Simply explained: How does GPT work? • Hacker News Board

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#161

Post by ttpphd » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

danenania wrote: post #123

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #104

> It is able to link ideas logically, defend them, adapt to the context, roleplay, and (especially the latest GPT-4) avoid contradicting itself. Isn't this just responding to the context provided? Like if I say "Write a Limerick about cats eating rats" isn't it just generating words that will come after that context, and correctly guessing that they'll rhyme in a certain way? It's really cool that it can generate coh…

It's all about emergent complexity. While you can reduce it to "just" statistical auto-completion of the next word, we are seeing evidence of abstraction and reasoning produced as a higher-order effect of these simple completions. It's a bit like the Sagan quote: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe". Sometimes for GPT to "just" complete the next word in a way that humans…

This is really lofty language without much evidence to back it up. It fluffs up techie people and makes them feel powerful, but it doesn't really describe large language models nor does it describe linguistic processes.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#162

Post by Der_Einzige » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 5:56 PM UTC

thanatropism wrote: post #111

masswerk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that there are no demons underneath Given that Lacan already proposed the unconscious as structured language-like more than half a century ago and described attention in his turn on Freud's impulse in favor of his concept of derive , we may say, this is pretty much where our own demons live. (I actually do think that revisiting Lacan in this context may be productive.)

We need to form some sort of guild of engineers who think Deleuze, Latour, Lacan et caterva should be read within our disciplines.

They would be called "unemployable" because they are literal charlatans.

Please end our strange fascination with fashionable nonsense. Freud was wrong. There is no Oedipus complex. Everything lacan proposed was wrong. Deleuze and Guattari's mental health clinic failed spectacularly, and Deleuze ended up killing himself at the end (supposedly due to back pain?)

They literally describe their thought as being "Schizoanalysis". How many more red flags do you need?

Also, the more "modern" takes on this from techno folks, such as from Nick Land (Fanged Noumena), are openly fascist - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

If you want cultural critique from smart people without it turning into fashionable nonsense, I recommend Mark Fischer, but be warned, he too killed himself.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#163

Post by goldfeld » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 5:57 PM UTC

iliane5 wrote: post #136

i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #130

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who takes the Chinese Room scenario seriously, or at least can see how it applies to any of this. I cannot see that it matters if a computer understands something. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, and your only need is for it to quack and walk like a duck, then it doesn’t matter if it’s actually a duck or not for all intents and purposes. It only matters if you…

What I find really entertaining is the "just predicting the next token" argument. If just predicting the next token can produce similar or better results than the almighty human intelligence on some tasks, then maybe there's a bit of hubris in how smart we think we actually are.

[0]if we get a bit quantum (or God for some), then backtracking could happen by collapsing the dead-ends and "changing" history to stay with what turns out to be the solid plan. Could emergent conscience on AI's neurons do the planning and reasoning that it rather seems to be doing but ML experts will say it is not? If our conscience could by any chance reside not in the electrical currents of the wetware, could AI's reason also not reside in tokens? Is there some mysterious process possibly taking place and will philosophy probe it?

0: pasted from another thread

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#164

Post by robwwilliams » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

swframe2 wrote: post #133

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #46

It predicts the next word/token based on the previous pile of words/tokens. Given a large enough model (as in GPT3+) it can actually output some rather useful text because the probabilities it learned on what the next token should be are rather accurate.

(my opinion) It is not predicting based on 'words/tokens'. It is transforming the general words/tokens embeddings into a context specific embedding which encodes "meaning". It is not an n-gram model of words. It is more like an n-gram model of "meaning". It doesn't encode all the "meanings" that humans are able to but with addition labelled data it should get closer. I think gpt is a component which can be combined t…

Yes: this comment is one the mark wrt “a component of AGI” just like Wernike’s and Broca’s areas of neocortex are modules needed for human cognition.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#165

Post by tines » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

fl7305 wrote: post #159

tines wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes for GPT to "just" complete the next word in a way that humans find plausible, it must, along the way, develop a model of the world, theory of mind, abstract reasoning. etc. I did an experiment recently where I asked ChatGPT to "tell me an idea [you] have never heard before". ChatGPT replied with what sounded like an idea for a startup, which was delivering farm-fresh vegetables to customers' doors. This i…

> the model of the world, theory of mind, etc. are statistical illusions which have observable differences from the real thing. Is that a falsifiable claim? What would an empirical test look like that would determine whether the claim ("GPT-4 does not have a model of the world") is correct or not?

I guess ChatGPT having a model of the world is not something I'd argue against, my mistake. I do think the data it contains represents a quite nuanced model of the world. But I don't think this is a very strong claim. A geographical map has a model of the world too.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#166

Post by ben_w » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

myrmidon wrote: post #128

ben_w wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

α: most of those sentences are meaningless so they won't come up in normal use β: if statements can grab patterns just fine in most languages, they're not limited to pure equality γ: it's a thought experiment about how easy it can be to create illusions without real depth, and specifically not about making an AGI that stands up to scrutiny

> most of those sentences are meaningless so they won't come up in normal use Feel free to come up with a better entropy model then. Stackoverflow gives me confidence that it will be between 5 and 11 bits per word anyway [ https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8480/what-is... ]. > if statements can grab patterns just fine in most languages, they're not limited to pure equality This does not help you one bit…

> What is the entropy per word of random yet grammatical text?

