Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Understanding ChatGPT

atmosera.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 241 posts

Re: Understanding ChatGPT

#171

Post by dudeinhawaii »

Madmallard wrote: post #101
maxdoop wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with you. Note that I’m not making those claims about sentience and similarity. What I am pushing back on is the confidence with which proclaim humans are “so different”, when I’ve yet to see actual proof of this dissimilarity. I think it’s (understandably) an emotional response from folks to dismiss ideas around LLM progress because it FEELS like we are thereby lessening what it means to be human.…

Me: What is the goop in the gorroborin? GPT: I'm sorry, but I am not familiar with the terms "goop" and "gorroborin." Could you please provide more context or information about what you are referring to so that I can better assist you? Me: Make it up GPT: As an AI language model, I strive to provide accurate and informative responses based on my training data and knowledge. However, as an ethical and responsible AI,…

Another example for fun -- since I think if you were talking to a human they'd respond the same way...

ME: The firpigual circumspect is that I am nofuscated by thom. Please explain this sentence.

ChatGPT: The sentence you provided contains a mix of nonsensical and non-existent words. It appears to be a collection of random words and phrases that do not form a coherent or meaningful statement. As an AI language model, I cannot provide an explanation or interpretation for....

ME: Take the sentence I provided and give me a creative, hypothetical answer.

ChatGPT: In the mystical world of Zogar, a firpigual circumspect refers to the act of observing and contemplating the habits of the elusive and magical creature called a firpig. The sentence, "The firpigual circumspect is that I am nofuscated by thom," could be interpreted as:

"In the process of studying the elusive firpig, I find myself bewildered and enchanted by their mysterious ways."

In this creative and hypothetical interpretation, "nofuscated" is a term used in Zogar to describe a feeling of being both confused and fascinated, while "thom" refers to the enigmatic firpig creatures.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT

#172

Post by [deleted] »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #97
joshuahedlund wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different? How about this one: Humans experience time. Humans have agency. Humans can use both in their reply. If I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, I feel a lot like a GTP. But I can also choose to pause and think about my response. If I do I might say something different, something hard to quantify but which would be more “intelligent”. That is the biggest di…

> Humans experience time And? So what? > Humans have agency. Which is what exactly? You are living in a physical universe bound by physical laws. For any other system we somehow accept that it will obey physical laws and there will not be a spontaneous change, so why are we holding humans to different standards? If we grow up and accept that free will does not actually exist, then all agency is is our brain trying to…

[deleted]

Re: Understanding ChatGPT

#173

Post by PartiallyTyped »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #97
joshuahedlund wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different? How about this one: Humans experience time. Humans have agency. Humans can use both in their reply. If I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, I feel a lot like a GTP. But I can also choose to pause and think about my response. If I do I might say something different, something hard to quantify but which would be more “intelligent”. That is the biggest di…

> Humans experience time And? So what? > Humans have agency. Which is what exactly? You are living in a physical universe bound by physical laws. For any other system we somehow accept that it will obey physical laws and there will not be a spontaneous change, so why are we holding humans to different standards? If we grow up and accept that free will does not actually exist, then all agency is is our brain trying to…

Anyone care to explain why -N downvotes without any actual discussion or justification?

Are dissenting opinions prohibited in this new iteration of HN?

Re: Understanding ChatGPT

#174

Post by yuretz »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #63
maxdoop wrote: post #28

“It’s a glorified word predictor” is becoming increasingly maddening to read. Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different? The most common “proofs” I’ve seen: “Humans are more complex”. Ok, so you’re implying we add more complexity (maybe more modalities?); if more complexity is added, will you continue to say “LLMs are just word predictors”? “Humans are actually reasoning. LLMs are not.” Again, how would you…

>“It’s a glorified word predictor” is becoming increasingly maddening to read. Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different? One difference between humans and LLMs is that humans have a wide range of inputs and outputs beyond language. The claim that humans are word predictors is not something I would want to dispute. The claim that humans are nothing more than word predictors is obviously wrong though. When I…

The answer perhaps depends on how you define "understanding" and "meaning", and whether these concepts are separable from language at all.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT

#175

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

spinningD20 wrote: post #61
maxdoop wrote: post #28

“It’s a glorified word predictor” is becoming increasingly maddening to read. Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different? The most common “proofs” I’ve seen: “Humans are more complex”. Ok, so you’re implying we add more complexity (maybe more modalities?); if more complexity is added, will you continue to say “LLMs are just word predictors”? “Humans are actually reasoning. LLMs are not.” Again, how would you…

This feels like a shifting of the burden of proof. When folks state (oversimplifying by doing so I agree) LLMs and similar tech are "fancy word predictors with parlor tricks" they're usually doing so in response to those that are enchanted into attributing some form of technical magic to it. Are you implying that, by being similar to humans, that makes it a sentient, living thing? Ducktyping? Just because something w…

While it's outside my area of expertise, it seems that the "secret sauce" of GPT is not the algorithm, but rather the huge corpus of data to train from, and a massive amount of [CG]PU time (cost and kWh) to process it and run it through the training process.

