201–210 of 241 posts
“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…
So calling it an AI is wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different? In this (and other comments by you I think?) you've implied the onus is on the AGI sceptics to prove to you that the LLM is not sentient (or whatever word you want to describe motive force, intent, consciousness, etc that we associate with human intelligence). This is an unreasonable request - it is on you to show that it is so. I’m forever amazed how a seemingly f…
> In this (and other comments by you I think?) you've implied the onus is on the AGI sceptics to prove to you that the LLM is not sentient (or whatever word you want to describe motive force, intent, consciousness, etc that we associate with human intelligence). This is an unreasonable request - it is on you to show that it is so. And yet, humans are assumed so without having to show it. Suppose a computer programmed…
“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…
We can effectively train humans to not do this, and some are paid very well to admit when they don't know something and they need to find the answer.
We haven't yet trained any known LLM to do the same and we have no expected timeframe for when we'll be able to do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coming to the wrong conclusion doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking through the problem.
It definitely means that it was thinking wrongly if at all. Just talk to GPT about math. You'll quickly change your mind about the possibility of it thinking.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qy5dF7bQcFjSKaW58/bad-at-ari...
“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…
The strongest answer to almost all of your questions is "Poverty of the stimulus" (wikipedia). 4 year olds are exposed to an almost microscopically tiny amount of words relative to chatgpt (you can probably contain it in a csv file that you can open in excel), and yet can reason, even develop multilingual skills and a huge amount of emotional intelligence from the very little word tokens they are exposed to. So whate…
Like putting water from a tal glass in a wide one. They understand this quite late.
Just because humans have additional more/different inputs doesn't imply chargpt can't start to learn to reason like us.
It could easily be than the fine-tuning we do (thinking through things) is similar to reading a huge amount of text like chargpt does.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Fair points. Thanks for letting me refine and discard hypotheses. While I think about those, how about this? Language is not a complete representation of thinking. We use language to describe symbols, not even very precisely, and we can convert imprecise language to more precise symbols in our brain, manipulate them as symbols, and only then turn them back into language. That’s why you often cannot perfectly translat…
I don't think that's true for all people. I know that some people manipulate words in their heads, others images, I manipulate sounds and images. Language is just a noisy medium through which we communicate the internal state of our brain or its outputs to other people / humans and ourselves.
> can learn to do math that ChatGTP never could without an API.
GPT4 does just fine in some cases and extrapolates just fine in others, e.g. ask it whether there are more wheels or doors, and try to investigate the definitions of either and see how well it adds the numbers.
> When Newton invented calculus he wasn’t predictively generating words by token;
There are very few people in history up to Newton so I don't think it's fair to hold up what is essentially a new field up to him.
> he performed logical manipulation of symbols in his brain first.
We don't know "how" he did that. We don't know that his brain manipulated symbols everything he did. We simply know that Calculus can be derived from a set of axioms following logical inference.
What you are expressing is largely true for many primates, and according to some, our brains are "just linearly scaled primate brains".
> That’s why LLMs can’t tell you where they got a specific piece of their own output from, while a human can.
I don't think that is correct. The human might provide a justification for something but that doesn't mean it is the true reason they reached a conclusion. The only way this happens is if you apply logical operators, at which point we are doing math again.
It turns out that our brains have decided long before we are even aware of the decision, such decisions may be guided by external stimulation, or even by internal stimulation since our neural networks don't have well defined components and boundaries thus neighbouring neurons can affect or even trigger circuits, and our own forward predictive models back propagate information to other circuits.
> If fundamentally human thinking was just “LLM” we would have never generated the words to train ourselves on in the first place!
I don't think that's true. Language has evolved over thousands of years in many different ways by > 80 bn humans each of whom having 80bn neurons and trillions of synapses.
Yet, we have found that models can learn to communicate with each other and derive their own languages.
I highly recommend you read Eagleman's "The Brain: The Story of You". It covers nearly everything I spoke of here and is very easy to read / listen to.
“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…
> Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different?
A recent Reddit post discussed something positive about Texas. The replies? Hundreds, maybe thousands, of comments by Redditors, all with no more content than some sneering variant of "Fix your electrical grid first", referring to the harsh winter storm of two years ago that knocked out power to much of the state. It was something to see.
If we can dismiss GPT as "just autocomplete", I can dismiss all those Redditors in the same way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but basically: Humans have the capacity to come up with new language, new ideas, and basically everything in our human world was made up by someone. ChatPT or similar, without any training data, cannot do this. Thus they're simply imitating
Humans can't either, without training data. The biggest difference between chatGPT and humans is that humans are not trained solely on language.
Anyway, I think a lot of ongoing conversations have orthogonal arguments. ChatGPT can be both impressive and generate topics broader than the average human while not giving us deeper insight into how human language works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The strongest answer to almost all of your questions is "Poverty of the stimulus" (wikipedia). 4 year olds are exposed to an almost microscopically tiny amount of words relative to chatgpt (you can probably contain it in a csv file that you can open in excel), and yet can reason, even develop multilingual skills and a huge amount of emotional intelligence from the very little word tokens they are exposed to. So whate…
Try taking ChatGpt, and teaching it on a new language that wasn't in it's training data. It will probably learn it faster than any 4 year old. You might say that's not fair because we are comparing a pre-trained LLM with a blank slate newborn. But human hardware is also pre-trained by billions of years of evolution. We are hardwired to understand language and certain world concepts. It is not fair to compare hardware…