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It's a stretch to call this discovering language. It's learning the correlations between sounds, spoken words and visual features. That's a long way from learni

It's a stretch to call this discovering language. It's learning the correlations between sounds, spoken words and visual features. That's a long way from learning language.

wumbo 2y ago
I think it's fair. It discerns what sounds are important, languagey sounds. It discovered but did not understand
deleted 2y ago
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anigbrowl 2y ago
No it isn't, this is exactly what babies do.
- astromaniak 2y ago
  babies do a lot more. they have feelings. like pain, pleasure. and different verities of them. then they have a lot of things hardcoded. and they have control of their bodies and the environment. for example they quickly learn that crying helps getting what they want.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    None of which has much to do with learning language.
    - gravescale 2y ago
      A lot of a baby's language pickup is also based on what other people do in response to their attempts, linguistically and behaviourally. Read-only observation is obviously a big part of it, but it's not "exactly" the same.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Right. But that happens too with ML models during training - the model makes a prediction given training example input, which is evaluated against expected output, rinse repeat. A single example is very similar to doing something in response to a stimuli, and observing the reaction. Here it's more of predicting a reaction and getting feedback on accuracy, but that's part of our learning too - we remember things that surprise us, tune out those we can reliably predict.
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      Actually the feedback part of learning is important. There's a famous experiment with cats in baskets that demonstrated that. But AI isn't an animal so the same constraints don't necessarily apply. I think you'd have to have a particularly anti-AI & pedantic bent to complain about calling this language discovery.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Feedback, yes. Feedback from interacting with the physical reality by means of physical body with flexible appendages? Useful in general, but neither necessary nor sufficient in case of learning language. Feedback is fundamental to deep neural networks, it's how they're trained. And to be honest, all of the things 'astromaniak mentions can be simulated and made part of training data set too. While the "full experience" may turn necessary for building AGI, the amount of success the field had with LLMs indicates that it's not necessary for the model to learn language (or even to learn all languages).
  - mannykannot 2y ago
    They do, and from it they learn many other things even before language, including some non-verbal expectation of what is likely to happen next, and that they have some ability to participate in the external world. Until recently, we have not seen anything that has gained some competence in language without having these precursors.
    - cma 2y ago
      > including some non-verbal expectation of what is likely to happen next Some of that isn't learned at all (other than through evolution). A newborn will flinch back from a growing circle on a screen.
      - mannykannot 2y ago
        Indeed - a half-billion years of training since the first neurons appeared - but here I'm thinking more of the sort of understanding which leads, for example, to reactions of surprise to incongruous outcomes. https://news.mit.edu/2011/infant-cognition-0527 https://news.mit.edu/2011/infant-cognition-0527
  - growfeather 2y ago
    Ok, it’s a lot more like a boltzmann brain in Plato’s cave learning what language is with zero other external context of what reality is.
- ilayn 2y ago
  Noone knows what babies do. Anything else is speculation.
- jebarker 2y ago
  Babies don't know language. They know some words. Dogs recognize some words too associated with what they see. Have they discovered language too?
pizza 2y ago
I don’t think that you are wrong but what do you mean by language that can’t covered by p(y|x)?
- roenxi 2y ago
  I think he's wrong with the same logic. If sound, visual and meaning aren't correlated, what can language be? This looks like an elegant insight by Mr Hamilton and very much in line with my personal prediction that we're going to start encroaching on a lot of human-like AI abilities when it is usual practice to feed them video data. There is a chance that abstract concepts can't be figured out visually ... although that seems outrageously unlikely since all mathematical concepts we know of are communicated visually and audibly. If it gets more abstract than math that'll be a big shock.
  - newzisforsukas 2y ago
    > If sound, visual and meaning aren't correlated, what can language be? Ask someone with an articulation disorder. /s Still, this is super reductive. Language can be feeling, it can be taste, it can be all sorts of things that are ineffable. It is weird to me that the research into this assumes there is a baseline of repeatability somehow. At best, this is mimicry, imo.
    - simianparrot 2y ago
      What’s bizarre to me is that the entire field of “AI” research, including the LLM space, seem to be repeating the exact same mistakes of the ecosystem models of the 1920’s and later. Gross oversimplifications of reality not because that’s what is actually observed but because that’s the only way to make reality fit with the desired outcome models. It’s science done backwards which isn’t really science at all. Not that I think these models have no use cases, they’re simply being used too broadly because the people obsessed with them don’t want to admit their limitations.
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soulofmischief 2y ago
This is exactly how I taught myself to read at age 3, and by age 5 my reading comprehension was collegiate, so I don't really understand what you mean. Language is literally communication through patterns. Patterns of speech, patterns of thoughts, archetypes, it's all patterns.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Same, I could read before kindergarten just from my parents reading to me. My mom was shocked when she found out I could read, they hadn't started intentionally teaching me yet.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    I just instructed my grandmother to read the same kid's book to me over and over again each night for a few weeks and matched the phonemes to the letters. At that point I'd already had a decent grasp of language so it felt like a very natural transition. It bit me for a while later on in grade school when I took an English class and realized I didn't know anything about how language was constructed, it was all purely intuition. Formalizing language took a concerted effort on my part, and my teachers didn't understand how to translate the material... because I can't just be told things at face value, there is always a nested mass of "but why?" that must be answered or I fundamentally don't understand. Once I finally got over that hill, it was smooth sailing again. It also made learning foreign languages very hard in school, I failed both foreign language classes I took, until I again took my own time to learn the fundamentals and now it all seems to stick.
jebarker 2y ago
I missed all the replies yesterday. My point is that I don't think that learning the correlation between some words and visual concepts qualifies as discovering language. It may be that that's as far as this approach can go so it never discovers more sophisticated constructs of language. In that case it's not different to recognizing a barking dog which is surely below "language". I am not a linguist, so not sure what qualifies as "language" officially, but intuitively this falls short.

