4 ms·

You kind of proved my point. Of course the "finger situation" is getting better but people handling complex objects is still where these tools trip. They can't

You kind of proved my point. Of course the "finger situation" is getting better but people handling complex objects is still where these tools trip. They can't reason about it - they just need to see enough data of people handling books. On a bus. Now do this for ALL possible objects in the world. I have generated hundreds of these - the bus cabin LOOKS like a bus cabin, but it's a plausible fake - the poles abruptly terminate, the seats are in weird unrealistic configurations, unnatural single-row isles, etc. Which is why I called it a super-convincing autocomplete.

mr_toad 3y ago
Put a brain in a jar and expose it only to photos and you’d get the same results. It’s hard to learn what holding a book is like if you’ve never held anything.
- godelski 3y ago
  I'm not sure I see the utility of this "thought experiment." It's not really provable and not even possible to do. Not to mention highly unethical. I mean just make the embodiment argument instead. But we don't know if embodiment is necessary, or even what kind of body is even necessary.
godelski 3y ago
> You kind of proved my point. Yeah I did say you were more right. But it was difficult to distinguish exaggeration from actual intent. You can check my comment history of me battling the common ML mindset. I love the area of study (I'm a researcher myself) but there's a lot of problems that even in the research community a lot want to ignore. It's odd to me. It's been hilarious to watch big names claim Sora understands physics. Or people think just because it doesn't understand physics that the videos aren't still impressive and even useful. But with how you updated your language, I think we are in a very high level of agreement. You are perfectly right: no ML model "understands" anything. GPT doesn't understand how to code and image models don't understand how to... art(?) or do physics or whatever. They don't have world models. And I'm deeply frustrated that people think a single example of a accurately acting like a world model is proof and will do gymnastics to say a single counter example isn't. A single counter does disprove a world model and to understand you need to be able to self-correct. Hallucinations are fine but "are you sure?" should be enough to get it to reconsider, not double down or just switch. We can be fooled with setups, but we laugh at ourselves quickly because we self-correct fairly easily (or rather, we can).
naasking 3y ago
> They can't reason about it - they just need to see enough data of people handling books. I'd like to see you reason about something before you've seen any data about it. What a silly argument. LLMs understand the world as presented to them via the training data, and the training data to date has been biased in unnatural ways and so sometimes produces unnatural results. That does not prove they cannot reason, it proves that they cannot reason in a vacuum, and neither can people.

mr_toad 3y ago

Put a brain in a jar and expose it only to photos and you’d get the same results. It’s hard to learn what holding a book is like if you’ve never held anything.

godelski 3y ago
I'm not sure I see the utility of this "thought experiment." It's not really provable and not even possible to do. Not to mention highly unethical. I mean just make the embodiment argument instead. But we don't know if embodiment is necessary, or even what kind of body is even necessary.

godelski 3y ago

> You kind of proved my point. Yeah I did say you were more right. But it was difficult to distinguish exaggeration from actual intent. You can check my comment history of me battling the common ML mindset. I love the area of study (I'm a researcher myself) but there's a lot of problems that even in the research community a lot want to ignore. It's odd to me. It's been hilarious to watch big names claim Sora understands physics. Or people think just because it doesn't understand physics that the videos aren't still impressive and even useful. But with how you updated your language, I think we are in a very high level of agreement. You are perfectly right: no ML model "understands" anything. GPT doesn't understand how to code and image models don't understand how to... art(?) or do physics or whatever. They don't have world models. And I'm deeply frustrated that people think a single example of a accurately acting like a world model is proof and will do gymnastics to say a single counter example isn't. A single counter does disprove a world model and to understand you need to be able to self-correct. Hallucinations are fine but "are you sure?" should be enough to get it to reconsider, not double down or just switch. We can be fooled with setups, but we laugh at ourselves quickly because we self-correct fairly easily (or rather, we can).

naasking 3y ago

> They can't reason about it - they just need to see enough data of people handling books. I'd like to see you reason about something before you've seen any data about it. What a silly argument. LLMs understand the world as presented to them via the training data, and the training data to date has been biased in unnatural ways and so sometimes produces unnatural results. That does not prove they cannot reason, it proves that they cannot reason in a vacuum, and neither can people.