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Simply explained: How does GPT work?

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Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#361

Post by danenania »

staticman2 wrote: post #355
danenania wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That presupposes that the only thought that exists or can exist is human thought. You can define it that way if you like, but it’s not the only definition.

I'm not saying the only thought that exists is human thought. (I believe animals can think). I'm saying using a word invented to describe animals behavior, "thought" to describe a large language model has no discernible meaning other than you think it works like an animal brain. If you think it's an open question whether it works like an animal, you should find a better word than "thought".

A CPU "runs". A disk "seeks". An OS stores data in "memory". Re-purposing terms to describe new concepts is routine in the evolution of language, and (non-human, non-biological) "thought" is a perfectly apt way to describe what we can observe in the output of massive LLMs like GPT.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#362

Post by robwwilliams »

masswerk wrote: post #260
robwwilliams wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recommend a specific work of his? What Lacan I have leaves me bemused by his brilliance but not informed. Dennett provides both without the fireworks.

Generally, don't start with the "ecrits" (writings), they are hermetic and you really have to have some head start on this. From the seminars, Livre XI, Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de le psychoanalyse (1964) may be a start, as it – in parts – aligns itself with the cybernetic research of the day. However, do not expect too much from a single reading or a single of the seminars. (Mind that this is trying to talk…

Thanks much for great pointers and precautions on reading Lacan. Even Rorty finds Lacan, Foucault and friends difficult and he read in French rather than in translations.

I was browsing in the medical school bookstore in Berlin (Humboldt/Charité) looking through the psychiatry section and (not joking) a third of the books were by Lacan. Will try with residual trepidation.

The reading list is already too deep and broad for this mortal. But G. Buzsaki, P. Churchkand, A. Damasio, D. Dennett, M. Donald, J. Hawkins, D. Hofstadter, C. Koch, R. Llinas, M. Minsky, Tommasi, J. Panksepp, Piaget, E. Pöppel … do find good traction for those of us who are neuroscientists interested in levels of compute that lead to language generation by human wetware.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#363

Post by danenania »

ttpphd wrote: post #356
giardini wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ttpphd says > "Where is your articulated theory of abstract reasoning?" If he had a complete answer to your questions then he would keep his mouth shut and go directly to META and collect $2 BN USD or get a Nobel prize (or both). What you seem to want is a peer-reviewed academic paper but what we're doing here is brainstorming about what is going on in these LLMs. He's definitely onto something here: LLM models, at t…

I don't like buying into hype mindlessly. I prefer to reason through things and apply skepticism. If people are gonna claim that a chatbot has gained sentience, I'm gonna have some tough questions.

Note I didn't say "sentience" anywhere. There's a huge difference between non-human reasoning/thinking and sentience/consciousness. I don't believe the first implies the latter... it's necessary but not at all sufficient.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#364

Post by HDThoreaun »

mhink wrote: post #135
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…

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…

I don't think that's the correct take for the room. Say the human speaks english. If you asked them what the conversation was about, and they had the full resources of the room at their disposal could they tell you? No, because the room doesn't actually allow them to understand chinese, it's just a symbol lookup table. The lookup table doesn't mean the system understands chinese, just the relationship between symbols that can lead to a coherent output.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#365

Post by lanstin »

ExtremisAndy wrote: post #205
lanstin wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a long iterative session by the end it will have forgotten the helpful hallucinations at the beginning, so then phantom methods evolve in their name and details. I wonder if it is better at some languages than others. I have been using it for Go for a week or two and it’s ok but not awesome. I am also learning how to work with it, so probably will keep at it, but it is clearly a generative model not a thi…

No idea about Go, but I was curious how GPT-4 would handle a request to generate C code, so I asked it to help me write a header-only C string processing library with convenience functions like starts_with(), ends_with(), contains(), etc.) I told it every function must only work with String structs defined as: struct String { char * text; long size; } ...or pointers to them. I then asked it to write tests for the fun…

Interesting. I haven’t tried it with C. Hopefully the training code for C is higher quality than any other language (because bad C kills). Do you have a GitHub with the output?

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#366

Post by pegasus »

int_19h wrote: post #287
pegasus wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in as far as LLMs can be said to make inventions and discoveries, this is clearly how they do it. And yes, these type of processes definitely play a big part in our human creative capacity. But to say this is all there is to it, is going too far in my opinion. We just don't know. There's still so much we don't understand about ourselves. We haven't designed ourselves after all, we just happened to "come to" one…

I mean, to me at least, that is the definition of discovery. The exact process used to spot the pattern is an implementation detail. And yes, I agree that we really just don't know too many things. But my impression is that we're overestimating just how complicated out behavior really is.

The rabbit hole goes very deep with these questions. For example, you left out above the other half of the equation: inventions. Our creative ability. Is that just more pattern recognition? And can discovery and invention be always cleanly teased apart? Also, what humans might have access to is something that is more simple than we imagine. Mystics and philosophers have tried to point towards it. One book that discusses these things in the context of western science and philosophy is Nature Likes to Hide: https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Loves-Hide-Quantum-Perspective...

