71–80 of 518 posts
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…
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Understanding how ChatGPT writes doesn't translate to understanding how humans write/speak/think. We still don't understand the latter.
Notice I didn't say anything about chatGPT. chatGPT is at least something that's been built. Disagree with the theory that we are overgrown text prediction all you want, but you can't deny that it is an "understanding" in the sense that knowing it lets you build and test it. Let's call it a "potential understanding". This is different from an "illusory understanding", which feel like explanations but when you go to i…
Yeah, and it helps us understand how "overgrown text prediction" works, but not how humans work. In the same way that building a robotic arm won't help you understand how muscles work.
> If you can't build anything out of an "understanding", even a wrong thing, then you don't truly have an understanding.
Not entirely true. We can't build a star, but we do have a pretty good theory of how stars work.
But I do agree that we don't understand the human brain.
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I don’t know what to do with my life right now. I just want to be able to be with you and I know that I am not alone in my feelings. Wow. Very “Valentines Day” meets therapy session.
I'm just curious if you're using SwiftKey. I just did a similar experiment with my autocomplete and the second phrase was "I am not sure what to do with my life". Ostensibly it's trained against my dictionary inputs, but I question how much it truly pulls from that.
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…
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…
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" (…
That Kenneth Li Othello paper is great. The accompanying blog post https://thegradient.pub/othello/ was discussed on HN here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34474043 A lot of people didn't seem to get it when it was discussed on HN. A GPT had _only_ ever seen Othello transripts like: "E3, D3, C4 ..." and NOTHING else. It knows nothing of the board. It doesnt event know that there are two players. It learned Othe…
Yeah, like language have gramma rules games also have rules, in both cases LLM can learn rules, it's the same with many other structured chains of actions/tokens, you could also model actions from different domains and use them as language. It seems a lot of emergent behaviours of LLMs are what you could call generalized approximated algorithms for certain tasks. If we could distill only these patterns and extract them and maybe understand them (if possible, as some of these are HUGE) then based on this knowledge maybe we could create traditional algorithms that would solve similar problems.
In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe."
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play"
Minsky shut his eyes,
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that momment, Sussman was enlightened.
-- AI koanI 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…
What does that even mean?
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> 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…
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…