Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, this will force a rethink of several aspects of what we currently call intelligence. The dialog in my head tends to play out like this: "This thing is scary. It mimics human thought, including human creativity, amazingly well." "Nah, don't worry, it's just a black-box language model. A dumb machine that emits one word at a time with no concept of meaning. The underlying logic is nothing but a probabilty distr…
Yes, but it cannot really have conversations it has not read about on the web. There is no real abstraction. It excells at outputting symbols in the correct order, given we have an idea what the pattern should look like. Otherwise it's stuck in a loop.
I just tried to test it's ability to abstract directly, for your comment:
https://twitter.com/fergal_reid/status/1599191496372035584
I find it very hard to say this isn't doing abstraction.
I just made all those examples up, that's a new test I just created, so it didn't learn it elsewhere. I didn't cherrypick.
Isn't that doing out-of-sample abstraction?
That last sentence "species with 4 legs tend to be less intelligent and move at different speeds" is Abstraction or I don't know what Abstraction means.
(Not saying it's generally intelligent or anything; and I know it's just trained to predict symbols. But having a hard time with "...therefore it cannot abstract" in light of this sort of response.)