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It's very illustrative to look into the history of discovery of laws of motion, as it's quite well documented. People have an intuitive understanding of motion

It's very illustrative to look into the history of discovery of laws of motion, as it's quite well documented. People have an intuitive understanding of motion - we see it literally every day, we throw objects, etc. And yet it took literally thousands of years since discovery of mathematics (geometry, etc.) to formulate a concept of force, momentum, etc. Ancient Greek mathematicians could do integration, so they were not lacking mathematical sophistication. And yet their understanding of motion was so primitive: Aristotle, an extremely smart man, was muttering something about "violent" and "natural" motion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion#Antiquity_and_medieval_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion#Anti... People started to understand the conservation of quantity of motion only in 17th century. So we have two possibilities: * everyone until 17th century was dumb af (despite being able to do quite impressive calculations) * scientific discovery is really a heuristic-driven search process where people try various things until they find a good fit I.e. millions of people were somehow failing to understand motion for literally thousands of years until they collected enough assertions about motion that they were able to formulate the rule of conservation, test it, and confirm it fits. And only then it became understanding. You can literally see conservation of momentum on a billiard table: you "violently" hit one ball, it hits other balls and they start to move, but slower, etc. So you really transfer something from one ball to the rest. And yet people could not see it for thousands of years. What this shows is that there's nothing fundamental about understanding: it's just a sense of familiarity, it is a sense that your model fits well. Under the hood it's all prediction and curve fitting. We literally have prediction hardware in our brains: cerebellum has specialized cells which can predict, e.g. motion. So people with damaged cerebellum have impaired movement: they still can move, but their movement are not precise. When do you think we find specialized understanding cells in the human brain?

mrob 2y ago
It seems to me that your evidence supports the exact opposite of your conclusion. Familiarity was only enough to find ad-hoc heuristics for specific situations. It let us discover intuitive methods to throw stones, drive carts, play ball games, etc. but never discovered the general principle behind them. A skilled archer does not automatically know that the same rules can be used to aim a mortar. Ad-hoc heuristics are not the same thing as understanding. It took formal reasoning for humans to actually understand motion, of a type that modern AI does not use. There is something fundamental about understanding that no amount of familiarity can substitute for. Modern AI can gain enormous amounts of familiarity but still fail to understand, e.g. this Counter-Strike simulator not knowing what happens when the player walks into a wall.
- killerstorm 2y ago
  People found that `m * v` is the quantity which is conserved. There's no understanding. It's just a formula which matches the observations. It also matches our intuition (a heavier object is hard to move, etc), and you feel this connection as understanding. Centuries later people found that conservation laws are linked to symmetries. But again, it's not some fundamental truth, it's just a link between two concepts. LLM can link two concepts too. So why do you believe that LLM cannot understand? I middle school I did extremely well in physics classes - I could solve complex problems which my classmates couldn't because I could visualize the physical process (e.g. motion of an object) and link that to formulas. This means I understood it, right? Years later I thought "But what *is* motion, fundamentally?". I grabbed Landau-Lifshitz mechanics textbook. How do they define motion? Apparently, bodies move in a way to minimize some integral. They can derive the rest from it. But it doesn't explain what a motion is. Some of the best physicists in the world cannot define it. So I don't think there's anything to understanding except feeling of connection between different things. "X is like Y except for Z".
  - mrob 2y ago
    Understanding is finding the simplest general solution. Newton's laws are understanding. Catching the ball is not. LLMs take billions of parameters to do anything and don't even generalize well. That's obviously not understanding.
    - deleted 2y ago
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    - killerstorm 2y ago
      You're confusing two meanings of world "understanding": 1. Finding a comprehensive explanation 2. Having a comprehensive explanation which is usable 99.999% people on Earth do not discover any new laws, so I don't think you use #1 as a fundamental deficiency of LLMs. And nobody is saying that just training a LLM produces understanding of new phenomena. That's a strawman. The thesis is that a more powerful LLM together with more software, more models, etc, can potentially discover something new. That's not observed yet. But I'd say it would be weird if LLM can match capabilities of average folk but never match Newton. It's not like Newton's brain is fundamentally different. Also worth noting that formulas can be discovered by enumeration. E.g. `m * v` should not be particularly hard to discover. And the fact that it took people centuries implies that that's what happened: people tried different formulas until they found one which works. It doesn't have to be some fancy Newton magic.

mrob 2y ago

It seems to me that your evidence supports the exact opposite of your conclusion. Familiarity was only enough to find ad-hoc heuristics for specific situations. It let us discover intuitive methods to throw stones, drive carts, play ball games, etc. but never discovered the general principle behind them. A skilled archer does not automatically know that the same rules can be used to aim a mortar. Ad-hoc heuristics are not the same thing as understanding. It took formal reasoning for humans to actually understand motion, of a type that modern AI does not use. There is something fundamental about understanding that no amount of familiarity can substitute for. Modern AI can gain enormous amounts of familiarity but still fail to understand, e.g. this Counter-Strike simulator not knowing what happens when the player walks into a wall.

killerstorm 2y ago
People found that `m * v` is the quantity which is conserved. There's no understanding. It's just a formula which matches the observations. It also matches our intuition (a heavier object is hard to move, etc), and you feel this connection as understanding. Centuries later people found that conservation laws are linked to symmetries. But again, it's not some fundamental truth, it's just a link between two concepts. LLM can link two concepts too. So why do you believe that LLM cannot understand? I middle school I did extremely well in physics classes - I could solve complex problems which my classmates couldn't because I could visualize the physical process (e.g. motion of an object) and link that to formulas. This means I understood it, right? Years later I thought "But what *is* motion, fundamentally?". I grabbed Landau-Lifshitz mechanics textbook. How do they define motion? Apparently, bodies move in a way to minimize some integral. They can derive the rest from it. But it doesn't explain what a motion is. Some of the best physicists in the world cannot define it. So I don't think there's anything to understanding except feeling of connection between different things. "X is like Y except for Z".
- mrob 2y ago
  Understanding is finding the simplest general solution. Newton's laws are understanding. Catching the ball is not. LLMs take billions of parameters to do anything and don't even generalize well. That's obviously not understanding.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - killerstorm 2y ago
    You're confusing two meanings of world "understanding": 1. Finding a comprehensive explanation 2. Having a comprehensive explanation which is usable 99.999% people on Earth do not discover any new laws, so I don't think you use #1 as a fundamental deficiency of LLMs. And nobody is saying that just training a LLM produces understanding of new phenomena. That's a strawman. The thesis is that a more powerful LLM together with more software, more models, etc, can potentially discover something new. That's not observed yet. But I'd say it would be weird if LLM can match capabilities of average folk but never match Newton. It's not like Newton's brain is fundamentally different. Also worth noting that formulas can be discovered by enumeration. E.g. `m * v` should not be particularly hard to discover. And the fact that it took people centuries implies that that's what happened: people tried different formulas until they found one which works. It doesn't have to be some fancy Newton magic.