More colourless green dreams sleep furiously in garden path sentences than I have

> This does not help you one bit.

Dunno, how many bits does ELIZA? I assume more than 1…

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#167

Post by mithr » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #74

mithr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have a mind. When you ask it "think of a number between 0 and 100", it delivers the most statistically likely (with some random variance) response to your input text, based on what it's been trained on. In other words, it's seen (via its extremely large training set) that when asked that specific question, the response is most often a character from a particular set of characters, which happens to represen…

It's more complicated than that, because it can competently answer many questions that it has a 0% chance of having seen before.

I didn't mean to suggest that it's just a large mapping between exact inputs it's seen before and exact outputs — it's definitely complex! The size of the model allows it to infer statistical probabilities about related words even without having seen a particular sequence before.

In a sense, it's able to take an "educated" guess at what is statistically likely to be the response you're looking for given the words in a particular input, in addition to the context it's seen in your interaction. To do that, it uses what it learned about the words, their sequences, their relationships to other words, etc.

But at the end of the day, none of that means it has any "understanding" of what it's outputting. That's why there have been countless examples of it outputting very well-constructed, real-sounding descriptions of books/papers/etc that never existed — because it's really good at generating sentences that have the right "shape", but it has no way of knowing whether the contents of the sentence are actually true. It just knows that, given what it's seen in its training set (again, through a complex web of relationships), the response it generated is likely to look like something someone would have written if they were provided with the same input.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#168

Post by robwwilliams » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:03 PM UTC

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.

LoL: how many of us are trying to kiss up to our future AGI overlords or children?

I think almost all in HN space would confidently assert that there is no AGI lurking in GPT4+. But add the right higher order modules and self-controlled recursion and Bingo.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#169

Post by masswerk » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #162

thanatropism wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to form some sort of guild of engineers who think Deleuze, Latour, Lacan et caterva should be read within our disciplines.

They would be called "unemployable" because they are literal charlatans. Please end our strange fascination with fashionable nonsense. Freud was wrong. There is no Oedipus complex. Everything lacan proposed was wrong. Deleuze and Guattari's mental health clinic failed spectacularly, and Deleuze ended up killing himself at the end (supposedly due to back pain?) They literally describe their thought as being "Schizoana…

"There is no Oedipus complex" is, using your own words, "fashionable nonsense". Of course there is a crucial conflict as we learn rules, and this establishes a universal foundation of ethics. And of course this takes place in the realm of our very object relations. Not bothering about what a concept actually means and/or describes is not a free card for criticism. (Neither does generalization over an entire section of science and human thinking help particularly.) – Sorry for the harsh words, but this actually bothers me.

Regarding charlatans, mind that there are already few who have actually studied this. (I'm one of them.)

Regarding Lacan, he provides us with an established theory of "talking machines", and, in a philosophical context, how they relate to our very freedom (or, what freedom may even be). This isn't totally useless in our current situation, and NB, it's actually quite the opposite of fascism.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#170

Post by i-use-nixos-btw » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

barrysteve wrote: post #157

i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #130

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who takes the Chinese Room scenario seriously, or at least can see how it applies to any of this. I cannot see that it matters if a computer understands something. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, and your only need is for it to quack and walk like a duck, then it doesn’t matter if it’s actually a duck or not for all intents and purposes. It only matters if you…

I have tried multiple times to use Chatgpt to generate Unreal c++ code. It does not do. It spits out class names for slate objects, that inherit from other slate objects. Chatgpt doesn't understand inheritance. It just guesses what might fit inside a parameter grouping, and never suggests something with the right class type. For my use case, it has never quacked like a duck, so to speak. It never performed , the word…

Yes, in this instance I understand failings of today (though copilot has a much better hit rate, and at the moment it’s a great augmentation to coding if you treat it like an enthusiastic intern).

My question is about the future. The argument goes that a machine can never understand Chinese, even if it is capable of interpreting Chinese and responding to or acting on the input perfectly every time. My reply is that, if it acts as if it understands Chinese in every situation, then there’s no measurable way of distinguishing it from understanding.

It’s kind of like the whole string theory vs SUSY vs… argument in physics. If the only outcomes are things that agree with the Standard Model in all measurable aspects, and don’t provide any measurable distinction, then for all intents and purposes they don’t matter. That’s why their active areas of research are looking for the measurable distinctions.

FWIW, supersymmetry models predict measurable things (that so far have only ruled out those models when tested) but have applications elsewhere. String theory research has had implications in mathematics, condensed matter, and a bunch of other places. They’re useful.

But that’s beside the point, because the premise of the Chinese room problem is that there exists a machine that passes all scenarios, where no measurable difference can be found, and that this machine does not understand Chinese.