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#367

Post by pegasus »

simonh wrote: post #309
pegasus wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you subscribe to a purely mechanistic world-view, i.e. computationalism, then yes. But that's a leap of faith I cannot justify taking. It's a matter of faith, because though we cannot exclude the possibility logically, it also doesn't follow necessarily from our experience of life, at least as far as I can see. Yes, so many times throughout the ages, scientists have discovered mechanisms to explain things which we…

> Then, to maintain integrity, one would have to show the same deference to these models as one shows to their fellow human. Except they’re not even remotely close to anything like human intelligence. As I wrote in another comment they are very capable systems, to the point where in some ways they show some level of elementary understanding, but in many forms of reasoning they are utterly and completely incapable. As…

They might well be in a couple of years, once they become deeply integrated with symbolic techniques. It's already happening with plugins, chain-of-thought reasoning, self-reflection etc. Soon the illusion will be very convincing and hard to shake off. Yet to me, nothing essential will have changed, and the idea of treating these systems as our equals will remain just as patently absurd as before. I expect this will the physicalist position a much more fraught decision, because it will impose some hard limits on their interaction and use of these technologies on those who subscribe to it.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#368

Post by staticman2 »

danenania wrote: post #361
staticman2 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying the only thought that exists is human thought. (I believe animals can think). I'm saying using a word invented to describe animals behavior, "thought" to describe a large language model has no discernible meaning other than you think it works like an animal brain. If you think it's an open question whether it works like an animal, you should find a better word than "thought".

A CPU "runs". A disk "seeks". An OS stores data in "memory". Re-purposing terms to describe new concepts is routine in the evolution of language, and (non-human, non-biological) "thought" is a perfectly apt way to describe what we can observe in the output of massive LLMs like GPT.

A CPU "runs" but nobody debates whether a CPU has legs and leaps around.

A OS stores "memories" but nobody argues whether the OS fondly recalls the day their son was born.

When people are debating how the LLM works and you call what the LLM does "thought" it's perfectly reasonable to conclude you believe the human brain works essentially the same as an LLM.

I just asked ChatGPT 4.0 and here's my question and the response, in the interest of full disclosure I edited out the part that I thought wasn't relevant so as not to bore:

"...if I call your processes "thoughts" is that the correct term? If not what term should I use?"

"If you want to describe the processes of an AI language model like me, it's more accurate to use terms such as "information processing," "pattern recognition," or "data-driven predictions." While these terms don't fully capture the complexity of the underlying algorithms, they are more appropriate than "thoughts," which implies consciousness and self-awareness that AI models like me do not possess.

Using the term "thoughts" might be misleading, as it could imply that the AI has a subjective experience or a sense of understanding, which is not the case. Instead, I rely on advanced algorithms to generate responses based on the patterns and associations learned from the data during my training."

So ChatGPT doesn't state you used the correct term.

I genuinely wonder if you think ChatGPT is consciouss and self-aware and you used a word that implied that intentionally, or if you just like how the word "thought" sounds and are indifferent to what people think you are implying.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#369

Post by TuringTest »

myrmidon wrote: post #72
TuringTest wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What gives you any confidence that the way GPT4 comes up with answers is qualitatively different from humans? For a start, GPT-4 doesn't include in its generation the current state of its internal knowledge used so far; any text built can only use at most the few words already generated in the current session as a kind of short-term memory. Biological brains OTOH have a rhythm with feedback mechanisms which adapt t…

> For a start, GPT-4 doesn't include in its generation the current state of its internal knowledge used so far Sure. But are you certain that you NEED write access to long term memory to think ? Would your thinking capabilities degrade meaningfully if that was taken away?

Yes, I would say that a brain without the capacity to form new memories has degraded thinking capabilities.

Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?

#370

Post by winternett »

Analog24 wrote: post #24
winternett wrote: post #21

Where is IBM's Watson in all this? It seems as if it never existed? That is just one example of how companies keep making these grand presentations and under-delivering on results... Plain and simple the over-hyped GPT editions are NOT truly AI, it is scripting to assemble coherent looking sentences backed by scripts that parse content off of of stored data and the open web into presented responses.... There is no "a…

What would be the differentiating factor(s) for true AI/intelligence in your opinion?

Self sustained and totally independent mental capacity by an IT system... The ability to create and store memory and reasoning on it's own... This definition is not made by me, it's also a lot more vast... If you look up Spielberg's AI or I robot, Terminator, or any of those other films or books ln the matter, the definition is out there.

Use of the word "Intelligence" in Artificial Intelligence implies and indicates that humans are not involved in the equation past the point of initial creation and that it sustains itself and grows on it's own after a point... So far the various GPT models solely rely on human intervention and updates, which is bewildering to some like me why it's being marketed as Ai.

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