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What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#61

Post by IIAOPSW »

bheadmaster wrote: post #14
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brain knows where it's going to go by the end of the sentence as well, it's conceptualized the whole sentence and my hands are on the road to completing the sentence, I'm not only aware of what I've written so far.

> My brain knows where it's going to go by the end of the sentence as well How would you know that? Sincere question, because to me it feels like my brain is improvising word by word when typing out this sentence. I often delete and retype it until it feels right, but in the process of typing a single sentence, I'm just chaining words one after another the way they feel right. In other words, my brain doesn't exactly…

Here's a theory. Thoughts exist on certain time scales. Everything about perception exists on certain time scales. The brain wave frequencies we use to represent things is directly related to the time scale of the thing it represents. The end of the sentence which you are trying to reach departed on its internal journey though the brain around the same time as whatever triggered the thought. It just so happened to take a more circuitous route, delaying it in preference of other words until it was ready. The longer the distance of logical relations between parts of the sentence, the larger the relevant time scale, the lower the relevant brain waves used to represent it.

Its like a juggling act. The ball with the conclusion is thrown up highest, a bunch of other balls are thrown up in between, and they should all start arriving back in your hands, in the correct order, one at a time, without having known the exact sequence to expect when they were first thrown.

Sometime the juggler misjudges and the train of thought is scrambled and lost.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#62

Post by Barrin92 »

svachalek wrote: post #55
calf wrote: post #51

I think what is interesting is even in the 1st sentence of Wolfram's essay, he acknowledges what ChatGPT is doing could merely be superficial. So we can't even tell if ChatGPT actually learned "language" in a superficial versus nontrivial/substantial sense. Lots of people say, I asked ChatGPT to write me a poem/essay, and it did! But was it really a poem/essay, or did it just look like one and on closer examination i…

When you ask a child to write a poem or essay, is it real or fake? I think if we accept that as real, it's hard not to accept ChatGPT as real. Sometimes its writing is not very good, sometimes its not even all that consistent, but from what I've seen the quality level is better than the average non-professional human writer.

Realness has little to do with the quality of the output. Or else my TI-83 would be the realest mathematician on the planet, it can multiply numbers that even Terence Tao can't in his head.

Judging these systems solely by their output is to repeat the msitakes of behaviorism, even a dumb markov chain or a parrot converses better than an infant, but unlike the infant does not acquire an understanding or representation of language.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#63

Post by the_af »

chx wrote: post #41

Wasn't there a humorous law which said "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no" and indeed, what makes you think it works? It fools people into thinking it works but have you seen that chess match between Stockfish and ChatGPT? It's the best, most succinct demonstration of what ChatGPT is. https://pastebin.com/X6kBRTa9 https://i.redd.it/fl4puwzxt9ha1.gif https://youtu.be/rSCNW1OCk_M

In my experience, ChatGPT is unsuitable even for tic tac toe. When I tried it, it hallucinated completely incorrect board positions (e.g. forgot about moves already made or wanted to continue playing after I had won).

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#64

Post by [deleted] »

spion wrote: post #15

The answer to this is: "we don't really know as its a very complex function automatically discovered by means of slow gradient descent, and we're still finding out" Here are some of the fun things we've found out so far: - GPT style language models try to build a model of the world: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382 - GPT style language models end up internally implementing a mini "neural network training algorithm" (…

[deleted]

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#65

Post by lukeplato »

visarga wrote: post #53
jw1224 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah I've been thinking along these lines. ChatGPT is telling us something about language or thought, we just havent got to the bottom of what it is yet. Something along the lines of 'with enough data its easier to model than we expected'. I’ve been thinking similarly, and am coming to understand and accept we’ll never get to the bottom of it :) The universe is fractal-like in nature. It shouldn’t be a surprise, th…

> 'with enough data its easier to model than we expected' > a self-similar process is ultimately responsible for granting us our own intelligence In my view, intelligence essentially resides within language, specifically in the corpus of language. Both humans and AIs can be effectively colonized by language, as there are innumerable concepts and observations that are transmitted from one mind to another, and now even…

Yann LeCun often argues that animals like cats and dogs are substantially more intelligent than current LLMs [0] and I'd have to agree. I don't see how/why to consider practical knowledge as only constituting a tiny fraction of our overall intelligence. Either way, it's not clear if the GPT-* models will someday produce emergent common sense or if they're going down an entirely wrong path.

[0] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1622300311573651458

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#66

Post by strangattractor »

codeulike wrote: post #32

Wow this is 19,000 words. I like his summary at the end: At some level it’s a great example of the fundamental scientific fact that large numbers of simple computational elements can do remarkable and unexpected things. And this: ... But it’s amazing how human-like the results are. And as I’ve discussed, this suggests something that’s at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of th…

Maybe some type of cellular automata could explain it;)

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#67

Post by [deleted] »

calf wrote: post #51

I think what is interesting is even in the 1st sentence of Wolfram's essay, he acknowledges what ChatGPT is doing could merely be superficial. So we can't even tell if ChatGPT actually learned "language" in a superficial versus nontrivial/substantial sense. Lots of people say, I asked ChatGPT to write me a poem/essay, and it did! But was it really a poem/essay, or did it just look like one and on closer examination i…

[deleted]

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#68

Post by rubyist5eva »

It's a bunch of smoke and mirrors akin to blockchain, bitcoin (and the entire web3/crypto space in general) - a whole bunch of hype and "evangelists" who keep saying it's going to change the world (and make them a whole lot of money in the process, how convenient!) but if you do look at it critically even at a surface level you realize it's just a bunch of really computationally expensive BS that isn't any better or more officient than existing status quo solutions.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#69

Post by jonahx »

Barrin92 wrote: post #62
svachalek wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you ask a child to write a poem or essay, is it real or fake? I think if we accept that as real, it's hard not to accept ChatGPT as real. Sometimes its writing is not very good, sometimes its not even all that consistent, but from what I've seen the quality level is better than the average non-professional human writer.

Realness has little to do with the quality of the output. Or else my TI-83 would be the realest mathematician on the planet, it can multiply numbers that even Terence Tao can't in his head. Judging these systems solely by their output is to repeat the msitakes of behaviorism, even a dumb markov chain or a parrot converses better than an infant, but unlike the infant does not acquire an understanding or representation…

> has little to do with the quality of the output.

Non-snarky question: What else can you judge by? Isn't any alternative just putting more precise conditions on the output?

With ChatGPT, it's still easy enough to see it's mistakes, and its attempts at fiction and poetry, impressive as they are, are still clumsy to a trained eye, relative to expert human work. But what if they weren't? What happens when they're indistinguishable?

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#70

Post by spauka »

ionwake wrote: post #38

It was kinda long so I uhh fed it into chatgpt for a summary : The author, Stephen Wolfram, describes the process of training ChatGPT using large amounts of text data, which allows the model to learn patterns and associations between words and phrases. He explains that ChatGPT uses a multi-layered approach to generate responses, starting with analyzing the input text and then generating a response based on the learne…

So ChatGPT didn't correctly summarize the text at all, this article does not talk about ethics at all, doesn't talk about potential uses and I would consider the statement about capturing context and incorporating knowledge from a wide range of sources to be a pretty poor summary of the text.

In fact I think that's a great example of exactly what is actually discussed, namely that the context that ChatGPT is able to hold is limited as it's context is held completely in its input. There is never any modification to it's internal state, we're just passing a longer input vector in to the start of the GPT-3 black box. For long inputs the embedding vector becomes more and more sparse and it needs to make more assumptions to fill in it's output.

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