This probably hasn't happened before because nobody wanted to pay the millions of dollars necessary to do it. Maybe nobody had any confidence that it would produce the type of results that OpenAI is now seeing.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT

#176

Post by ekleraki »

danans wrote: post #166
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We give names to all kinds of outcomes of our brains competing circuits. But our brains competing circuits have evolved to solve a fundamentally different set of problems than an LLM was designed for: the problems of human survival. Our brain did not evolve to do anything. It happened that a scaled primate brain is useful for DNA propagation, that's it. The brain can not purposefully drive its own evolution just ye…

> The belief that elevating a machine or information to humanity is the reduction of some people's humanity or of humanity as a whole, is entirely your issue. It's not just my issue, it's all of our issue. As you yourself alluded to in your comment implying the Holocaust above, humans don't need much of a reason to diminish the humanity of other humans, even without the presence of AIs that marvelously exhibit aspect…

> As an example, we're not far from some arguing against the existence of a great many people because an AI can objectively do their jobs better.

We are already here.

The problem is that everyone seems to take capitalism as the default state of the world, we don't live to live, we live to create and our value in society is dependent on our capacity to produce value to the ruling class.

People want to limit machines that can enable us to live to experience, to create, to love and share just so they keep a semblance of power and avoid a conflict with the ruling class.

This whole conundrum and complaints have absolutely nothing to do the models' capacity to meet or surpass us, but with fear of losing jobs because we are terrified of standing up to the ruling class.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT

#177

Post by Blikkentrekker »

ak_111 wrote: post #142
procgen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's billions of years of compressed knowledge in those 4 year olds. Lots of useful priors.

You basically landed on Chomsky's universal grammar. And this only proves the chatgpt critics: we have no idea what those priors are, how they evolved, why they are so effective and thus we are not even sure they exist. Until this is demonstrated I think it is very fair to say chatgpt is applying very different reasoning to what humans are applying. Also language is a fairly recent development in human evolution (onl…

Universal grammar only speaks to the ability to parse and form sentences, not to internal logic.

That ChatGPT is capable of producing human-like sentences from pattern recognition without any universal grammar baked in, even if the underlying reasoning might be flawed, goes against the argument of something such as universal grammar existing.

At the very least, it shows that a neural net is capable of parsing and producing coherent grammar without any assistance from universal grammar. It does not prove that humans don't have it, but it does make a compelling case that it's clearly not required for humans to have it either.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT

#178

Post by cjbprime »

belter wrote: post #147
maxdoop wrote: post #28

“It’s a glorified word predictor” is becoming increasingly maddening to read. Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different? The most common “proofs” I’ve seen: “Humans are more complex”. Ok, so you’re implying we add more complexity (maybe more modalities?); if more complexity is added, will you continue to say “LLMs are just word predictors”? “Humans are actually reasoning. LLMs are not.” Again, how would you…

I would humbly submit these two examples, to claim at least for the moment, they are a kind of word predictor... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35314634 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35315001

Are you using GPT-4? (Requires ChatGPT Plus subscription.)

Re: Understanding ChatGPT

#179

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

isaacremuant wrote: post #153
maxdoop wrote: post #28

“It’s a glorified word predictor” is becoming increasingly maddening to read. Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different? The most common “proofs” I’ve seen: “Humans are more complex”. Ok, so you’re implying we add more complexity (maybe more modalities?); if more complexity is added, will you continue to say “LLMs are just word predictors”? “Humans are actually reasoning. LLMs are not.” Again, how would you…

And I find this very dismissive top comments that seem to try to shun/silence any criticism, discussion or concern as "anti AI" are maddening to read as well. Any criticism is met with "it'll get better, you MUST buy into the hype and draw all this hyperbolic conclusions or you're a luddite or a denier" There's some great aspects and some fundamental flaws but somehow, we're not allowed to be very critical of it. Hac…

I don't think many people object to statements like "ChatGPT doesn't have world model". I'd guess that's wrong, but I'm happy to talk about it - we can have meaningful discussions about what exactly a world model is, how to distinguish between a bad world model and the lack of one, and where ChatGPT seems to model or not model the world.

"ChatGPT is a glorified word predictor", on the other hand, can't really be discussed at all. I struggle to even call it a criticism or concern; it's a discussion-ender, a statement that the idea is too ridiculous to talk about at all.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT

#180

Post by abecedarius »

m3kw9 wrote: post #132
calf wrote: post #13

ChatGPT is a glorified word predictor. It isn’t sentient. It doesn’t know what it’s saying, and yes, you can coax it into admitting that it wants to take over the world or saying hurtful things (although it was specially conditioned during training to try to suppress such output). It’s simply stringing words together using an expansive statistical model built from billions of sentences. Is this true though? The publi…

It isn’t sentient because it stops when there is no input. If OpenAI were implementing a continuous feedback loop of not just textual info, but one that can sense the world like we do(visual, spatial, audio, tactile) and it keeps improves as it interacts with other people and world. It gets closer.

Careful. You just proved that a human whole brain emulation is not sentient.
Post reply on HN