Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Simply explained: How does GPT work?

confusedbit.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 392 posts

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#231

Post by iliane5 »

tines wrote: post #145
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.

> If just predicting the next token can produce similar or better results than the almighty human intelligence on some tasks But it's not better than almighty human intelligence, it _is_ human intelligence, because it was trained on a mass of some of the best human intelligence in all recorded history (I say this because the good stuff like Aristotle got preserved while the garbage disappeared (this was true until th…

> But it's not better than almighty human intelligence, it _is_ human intelligence, because it was trained on a mass of some of the best human intelligence in all recorded history

Sure, I was saying "better" in the sense that if for X task, it can do better than Y% of humans.

> since we hand-fed it the answers, it falls a little flat for me

We didn't really hand-fed it any answers though did we? If you put a human in a white box all its life, with access to the entire dataset on a screen but no social interaction, nothing to see aside from the text, nothing to hear, nothing to feel, nothing to taste, etc, it'd be very impressed if they were then able to create answers that seem to display such thoughtful and complex understanding of the world.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#232

Post by brycedriesenga »

pegasus wrote: post #219
mhink wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my understanding of the Chinese Room example, the resolution to the argument is that the *human* may not understand Chinese, but the *system as a whole* can be said to understand it. With this in mind, I think asking whether ChatGPT *in and of itself* is "conscious" or has "agency" is sort of like asking if the speech center of a particular human's brain is "conscious" or has "agency": it's not really a question t…

Good point, that very much vibes with my thoughts on this matter. Lately, I've been contemplating the analogy between the role LLMs might take within society with that of the brain's language center* in human behavior. There's definitely a way in which we resemble these models. More than some might like to admit. The cleverness, but also the hallucinating, gaslighting and other such behaviors. And on the other hand,…

What goals do we have that aren't essentially all boiled down to whatever evolution, genetics, and our environment have sorted of molded into us?

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#233

Post by tines »

danenania wrote: post #209
tines wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and nobody will disagree with you on those points But that's the point, they do. Even on HN there are many comments saying that humans are just fancy autocomplete, i.e. there's no fundamental difference between humans and LLMs.

"there's no fundamental difference between humans and LLMs." I think that's a straw man. No one disagrees that humans and LLMs produce cognition differently. One uses a wet, squishy brain. The other uses silicon chips. There's no disagreement here.

> One uses a wet, squishy brain. The other uses silicon chips.

Well then, that settles the debate!

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#234

Post by fl7305 »

tines wrote: post #165
fl7305 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Thanks. To get to what I think is the core of your argument (?)

> ChatGPT simply "finds" training data where someone asked a similar question, and produces the likely response, which is an idea that it has actually "heard," or seen in its training data, before.

I can definitely see a scenario where we manage to build an ultra-intelligent machine that can figure out any logical puzzle we put to it, but where it still isn't "creative" in any way.

But GPT-4 seems to be not just intelligent, but also creative.

Have you seen the "confetti has left the cannon" example?

  For the curious, here was the conversation I had:
  ME: What's another saying similar to: "The cat is out of the bag" or "The genie is out of the bottle"?
  
  chatgpt: Another similar saying is "the toothpaste is out of the tube." Like the other two expressions, this phrase conveys the idea that something has been revealed or unleashed, and it cannot be undone or put back into its original state.
  
  ME: Can you invent a new phrase that has the same meaning, which is completely new?
  
  chatgpt: Certainly! Here's a new phrase with a similar meaning: "The confetti has left the cannon." This phrase suggests that once something is out in the open or has happened, it's impossible to reverse or contain it, much like confetti that has been shot out of a cannon during a celebration.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35346683

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#235

Post by pegasus »

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.

There's definitely hubris in how clever we consider ourselves. And encountering these AIs will hopefully bring a healthy adjustment there. But another manifestation of our hubris is the way we over-valorize our cleverness, making us feel oh so superior to other species, for example. Emotions, desires, agency, which we share with our animal cousins (and plants maybe also), but which software systems lack, are equally important to our life experience.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#236

Post by brycedriesenga »

tines wrote: post #198
autokad wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took the basics of a dream I had, and asked it to turn it into a short story. the result was pretty good. Is it using stuff already to seed its responses? sure, but thats what we do to. Nothing you do or say wasn't taught to you. But these are not simply parroting responses. I said this to chatgpt: I had a dream that me and my friend were in a car accident, and we had a choice in deciding how to use 1 hour. we coul…

> Nothing you do or say wasn't taught to you. If nothing we do or say wasn't taught to us then where did all human knowledge come from in the first place? This doesn't hold up. (Again, being direct for the sake of argument, please forgive any unkindness.)

From our environment, genetics, and other people. We simply are able to take in more inputs (i.e. not just text) than LLMs.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#237

Post by pegasus »

autokad wrote: post #179
tines wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm going to be brusque for the sake of the argument, I very much could be wrong and I don't even know how much I believe of the argument I'm making.) > chatgpt doesnt just feed us back answers we already taught it True, there is some structure to the answers we already taught it that it statistically mimics as well. > It learned relationships and semantics so it can apply that knowledge to do something novel Can yo…

I took the basics of a dream I had, and asked it to turn it into a short story. the result was pretty good. Is it using stuff already to seed its responses? sure, but thats what we do to. Nothing you do or say wasn't taught to you. But these are not simply parroting responses. I said this to chatgpt: I had a dream that me and my friend were in a car accident, and we had a choice in deciding how to use 1 hour. we coul…

Yes, but that dream? It could never have it. Sure, it can produce at times very convincing descriptions of supposed dreams, but not actually have the experience of dreaming. Because of that, there will always be ways it will eventually miss-step when trying to mimic human narratives.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#238

Post by missingrib »

i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #170
barrysteve wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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.

I'm not sure if you understood the argument. The argument isn't asserting that there is a measurable way of distinguishing it, it's actually claiming that regardless of how well it seems like it understands Chinese, it doesn't actually understand Chinese. It's about intentionality and consciousness.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#239

Post by iliane5 »

dvt wrote: post #223
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, sad…

There's no denying LLMs are anything but sentient however is sentience really needed for intelligence? I feel like if we can have machines that are X% smarter than a human could ever get for any given task, it'd be a much better outcome for us if they were not sentient.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#240

Post by pegasus »

brycedriesenga wrote: post #236
tines wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing you do or say wasn't taught to you. If nothing we do or say wasn't taught to us then where did all human knowledge come from in the first place? This doesn't hold up. (Again, being direct for the sake of argument, please forgive any unkindness.)

From our environment, genetics, and other people. We simply are able to take in more inputs (i.e. not just text) than LLMs.

I would agree that much more than we're usually ready to admit to ourselves is second-hand, but saying everything is going too far. Inventions and discoveries are happening all the time, at all scales.
Post reply on HN