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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

#181

Post by wizzwizz4 »

tck42 wrote: post #39
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know it's non-conscious? (Serious question.) Yeah, it's not close to a human, but…

Purely my opinion, but this is a static function right? Wouldn't anything conscious require some sort of feedback loop, where observations, either internal or external, cause an update to the model for you to even start considering if it's conscious or not?

Are humans with total inability to form short-term memories not conscious, then?

During its training period, there was a feedback loop like you describe.

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

#182

Post by dTal »

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…

The cigarette and the too-sour part were all part of the prompt and were written by a human. I guess somebody had better tell them the bad news...

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

#183

Post by junon »

bigyikes wrote: post #99
typon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're kind of proving the OPs point. The argument is that GPT3 has no understanding of the world, just superficial understanding of words and their relationships. If it did have a real understanding, prompt construction wouldn't matter as much, but it clearly does because all GPT3 cares about the structure of sentences, not their meanings.

Lacking “understanding” doesn’t make GPT-3 less impressive and also doesn’t make comparisons to human abilities unwarranted. I read the prompt, and I expected that this was the beginning of some kind of fiction. In my mind, it sounded like I was reading the beginning of a somebody’s dream. What does it even mean to understand something? Because naively, it looks very much like GPT-3 and I have a shared understanding…

It's not about impressiveness - surely, it's impressive. However, the article is more or less critiquing the discourse surrounding the model - namely, that there is a strange misconception floating around that it's somehow a general purpose AI that can understand and think about the world similar to a human. Which, of course, it cannot.

If the claims about GPT-3 were accurate, there'd be a lot less of a flare-up about it. Don't claim your software does what it can't.

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

#184

Post by hnuser123456 »

throwawaygh wrote: post #171
hnuser123456 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a quick search on Gary, he's, in essence, spreading the word that GPT-3 isn't an AGI. Maybe this is useful to laymen to quench fears that it is one, but how should this garner a relationship with OpenAI? There are still people who have access who admit it's not, including OpenAI themselves already. I do wish the model was truly published openly, but despite it not being an AGI, it's already powerful enough to be…

> I do think there's an argument to be made that we should try to keep it in a good light to further interest in the field. How many more articles do we need like the one linked by OP? This is how winter happens and is a decidedly anti-scientific mindset. Do you consult with non-technical/low-technical execs on AI investments? If you did, the answer to your question would be obvious. For every dollar Microsoft and VC…

Is a winter not a widespread lack of interest in the field? I would stay step 0 is getting people interested by showing what's possible, and step 1 is showing what's not currently possible but should be.

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

#186

Post by canjobear »

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…

> The neurophysiological concept of “understanding” as most understand it is orthogonal to the way the algorithm actually works.

This is not obviously true and it's exactly the core of the debate. A GPT-3 proponent might say: We don't really know what "understanding" means, so it very well might be nothing more than complex rehashing of conditional probabilities. This isn't implausible. Consider Friston's "free energy principle" which leads to the conclusion that brain function is determined entirely by prediction.

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

#189

Post by canjobear »

chillacy wrote: post #134
pwinnski wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About structure, clearly. About meaning, not so clear. It seems more supportable to say that GPT-3 knows nothing about meaning, but that its knowledge of structure often gives an illusion of meaning.

This is the thesis of Bender 2020 https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.acl-main.463.pdf when evaluating GPT-2. They distinguish between meaning and form. We don't _really_ know what the physical manifestations of meaning and form are in the brain... they're just concepts we invented. If anything, GPT-3 is suggesting that either: 1. Tasks which were previously thought to require meaning actually turn out only to requ…

It seems like Bender & Koller's argument can just as easily prove that humans don't have representations of meaning either. Our brains get input from multiple "languages"---conventional natural languages as well as the neural codes that represent our sensory inputs. All we have access to is the form of these inputs, and so we can never learn the underlying "meaning".
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