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Simply explained: How does GPT work?

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Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#181

Post by ttpphd »

danenania wrote: post #172
ttpphd wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The evidence is ChatGPT's output. Unless you're saying that passing the bar exam, writing working code, etc. doesn't require abstract reasoning abilities or a model of the world?

It's a large language model. It is fed training data. It is not that impressive when it spits out stuff that looks like its training data. You are the one asserting things without evidence.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#182

Post by tines »

danenania wrote: post #178
noahtallen wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's certainly fair to say that GPT's "reasoning" is different from human reasoning. But I think the core debate we're having is whether the difference really matters in some situations. Certainly, Midjourney's "creativity" is different from human creativity. But it is producing results that we marvel at. It's creative not because it's doing the exact same philosophical thing humans do, but because it can pro…

Most arguments that AI can't really reason/think/invent essentially reduce to defining these terms as things only humans can do. Even if you had an LLM-based AGI that passes the Turing test 100% of the time, cures cancer, unites quantum physics with relativity, and so on, many of the people who say that ChatGPT can't reason will keep saying the same thing about the AGI.

I don't think there's anything wrong with people trying to see what, if anything, differentiates ChatGPT from humans. Curing cancer etc. is useful, as is ChatGPT, regardless of how it achieves these results. But how it achieves them is important to many people, including myself. If it's no different from humans, then we need to treat it like a human---well no, strike that, we need to treat it _well_ and protect it and give it rights and so on. If it's a fancy calculator, then we don't.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#183

Post by simonh »

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.

I think it’s undeniable that LLMs encode knowledge, but the way they do so and what their answers imply, compared to what the same answer from a human would imply, are completely different.

For example if a human explains the process for solving a mathematical problem, we know that person knows how to solve that problem. That’s not necessarily true of an LLM. They can give such explanations because they have been trained on many texts explaining those procedures, therefore they can generate texts of that form. However texts containing an actual mathematical problem and the workings for solving it are a completely different class of text for an LLM. The probabilistic token weightings for the maths text explanation don’t help at all. So yes these are fascinating, knowledgeable and even in some ways very intelligent systems. However it a radically different form of intelligence from us, in ways we find difficult to reason about.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#184

Post by bulkprotocol »

JieJie wrote: post #132
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 literally lost a friend of thirty years yesterday because she is wedded to the Chinese Room analogy so fiercely, she refuses to engage on the subject at all. For all the terrible things people worry about ChatGPT doing, this was not one that I thought I was going to have to deal with. (edit: ChatGPT was not involved at all, but when I suggested she give it a try to see for herself, that was the end of it.)

You blew up a 30 year friendship over an...analogy?

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#185

Post by robwwilliams »

masswerk wrote: post #180
robwwilliams wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please no! Read systems neuroscience. Like Hassabis does. Or if of a philosophical persuasion, then Dennett or Rorty.

Much of cognitive science reinvents wheels that had been established in the 1920s and 1930s already, namely in sociology of knowledge and related fields. fRMI actually often confirms what had been already observed in a psychoanalytic context. (I don't think it's a good general advice to totally ignore what is already known.)

But Lacan? And no, there is a vast new world of cognitive neuroscience that was undreamed even 10 years ago.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#186

Post by bulkprotocol »

Zetice wrote: post #155
cjblack wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

He's got a habit of self aggrandizing, antagonism, and deception in an effort to promote himself and his brand, I worry that his explanations are designed to maximally benefit him, rather than to maximally explain the topic. He's a brilliant man, I just don't trust him.

Is that the case with this specific article?

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#187

Post by danenania »

tines wrote: post #182
danenania wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most arguments that AI can't really reason/think/invent essentially reduce to defining these terms as things only humans can do. Even if you had an LLM-based AGI that passes the Turing test 100% of the time, cures cancer, unites quantum physics with relativity, and so on, many of the people who say that ChatGPT can't reason will keep saying the same thing about the AGI.

I don't think there's anything wrong with people trying to see what, if anything, differentiates ChatGPT from humans. Curing cancer etc. is useful, as is ChatGPT, regardless of how it achieves these results. But how it achieves them is important to many people, including myself. If it's no different from humans, then we need to treat it like a human---well no, strike that, we need to treat it _well_ and protect it an…

I don't think there's anything wrong with it either. It's an important debate. I just think the arguments usually become very circular and repetitive. If there's nothing an AI could ever do to convince you that it's thinking or reasoning, then really you should be explicit and say "I don't believe an AI can produce human thought or human reasoning" or "an AI is not a human" and nobody will disagree with you on those points.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#188

Post by agentultra »

fl7305 wrote: post #174
agentultra wrote: post #29

A good article and well articulated! I would change the introduction to be more impartial and not anthropomorphize GPT. It is not smart and it is not skilled in any tasks other than that for which it is designed. I have the same reservations about the conclusion. The whole middle of the article is good. But to then compare the richness of our human experience to an algorithm that was plainly explained? And then to sp…

> it is not skilled in any tasks other than that for which it is designed. But it wasn't designed. It's not a computer program, where one can make confident predictions about its limitations based on the source code. It's a very large black box. It was trained on guessing the next word. Does that fact alone prove that it cannot have evolved certain internal structures during the training? Do you claim that an artific…

> It's a very large black box. It was trained on guessing the next word. Does that fact alone prove that it cannot have evolved certain internal structures during the training?

Yes. There is interesting work to formalize these black boxes to be able to connect what was generated back to its inputs. There’s no need to ascribe any belief that they can evolve, modify themselves, or spontaneously develop intelligence.

As far as I’m aware no man made machine has ever exhibited the ability to evolve.

> Do you claim that an artificial neural network with trillions of neurons can never be intelligent, no matter the structure?

If, by structure, you mean some algorithm and memory layout in a modern computer I think this sounds like a reasonable claim.

NN, RNN, etc are super, super cool. But they’re not magic. And what I’m arguing in this thread is that people who don’t understand the maths and research are making wild claims about AGI that are not justified.

> Look, I realize that "GPT-4 is intelligent" is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

That’s the crux of it.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#189

Post by masswerk »

robwwilliams wrote: post #185
masswerk wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of cognitive science reinvents wheels that had been established in the 1920s and 1930s already, namely in sociology of knowledge and related fields. fRMI actually often confirms what had been already observed in a psychoanalytic context. (I don't think it's a good general advice to totally ignore what is already known.)

But Lacan? And no, there is a vast new world of cognitive neuroscience that was undreamed even 10 years ago.

> But Lacan?

Well, if you're in need of an established theory of (semantically driven) talking machines and what derives from this, and what this may mean for us in terms of freedom, look no further.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#190

Post by robwwilliams »

nicpottier wrote: post #76
EForEndeavour wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The hypothesis that I find most compelling and intuitive is that language is thought and vice versa. We made a thing really good at language and it turns out that's also pretty good at thought. One possible conclusion might be that the only thing keeping GPT algos from going full AGI is a loop and small context windows.

Add the strange loops and embed in a body the interacts with a real or rich virtual word—that should do the trick. Of course there should ideally be an emotional-motivational context.
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