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ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

nabilalouani.substack.com

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Re: ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

#61
post #57
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because of alan turing. The turing test has arbitrarily put the bar at “must successfully emulate a human being to be labeled general intelligence”. I don’t find the turing test useful at all as a benchmark. We don’t need something to successfully emulate a human to do useful intelligent work. ChatGPT can already do that work in many domains and many languages, if working as an assistant to a human. I honestly…

I can see why not believing Turing Test is a useful benchmark means that you can't deduce ChatGPT is sentient from it being able to pass one. But how do you deduce it is not AGI without some other reasonable benchmark? Moreover, how can you deduce GPT-4 can't spontaneously become one even in principle without having that benchmark? Those two are the questions to the skeptics really.

Right. I don’t see why human-level AI is the criteria for AGI. I think we can have weak AGI, potentially long before we have strong AGI. We need clear benchmarks, otherwise it turns into theology.

Re: ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

#62
>If you want to know what a person is really like, watch how they treat the staff in a restaurant. Power reveals the true character of those who hold it.

This is the only part of the article I am in total agreement with.

The rest is just another variant of the Chinese room argument (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room).

My own take on this is that people are searching for the magical in the wrong place ("we are so special") rather than seeing things are magical by their very existence

Re: ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

#63
post #9
post #8

> Models don’t understand anything Are people really so unaware of themselves? What is understanding? I'm not going to even attempt to define that, but I will posit that the only way we have of verifying understanding, regardless of what definition you use, is validating the correct output for a given input. For instance, when we teach children, we validate their understanding by giving them a test. Are we able to lo…

I'm pretty sure that ChatGPT doesn't "understand" things as humans do. But does it mean that it has no ability to understand things? For example, assume there is an alien species that can only see ultraviolet, but not any other lightwave in human's visual spectrum. They don't "see" things as humans do. But we'll still consider they to have ability to see things.

Per chatGPT

"According to Wittgenstein, understanding is not just a matter of having the right information or knowledge, but also involves the ability to use language in a way that is appropriate to the context and situation."

Re: ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

#64
post #40

> he sees them the same way you see Indian/Japanese/Arab characters without being able to tell what they mean. Lost me at Indian characters, only if he asked chatGPT Indian isn't a language.

Indian characters could be the superset of multiple character sets from the Indian subcontinent. There's nothing inherently wrong about it.

Agreed, i got that too. But i would like to people start noticing and not use general terms often. Nothing wrong with it.

Indians are people, same as Americans. Proper way to represent characters of languages originating from Indian subcontinent is Indic and/or dravidian languages. With Scandinavian language speaking countries we know who they are, maybe we use a similar context. :)

Re: ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always tech-adjacent types that drop these crap takes from what I've seen. Maybe they're threatened as SWEs are last to go when LLMs can generate code - someone has to check it; we just won't need two PMs, scrum lord and a BI attaché for that... ChatGPT has allowed me to explore programming topics where there is, otherwise, very little useful information - it won't produce good code verbatim but it doesn't have…

If there is otherwise very little information then where do you think ChatGPT is pulling that information from? It does not pull stuff out of the void, it's only as accurate as the data shoved into it and that data can be very wrong. People get into a state of false confidence using ChatGPT for things they cannot easily fact check.

Absolutely, it's comically wrong most of the time but it's still a useful tool to solidify understanding in a way that's hard to do organically.

Re: ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

#67

These articles are all the same. It's like complaining how the Ford Model T couldn't drive you to England in the early 20th century while ignoring how it would revolutionize cities and life within America. Whether you believe it's 'real' or not is irrelevant. It's here, it's useful and the world will not be the same as it was.

And if anything the LLMs are better than the average person realises. Everyone I have demoed it to assumed it was like a slightly better Siri or cleverbot. None of them expected it to be capable of synthesising full long form text works with coherent and largely accurate content.

Re: ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

#68

People who can’t understand ChatGPT hype would have not used calculators when they came out on the grounds they didn’t understand mathematical proofs.

Calculator that computes that 3 + 2 is 8 should indeed not be trusted much.

Do you know any such calculators?

Re: ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

#69

ML and AI has been one of the least overhyped things in the tech industry. Chatgpt is the fruit of a lot of that underhyped work and the acclaim it's getting is based on real merit unlike crypto

it will be the next financial bubble like dot-com, im calling it

Re: ChatGPT Hype Is Proof Nobody Understands AI

#70
Gary Marcus has been incredibly vocal against LLM for quite a while now. The problem is that the guy does not understand that modern LLM are no longer just classifiers, as the article seems to imply. The underlying transformer architecture has completly transformed the field. For instance, training an AI to recognize cats has nothing to do with training a LLM, texts are fed to the machine without any labels. Attention is where these models take their strenght. It is a way to learn how to predict the next token by learning which elements are connected between the input and the output so far. These architectures model a sequence, which is very different than simply finding the next token with a basic probabilities as ancient approaches did.
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