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Simply explained: How does GPT work?

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Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#221

Post by myrmidon »

agentultra wrote: post #142
myrmidon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is that this is not thinking, smart, or "general intelligence." Why not? I would already, without hesitation, describe GPT4 as strictly more intelligent than my cat and also all gradeschoolers I've ever known... Maybe some adults, too- depends on your exact definition of intelligence. > Let's say I write an algorithm [...], you can't tell if [input] was produced by GTP-4 or my algorithm. Sure, I'd call you…

> I would already, without hesitation, describe GPT4 as strictly more intelligent than my cat Well if we're going to define intelligence based one what you believe it is then why don't you explain it? I'm not the one claiming to know what intelligence is or that we can even simulate a system capable of emulating this characteristic. So if you hold the specification for human thought I think you ought to share it with…

My explicit definition for "intelligence" would be something with an internal model of that you can exchange information with.

Cat is better at this than the robot vacuum, gradeschooler is better still and GPT (to me) seems to trump all of those.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#222

Post by pulvinar »

brazzy wrote: post #203
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…

Almost all people almost never have truly original ideas. When asked to "tell me an idea [you] have never heard before", they will remix stuff they have heard to get something that "feels" like it's new. In some cases they'll actually be wrong and reproduce something they heard and forgot about hearing, but remember the concept. Most of the time, the remix will be fairly superficial. And remixing stuff it has heard b…

Certainly. I mean we've seen all 26 letters before-- ChatGPT is just remixing them.

How does one actually measure novelty, without having to know everything first?

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#223

Post by dvt »

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…

> It seems to me to posit that to understand requires that the understandee is human.

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose we make first contact tomorrow, and we meet some intelligent aliens. What are some questions you would ask them? How would you decide on their sentience or understanding?

Sentience involves goal-seeking, understanding, sensory inputs, first-personal mental states (things like pain, happiness, sadness, depression, love, etc.), a sense of what philosophers like Elizabeth Anscombe call I-ness, etc. Most of this stuff, to me, seems like is language-agnostic. Even a baby that can't speak feels pain or happiness. Even a dog feels anxiety or affection.

LLMs are a cute parlor trick, but a phantasm nonetheless.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#224

Post by iliane5 »

simonh wrote: post #183
iliane5 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tra…

Well it's like birds and airplanes. Do airplanes "fly" in the same sense that birds do? Of course not, birds flap their wings and airplanes need to be built, fueled and flown by humans. You could argue that the way birds fly is "more natural" or superior in some ways but I've yet to see a bird fly Mach 3.

If you replace the analogy with humans and LLMs, LLMs won't ever reason or understand things in the same way we do, but if/when their output gets much smarter than us across the board, will it really matter?

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#225

Post by fl7305 »

agentultra wrote: post #188
fl7305 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> There’s no need to ascribe any belief that they can evolve, modify themselves, or spontaneously develop intelligence.

But neural networks clearly evolve and are modified during training. Otherwise they would never get any better than a random collection of weights and biases, right?

Is the claim then that an artificial neural network can never be trained in such a way that it will exhibit intelligent behavior?

>> 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.

Yes, that's what I mean.

Is your claim that no Turing machine can be intelligent?

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

> That’s the crux of it.

And I provided links to such evidence. Is there a rebuttal?

If we're saying that GPT-4 is not intelligent, there must be questions that intelligent humans can answer that GPT-4 can't, right?

What is the type of logical problem one can give GPT-4 that it cannot solve, but most humans will?

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#226

Post by throwbadubadu »

Method-X wrote: post #212
zackmorris wrote: post #175

On the other hand, many people who are not ready to change, who do not have the skills or who cannot afford to reeducate are threatened. That's me. After programming since the '80s, I'm just so tired. So much work, so much progress, so many dreams lived or shattered. Only to end up here at this strange local maximum, with so much potential, destined to forever run in place by the powers that be. The fundamentals form…

It sounds like your mindset is the root of your struggles. Embracing change and adapting to new technologies has always been crucial in our industry. Instead of waiting for help from others, take control and collaborate with like-minded people. If you don't like the status quo, work toward changing it.

I think this is a bit hard .. and also unfair to repeat that embrace-change-mantra, because what he says is as absurd as at the same time totally true (:

I'd hope some of us would just be there in 60 years to just tell the future: "Heee just embrace it, ya know" .. nuff said.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#227

Post by defgeneric »

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.

I agree generally but read the post and it only mentions cellular automata briefly and promotes Wolfram Alpha once. Overall it's very good at moving from Markov chains to neural nets with decent examples and graphics.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#228

Post by pegasus »

lordnacho wrote: post #220
kmod wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example that I think garners more agreement that properties of a limit ("really understanding") don't necessarily mean that any path towards that limit has the properties of the limit. I think there's a lot of room for disagreement about whether this is a factually-accurate analogy and I'm not trying to argue either way on that, just trying to answer your question about how one might make these sorts of arg…

I think what this points towards is that we care about the internal mechanism. If we prod it externally and it gives the wrong answer, then the internal mechanism is definitely wrong. But if we get the right answers and then open it up and find the internals are still wrong, it's still wrong. This illuminates a contradiction: the walks like a duck thing is incompatible with the internals being a duck. If you see a cr…

I think @dvt's comment above is a good attempt at answering this question. I agree with him that intrinsic motivation and a capacity for suffering, hope and all the other emotions (which we share with pretty much all animals, if not plants too) are at the top of the list. Cleverness is there also, but not at the top of the list.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#229

Post by pulvinar »

SilasX wrote: post #173
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…

>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? I guess ... this is what confuses me. GPT -- at least, the core functionality of GPT-based products as presented to the end user -- can't just be a language model, can it? There must be vanishingly view examples from its training text th…

I think you're really undervaluing the capabilities of language models. I would put an AND gate and this language model at opposite ends in terms of complexity. It is not just words, it's a very broad and deep hierarchy of learned all-encompassing concepts. That's what gives it its power.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#230

Post by IKLOL »

tim333 wrote: post #214
zackmorris wrote: post #175

On the other hand, many people who are not ready to change, who do not have the skills or who cannot afford to reeducate are threatened. That's me. After programming since the '80s, I'm just so tired. So much work, so much progress, so many dreams lived or shattered. Only to end up here at this strange local maximum, with so much potential, destined to forever run in place by the powers that be. The fundamentals form…

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... In the long run tech does a bit too well with "food in their belly" to the point that obesity is the main problem in the English speaking world. As to programming it's quite cool getting chat GTP to write code and stuff. If you can't beat it make use of it I guess.

All the while housing, healthcare, education, and the things that matter once you've achieved food prosperity are disappearing at a rapid rate. This makes people turn to their baser needs more often, food and pornography and other stimulus.
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