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Simply explained: How does GPT work?

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Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#41

Post by alkonaut »

What I wonder most is how it encodes knowledge/state other than in the sequence of queries/responses. Does it not have a "mind"?

If I play a number guessing game, can I tell it to "think of a number between 0 and 100" and then tell me if the secret number is higher/lower than my guess (For a sequence of N guesses where it can concistently remember it's original number)? If not, why? Because it doesn't have context? If it can: why? Where is that context?

To a layman it would seem you always have two parts of the context for a conversation. What you have said, and what you haven't said, but maybe only thought of. The "think of a number" being the simplest example, but there are many others. Shouldn't this be pretty easy to tack on to a chat bot if it's not there? It's basically just an contextual output that the chat bot logs ("tells itself") and then refers to just like the rest of the conversation?

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#42

Post by [deleted] »

vadansky wrote: post #31
habosa wrote: post #20

Is it possible that we don’t truly know how it works? That there is some emergent behavior inside these models that we’ve created but not yet properly described? I’ve read a few of these articles but I’m still not completely satisfied.

I hate being the bearish guy during the hype cycle, but I think a lot of that is just anthropomorphizing it. They fed it TBs of human text, it spits out human text, we think it's humanesque. Of course maybe I'm wrong and it's AGI and it will find this comment and torture me for for insulting it's intelligence.

[deleted]

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#44

Post by Workaccount2 »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #32
onetrickwolf wrote: post #7

I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.

The advanced capabilities of scaled up transformer models fed oodles of training data has burdened me with pseudo-philosophical questions about the nature of cognition that I am not well equipped to articulate, and make me wish I'd studied more neuroscience, philosophy, and comp sci earlier in life. A possibly off-topic thought dump: - What is thinking, exactly? - Does human (or superhuman) thinking require conscious…

> has burdened me with pseudo-philosophical questions about the nature of cognition that I am not well equipped to articulate, and make me wish I'd studied more neuroscience, philosophy, and comp sci earlier in life

Welcome to the club. There pretty much are no answers, just theories primarily played out as thought experiments. Its on of those areas where you can pick out who knows less (or is being disingenuous) by seeing who most confidently speaks about having answers.

We don't know what consciousness is, and we don't know what it means to "think". There, I saved you a decade of reading.

Edit: My choice theory is panpsychism, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ but again, we don't yet know how to verify any of this (or any other theory).

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#45

Post by fnordpiglet »

agentultra wrote: post #37
onetrickwolf wrote: post #7

I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.

It's not thinking, plain and simple. Anything it generates means nothing to the algorithm. When you read it and interpret what was generated you're experiencing something like the Barnum-Forer effect. It's sort of like reading a horoscope and believing it predicted your future.

Except for when as an expert in a field you ask it questions about that are subtle and it answers in a cogent and insightful way, and as an expert you are fully aware of that. It’s not reasonable to call that a Barnum-Forer effect. It’s perhaps not thinking (but perhaps we need to more clearly define thinking), but its not a self-deception either.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#47

Post by [deleted] »

alkonaut wrote: post #41

What I wonder most is how it encodes knowledge/state other than in the sequence of queries/responses. Does it not have a "mind"? If I play a number guessing game, can I tell it to "think of a number between 0 and 100" and then tell me if the secret number is higher/lower than my guess (For a sequence of N guesses where it can concistently remember it's original number)? If not, why? Because it doesn't have context? I…

[deleted]

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#48

Post by myrmidon »

agentultra wrote: post #37
onetrickwolf wrote: post #7

I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.

It's not thinking, plain and simple. Anything it generates means nothing to the algorithm. When you read it and interpret what was generated you're experiencing something like the Barnum-Forer effect. It's sort of like reading a horoscope and believing it predicted your future.

What gives you any confidence that the way GPT4 comes up with answers is qualitatively different from humans?

Why should the emulation of human though, a result of unguided evolution, require anything more than properly wired silicon?

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#49

Post by rootusrootus »

vadansky wrote: post #31
habosa wrote: post #20

Is it possible that we don’t truly know how it works? That there is some emergent behavior inside these models that we’ve created but not yet properly described? I’ve read a few of these articles but I’m still not completely satisfied.

I hate being the bearish guy during the hype cycle, but I think a lot of that is just anthropomorphizing it. They fed it TBs of human text, it spits out human text, we think it's humanesque. Of course maybe I'm wrong and it's AGI and it will find this comment and torture me for for insulting it's intelligence.

> I hate being the bearish guy

No, please keep it up. Someone needs to keep pushing back against all the "I don't understand it, but it says smart-sounding things, and I don't understand the human brain either, so they're probably the same, it must be sentient!"

It's a pretty handy technology, to be sure. But it's still just a tool.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#50

Post by nitnelave »

seydor wrote: post #17

This is confusing, using the semantic vectors arithmetic of embeddings is not very relevant to transformers and its completely missing the word 'attention'. I don't think transformers are that difficult to explain to people , but it is hard to explain "why" they work. But i think it's important for everyone to look under the hood and know that there are no demons underneath.

I was trying to keep the article at a level that everyone understands, from middle school up. I thought about going a bit deeper in the structure and mentioning attention, but my problem is that the intuitive concept of "attention" is quite different from the mathematical reality of an attention layer, and I'm sure I would have lost quite a few people there. It's always a trade-off :)
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