It's a stretch to call this discovering language. It's learning the correlations between sounds, spoken words and visual features. That's a long way from learning language.

wumbo 2y ago

I think it's fair. It discerns what sounds are important, languagey sounds. It discovered but did not understand

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 2y ago

No it isn't, this is exactly what babies do.

astromaniak 2y ago
babies do a lot more. they have feelings. like pain, pleasure. and different verities of them. then they have a lot of things hardcoded. and they have control of their bodies and the environment. for example they quickly learn that crying helps getting what they want.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  None of which has much to do with learning language.
  - gravescale 2y ago
    A lot of a baby's language pickup is also based on what other people do in response to their attempts, linguistically and behaviourally. Read-only observation is obviously a big part of it, but it's not "exactly" the same.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Right. But that happens too with ML models during training - the model makes a prediction given training example input, which is evaluated against expected output, rinse repeat. A single example is very similar to doing something in response to a stimuli, and observing the reaction. Here it's more of predicting a reaction and getting feedback on accuracy, but that's part of our learning too - we remember things that surprise us, tune out those we can reliably predict.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    Actually the feedback part of learning is important. There's a famous experiment with cats in baskets that demonstrated that. But AI isn't an animal so the same constraints don't necessarily apply. I think you'd have to have a particularly anti-AI & pedantic bent to complain about calling this language discovery.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Feedback, yes. Feedback from interacting with the physical reality by means of physical body with flexible appendages? Useful in general, but neither necessary nor sufficient in case of learning language. Feedback is fundamental to deep neural networks, it's how they're trained. And to be honest, all of the things 'astromaniak mentions can be simulated and made part of training data set too. While the "full experience" may turn necessary for building AGI, the amount of success the field had with LLMs indicates that it's not necessary for the model to learn language (or even to learn all languages).
- mannykannot 2y ago
  They do, and from it they learn many other things even before language, including some non-verbal expectation of what is likely to happen next, and that they have some ability to participate in the external world. Until recently, we have not seen anything that has gained some competence in language without having these precursors.
  - cma 2y ago
    > including some non-verbal expectation of what is likely to happen next Some of that isn't learned at all (other than through evolution). A newborn will flinch back from a growing circle on a screen.
    - mannykannot 2y ago
      Indeed - a half-billion years of training since the first neurons appeared - but here I'm thinking more of the sort of understanding which leads, for example, to reactions of surprise to incongruous outcomes. https://news.mit.edu/2011/infant-cognition-0527 https://news.mit.edu/2011/infant-cognition-0527
- growfeather 2y ago
  Ok, it’s a lot more like a boltzmann brain in Plato’s cave learning what language is with zero other external context of what reality is.
ilayn 2y ago
Noone knows what babies do. Anything else is speculation.
jebarker 2y ago
Babies don't know language. They know some words. Dogs recognize some words too associated with what they see. Have they discovered language too?

