201–210 of 244 posts
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We either have the capacity to make boats and traverse the oceans or we don’t. These days almost nobody makes boats, but we sure used to and still can. What’s your point?
I have no idea what you're talking about and it doesn't really matter to me anyway. Enjoy your day.
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The LLMs that are doing this are trained on trillions of examples of human language. This is not remotely a counterexample. Now if an LLM can invent a new full language from scratch, without any training data of existing languages (like how AlphaZero learned to play Go), then that will be impressive, and a difference in kind.
Um but you have the example of English. Modern English was based on Middle English, which in turn is based on Old English, but greatly influenced by Norman on account of the invasion, as well as by Norse
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I didn’t say everyone learns it from scratch at least one, I said we did.
That's not learning, though, is it? Inventing, maybe, or developing or evolving.
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Humanity invented language though. LLMs did not; they're merely parroting our language back to us.
Wed punish them in training if they came up with their own language
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Chomsky has been adding parameters to his theory to handle exceptions in a way that mimics the endless series of conditional statements appended to knowledge systems of yore. In neuroscience, predictive processing has gained immense favor and can explain language in ways that have nothing to do with innate grammar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding Exactly how well did "building a bird" work for buildin…
…he has? Isn’t his modern term “minimalism”, where he tries to simplify things as much as possible? Regardless, continuing to study the field in no way implies that he’s backed down or meaningfully evolved his basic theories of Universal Grammars. He’s very much still confident in them. Re: predictive processing, in what way does that relate to language…? Even if you apply it to language in a way not mentioned in the…
But I can’t help by think about all of the whacky ideas like antigravity vital forces that biologists contrived to explain how birds could fly and that it took Bernoulli and the rigorous study of those principles that led to the airfoil… which is how birds actually soar through the air.
BTW, what the fuck happened to these forums in the last few years? It seems like most people base their opinions on how opposite they are to Sam Altman and Elon Musk’s as opposed to any geeky principles of discovery. I highly doubt that most of y’all would have been ardent supporters of generative grammar five years ago… but slap the word LLM on something and boy howdy!
It’s kind of nice, I learn quite a bit defending good ideas. All y’all get is fake internet points.
I fully understand any and all downvotes! Have fun!
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That’s a red herring. Ex post facto the activity of language use as a construction must supersede some enaction by capable actors . This is a complete tautology in terms, and any dispute must therefore be over the ontology in which it is expressed. To elaborate how something came to be is not required to express that something is .
What makes capable actors capable in the first place is not derived from thin air. There's a reason a capable actor came to be where there was none generations prior. That reason did not come about without reaction to some outside vector. Evolution optimized for language learning abilities before the full capabilities came. Evolution is not thin air.
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>Also, the LLMs are cheating! No...they aren't. Humans aren't learning from thin air by any stretch of the imagination.
Humans learn from the structure of the world -- not the structure of language. LLMs cheat at generating text because they do so via a model of the statistical structure of text. We're in the world , it is us who stipulate the meaning of words and the structure of text. And we stipulate new meanings to novel parts of the world daily . What else is an 'iPhone' etc. ? There's nothing in `i P h o n e` which is at all lik…
> Humans learn from the structure of the world -- not the structure of language.
In short, there's no evidence that being in the world makes our knowledge any different from an LLM. The main advantages we have at the moment are sensory learnings (LLMs are not good at comparing smells and flavors) and the ability to continuously train our brains.
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Um but you have the example of English. Modern English was based on Middle English, which in turn is based on Old English, but greatly influenced by Norman on account of the invasion, as well as by Norse
Keep playing it back through history and you'll find the first language invented by people. There is no equivalent accomplishment for AI.
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It contradicts the idea that you have to teach language using syntax and grammar. Which... I confess I thought was already not believed? We certainly aren't teaching kids in the home how to decline and conjugate words. Are we? (Similarly, languages that have gender are typically just picked up by usage, not necessarily ingrained by reasoning. Which leads to the obvious bad results when people think that there was sol…
Yeah perhaps that’s causing confusion for science enthusiasts new to this debate - Chomsky is definitely not talking about what a lay person would call “Grammar”. Your point is one of his main (implicit) supports though: on the face of it, it seems absolutely insane that a child could pick up complex linguistic concepts in a few short years, with many orders of magnitude less data than a LLM needs to reach the same c…
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Wordcels? Shape rotator?
The Brave summmarizer says: > Wordcels are people who have high verbal intelligence and are good with words, but feel inadequately compensated for their skill. The term "cel" denotes frustration over being denied something they feel they deserve.1 Shape rotators are people with high visuospatial intelligence but low verbal intelligence, who have an intuition for technical problem-solving but are unable to account for…