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Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

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11–20 of 33 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

#11
post #4

No, it's capable of reasoning, but it gained its knowledge of how the world works through analyzing things that were written or drawn by (mostly) humans.

Reasoning how? LLMs are statistical models, not brains.

Reasoning in behavior - you ask it to explain things and it does; it gives reasons, motivations, nuance, explains connections, clarifies points. That's reasoning.

Re: Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

#12
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasoning how? LLMs are statistical models, not brains.

Reasoning in behavior - you ask it to explain things and it does; it gives reasons, motivations, nuance, explains connections, clarifies points. That's reasoning.

There's a pretty significant gap between being able to give reasons and being able to actually reason (as a verb). The latter requires complex cognitive faculties not present in a mathematical model of the English language.

Re: Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

#13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasoning in behavior - you ask it to explain things and it does; it gives reasons, motivations, nuance, explains connections, clarifies points. That's reasoning.

There's a pretty significant gap between being able to give reasons and being able to actually reason (as a verb). The latter requires complex cognitive faculties not present in a mathematical model of the English language.

LLMs are tool, the important question to ask of a tool is "is this useful", not "does it work like my brain does". I don't see why you care about the internals, and not about the actual outputs.

Re: Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasoning how? LLMs are statistical models, not brains.

How are humans reasoning? Through a logical or statistical internal model. So if you make your model through slow thinking and discovery chatgpt just builds it to a billion words. The result is the same

The result is certainly not the same.

A LLM (that hasn't been trained on any data regarding this topic) is unlikely to demonstrate the same bouba/kiki effect seen among humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

Re: Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

#15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a pretty significant gap between being able to give reasons and being able to actually reason (as a verb). The latter requires complex cognitive faculties not present in a mathematical model of the English language.

LLMs are tool, the important question to ask of a tool is "is this useful", not "does it work like my brain does". I don't see why you care about the internals, and not about the actual outputs.

This comment chain wasn't about outputs, it was specifically about whether or not LLMs "reason"—precisely the internals. I feel like you're just moving the goalposts now to deflect from the original question.

Re: Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

#16
post #10
post #4

No, it's capable of reasoning, but it gained its knowledge of how the world works through analyzing things that were written or drawn by (mostly) humans.

It's not capable of reasoning and it has no knowledge of how the world works. That's why it often spits out nonsense and falsehoods. To oversimplify a bit, it's a next-word-in-the-sentence prediction engine.

While you're at it, throw out your calculator because it has no conception of numbers and doesn't know anything about mathematics.

Re: Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

#17
LLMs are more likely to create novel content (i.e. "hallucinate") than copy training data verbatim, so, in a word, "No". In fact the unpredictability and hallucination behavior is what is called creativity in artistic domains. The whole Stochastic Parrots paper and concept originated with Luddites who don't want this technology to advance to the point where is generally useful and applicable. And while the Luddites (people who smashed the first robots, Jacquard Looms which were programmable machines that did a job only humans were previously able to perform) had a justifiable concern about negative impacts (the loss of employment took two generations to recover) it is safe to say that the Industrial Revolution has had more positive effects (e.g. life expectancy, per capita wealth) in total.

Re: Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

#18
post #16
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not capable of reasoning and it has no knowledge of how the world works. That's why it often spits out nonsense and falsehoods. To oversimplify a bit, it's a next-word-in-the-sentence prediction engine.

While you're at it, throw out your calculator because it has no conception of numbers and doesn't know anything about mathematics.

Damn, what does that say about me then?

Re: Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

#19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are tool, the important question to ask of a tool is "is this useful", not "does it work like my brain does". I don't see why you care about the internals, and not about the actual outputs.

This comment chain wasn't about outputs, it was specifically about whether or not LLMs "reason"—precisely the internals. I feel like you're just moving the goalposts now to deflect from the original question.

> This comment chain wasn't about outputs

My point was that it should be.

Re: Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

#20
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasoning in behavior - you ask it to explain things and it does; it gives reasons, motivations, nuance, explains connections, clarifies points. That's reasoning.

There's a pretty significant gap between being able to give reasons and being able to actually reason (as a verb). The latter requires complex cognitive faculties not present in a mathematical model of the English language.

Considering we can't even define what "complex cognitive faculties" are you are just talking up air castles at this point.
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