pizza 2y ago

I don’t think that you are wrong but what do you mean by language that can’t covered by p(y|x)?

roenxi 2y ago
I think he's wrong with the same logic. If sound, visual and meaning aren't correlated, what can language be? This looks like an elegant insight by Mr Hamilton and very much in line with my personal prediction that we're going to start encroaching on a lot of human-like AI abilities when it is usual practice to feed them video data. There is a chance that abstract concepts can't be figured out visually ... although that seems outrageously unlikely since all mathematical concepts we know of are communicated visually and audibly. If it gets more abstract than math that'll be a big shock.
- newzisforsukas 2y ago
  > If sound, visual and meaning aren't correlated, what can language be? Ask someone with an articulation disorder. /s Still, this is super reductive. Language can be feeling, it can be taste, it can be all sorts of things that are ineffable. It is weird to me that the research into this assumes there is a baseline of repeatability somehow. At best, this is mimicry, imo.
  - simianparrot 2y ago
    What’s bizarre to me is that the entire field of “AI” research, including the LLM space, seem to be repeating the exact same mistakes of the ecosystem models of the 1920’s and later. Gross oversimplifications of reality not because that’s what is actually observed but because that’s the only way to make reality fit with the desired outcome models. It’s science done backwards which isn’t really science at all. Not that I think these models have no use cases, they’re simply being used too broadly because the people obsessed with them don’t want to admit their limitations.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

soulofmischief 2y ago

This is exactly how I taught myself to read at age 3, and by age 5 my reading comprehension was collegiate, so I don't really understand what you mean. Language is literally communication through patterns. Patterns of speech, patterns of thoughts, archetypes, it's all patterns.

bongodongobob 2y ago
Same, I could read before kindergarten just from my parents reading to me. My mom was shocked when she found out I could read, they hadn't started intentionally teaching me yet.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  I just instructed my grandmother to read the same kid's book to me over and over again each night for a few weeks and matched the phonemes to the letters. At that point I'd already had a decent grasp of language so it felt like a very natural transition. It bit me for a while later on in grade school when I took an English class and realized I didn't know anything about how language was constructed, it was all purely intuition. Formalizing language took a concerted effort on my part, and my teachers didn't understand how to translate the material... because I can't just be told things at face value, there is always a nested mass of "but why?" that must be answered or I fundamentally don't understand. Once I finally got over that hill, it was smooth sailing again. It also made learning foreign languages very hard in school, I failed both foreign language classes I took, until I again took my own time to learn the fundamentals and now it all seems to stick.

jebarker 2y ago

I missed all the replies yesterday. My point is that I don't think that learning the correlation between some words and visual concepts qualifies as discovering language. It may be that that's as far as this approach can go so it never discovers more sophisticated constructs of language. In that case it's not different to recognizing a barking dog which is surely below "language". I am not a linguist, so not sure what qualifies as "language" officially, but intuitively this falls short.