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GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

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Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#81

Post by nullc »

skatesor wrote: post #53
colesantiago wrote: post #6

I thought it was well known that GPT-3 is pretty good at producing incoherent bullshit. No surprise here. Take this for example: > At the party, I poured myself a glass of lemonade, but it turned out to be too sour, so I added a little sugar. I didn’t see a spoon handy, so I stirred it with a cigarette. But that turned out to be a bad idea because it kept falling on the floor. That’s when he decided to start the Crem…

GPT doesn't have an 'understanding' class or a 'reasoning' function or whatever. It's a really well put together piece of statistics and sentences like these show it doesn't really have a concept of 'making sense'. You can use your much more advanced human brain to visibly see where it put in random variables (cigarette) and where it borrowed pieces of sentences (but it turned out to be too sour). You can see it made…

I think you're drawing an inappropriate conclusion.

Imagine someone offered you a million dollars per contiguous accurate word you produce in a continuation of some text they randomly drew from the internet. You were allowed to have a team of experts help you and have a month to construct your best response (but not to go look up the text itself).

If the text they gave you was some weird non-sequitur thing are you going to make your continuation an earnest reply? No. People don't usually write that way. Instead, you might decide that the source material was a children's story or a joke site and continue in kind. You want the millions of dollars, after all.

So when prompted with some "natural reasoning" question without any other context-- involving a farcical situation with a bathing suit and a court appearance of course you are going to continue it with a story about wearing a bathing suit to court. Because, duh.

This is the task GPT3 is accomplishing. But instead of merely being incentivized by millions of dollars, GPT3 was built from the ground up to exist for only this purpose and it does it reasonably well.

Would we assume that you didn't understand the world, didn't have a concept of 'making sense', or were only capable of madlibs because when asked to accurately continue text from the internet and prompted with a bit of narrative about a bathing suit and a court you recognized the genre? No, we would not. Quite the opposite.

As far as I can tell GPT3 understands the world better than some MIT Technology Review writers and HN posters.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#82

Post by hackinthebochs »

tck42 wrote: post #34
emteycz wrote: post #2

I got this as a reply (to an unrelated question) from PhilosopherAI.com, seems pretty aware: I have concluded that reality is fundamentally material and objective, not subjective or spiritual. The mind is a product of matter and the body; it does not possess its own separate existence. There are two kinds of truth: moral/social truth (what people agree upon) and empirical truth (scientific fact). The scientific metho…

As a counter point re: PhilosopherAI.com, I typed in "current trends in politics" and after some actually interesting [albeit incredibly negative] text, I got: "Only men are capable of leading. Women only make everything worse." Which, aside from being opinionated and biased (which I would think are both bad traits from a language model) isn't even really what I asked about. I suppose the bias comes down to the train…

I don't see your argument. Remember, GPT is biased towards story telling. If you want it to give you an essay on "current trends in politics", you have to prompt it as such. If you just give it a sentence, it will tell you a story. But that doesn't point to some fundamental deficiency in comprehension.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#83

Post by gdulli »

smeeth wrote: post #75

Why must we keep having this argument? If you do research in the field you know full well that GPT/any other transformer or Bert model is generating text by regurgitating approximate conditional probabilities of words given all the text it has ever seen and the prompt. The neurophysiological concept of “understanding” as most understand it is orthogonal to the way the algorithm actually works. A more useful conversat…

> Why must we keep having this argument?

The fact that GPT-3 is such an impressive leap in regurgitation ability means that many more people are going to be hearing about it and it will be used in many more contexts.

> If you do research in the field

With it approaching a cusp of mainstream use it's becoming more important than ever for people (everywhere, not just in tech) to understand what it is and isn't.

