's "reason" it is a much different form of reasoning than that which human beings are capable of, and I'm highly skeptical that any such network will achieve parity to human reason until it can "grow up" and learn embodied in a rich, multi sensory environment, just like human beings. For machines to achieve reason, they will need to break out of the text-only/digital-only box first.

antirez 3y ago
> is still a problem in philosophy Exactly! This is why I removed this fundamental questions from my post: in this moment they don't have any clear reply and will basically make an already complex landscape even more complex. I believe that right now, whatever is happening inside LLMs, we need to focus on investigating the practical level of their "reasoning" abilities. They are very different objects than human brains, but they can do certain limited tasks that before LLMs we thought to be completely in the domain of humans. We know that LLMs are just very complex functions interpolating their inputs, but this functions are so convoluted, that in practical ways they can solve problems that were, before LLMs, completely outside the reach of automatic systems. Whatever is happening inside those systems is not really important for the way they can or can't reshape our society.

antirez 3y ago

> is still a problem in philosophy Exactly! This is why I removed this fundamental questions from my post: in this moment they don't have any clear reply and will basically make an already complex landscape even more complex. I believe that right now, whatever is happening inside LLMs, we need to focus on investigating the practical level of their "reasoning" abilities. They are very different objects than human brains, but they can do certain limited tasks that before LLMs we thought to be completely in the domain of humans. We know that LLMs are just very complex functions interpolating their inputs, but this functions are so convoluted, that in practical ways they can solve problems that were, before LLMs, completely outside the reach of automatic systems. Whatever is happening inside those systems is not really important for the way they can or can't reshape our society.