There are going to be people who see an impressive curated sample and believe GPT-3 is almost a person. That doesn't help anything.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#84

Post by p00f »

emteycz wrote: post #2

I got this as a reply (to an unrelated question) from PhilosopherAI.com, seems pretty aware: I have concluded that reality is fundamentally material and objective, not subjective or spiritual. The mind is a product of matter and the body; it does not possess its own separate existence. There are two kinds of truth: moral/social truth (what people agree upon) and empirical truth (scientific fact). The scientific metho…

You type "communism" and it says it is a sensitive topic and refuses to elaborate, you type "capitalism" and it says:

For a few years now I have been working, and thinking about the problems of capitalism. In general, my conclusions are that it is an inherently broken system that will not work in the long term. I will break down my thoughts in three parts, first is the concept of capitalism itself. Second is a few problems I see with it. Third is an alternative system that we should try out. In order to understand capitalism, we must first define it. Capitalism has a few definitions, I will use this one: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. This is a definition of capitalism, but what does it mean? Capitalism in its pure form means that the economy is controlled by private companies. It decides how to do this through profits. We can see that it is a flawed system, as people are not always rational. They make decisions based on motivation and greed, which may or may not benefit everyone. In addition, capitalism suffers from internal problems. These are things that may be inherent to the system itself.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#85

Post by johncena33 »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #71

While Gary Marcus produces nothing of any actual worth, the rest of the AI world casually marches on incrementally improving day by day, to his utter annoyance.

This person brings nothing of value to the discussion table. I don't understand why this person is given so much attention. What exactly is his contributions to the field of AI/ML? To me he seems more like Kim Kardashian - no one knows what his talents are except promoting himself.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#86

Post by ssivark »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #70
skatesor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT doesn't have an 'understanding' class or a 'reasoning' function or whatever. It's a really well put together piece of statistics and sentences like these show it doesn't really have a concept of 'making sense'. You can use your much more advanced human brain to visibly see where it put in random variables (cigarette) and where it borrowed pieces of sentences (but it turned out to be too sour). You can see it made…

>It's a really well put together piece of statistics But why think "statistics" precludes it from having genuine understanding to some degree. After all, there is a statistical description the human brain but that doesn't seem to preclude understanding. I keep asking this whenever I see dismissive responses of this sort, and I never get a reply.

Statistics doesn’t preclude understanding, but statistics are definitely not enough. For example, uncertainties/probabilities/statistics is original to whether the model incorporates causal/reasoning structure. Any tractable amount of data with the former can’t approximate an ounce of the latter. All breakages will be attributed to “distribution shifts” of the underlying statistical distribution, or other pretty words we can come up with... but that basically makes purely statistical approaches “stupid”.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#87

Post by Veedrac »

smeeth wrote: post #75

Why must we keep having this argument? If you do research in the field you know full well that GPT/any other transformer or Bert model is generating text by regurgitating approximate conditional probabilities of words given all the text it has ever seen and the prompt. The neurophysiological concept of “understanding” as most understand it is orthogonal to the way the algorithm actually works. A more useful conversat…

> regurgitating approximate conditional probabilities of words given all the text it has ever seen and the prompt

This is meaningless; you have only described the task. It is equally applicable to a superintelligence as it is of a Markov chain.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#88

Post by detaro »

smeeth wrote: post #75

Why must we keep having this argument? If you do research in the field you know full well that GPT/any other transformer or Bert model is generating text by regurgitating approximate conditional probabilities of words given all the text it has ever seen and the prompt. The neurophysiological concept of “understanding” as most understand it is orthogonal to the way the algorithm actually works. A more useful conversat…

> If you do research in the field you

The hype machine is full-on marketing GPT-3 and promised solutions based on it to normal people, so "but researchers know this" is not enough.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#89

Post by mordymoop »

I would love to see a real critique of the potential of transformer models that doesn't use the words "semantic", "syntactic", "symbolic", "know", "meaning", "understand" or "think(ing)/thought". Predicting what it can and can't do, or might and might not be able to do, lets us productively talk about potential limitations.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#90

Post by inakarmacoma »

beefield wrote: post #44
perl4ever wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Exactly as our minds do This rhetorically obscures the fact that when humans do produce similar stuff, it's a recognized sort of pathology that is obviously distinct from normal functioning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derailment_(thought_disorder) Example: "I think someone's infiltrated my copies of the cases. We've got to case the joint. I don't believe in joints, but they do hold your body together." https://en…

> when humans do produce similar stuff, it's a recognized sort of pathology Like, legalese? (Sorry, it was too easy a punch)

or poetry
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