I still want to read a ChatGPT text that doesn't look stupidly verbose
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I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
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Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
#42Is not black or white. Probably most of what we do is System 1, most of the time we are mostly meme machines, and so is a good part of the activity on some sectors.
But are able to make steps forward, intuition, hard step by step reasoning, finding connections between dots, etc. GPT can do some of that, and in some point of the road someone must decide if we reached somewhere else. Even if making the full road may or not be possible in a foreseeable future.
Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
#43> If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. This is simply not true. Predicting the next letter or word, or id you abstract it away from things that mean something to you, like the next color of a block in a long chain of colored blocks. You would realize that all we are doing is using statistics to predict what the next item might be. There simply is no need or req…
I think the most useful definition of understanding something is that you can explain it and use it in context. ChatGPT routinely does both.
And while AI gets better and better and we will remain as touchy as ever about abstract concepts that make us oh so human, how about we say it just can't be understanding, unless a human does, eh, it.
Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
#44I found this post to be overly long and unclear in its focus. Also who is this person that only serves as an autocomplete in meetings? Maybe don’t go to those meetings then? In my meetings I’m mainly having to decide what our approach will be in some ambiguous problem space.
>In my meetings I’m mainly having to decide what our approach will be in some ambiguous problem space.
Maybe that's because you are just some manager or exec in some company, and not a professor that has to transfer his knowledge, desribe, and explain things for others in his meetings?
The post has a very specific subject it discusses. It's also not required reading, if someone finds it long, they can skip it.
Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
#45I think this misses the point made by Hinton. The point is that, if a model is to reach a certain level of autocomplete, it needs to understand what it is talking about. Imagine the result of what required deep thought from you is included in the training data, along with billions of other such exchanges. At some point the only way to improve training score is to develop the ability to "understand" things. (That is,…
> it needs to understand what it is talking about "to understand" is a concept invented by the human brain to help it operate. It doesn't actually mean anything concrete in the physical world. See: the Chinese room argument (paradoxically it proves the converse of what Searle was arguing -- that there is no such thing as understanding, because you can emulate a system with identical outputs from the same set of input…
that's, uh, not the conclusion of the chinese room argument
Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
#46The argument “a sufficiently capable autocomplete must contain a level of general intelligence” is correct but also not very useful. It is a lot like saying “a sufficiently fast horse can fly”. It is technically correct that when you take things to the extreme you can accomplish great things, but we may not reach those levels. We may require completely different technology to reach those levels of autocomplete, and w…
The argument is simpler than that. Prediction requires a model, completely accurate or not. There's a projection of the world in text. A model of the text data we feed it is a model of the world as humans see it. The trend of loss is more and more accurate models of the dataset. So it won't stop at any arbitrary competency level. Indeed, there are already a few abilities GPT possess that are deemed Super Human. It's not a distinction that matters to the machine. It's all just data to be modelled.
We have reached those levels lol. That's why we're having this argument.
Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
#47> If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. This is simply not true. Predicting the next letter or word, or id you abstract it away from things that mean something to you, like the next color of a block in a long chain of colored blocks. You would realize that all we are doing is using statistics to predict what the next item might be. There simply is no need or req…
I think the most useful definition of understanding something is that you can explain it and use it in context. ChatGPT routinely does both.
Someone sufficiently fast and skilled at googling can explain and use in context a lot of things that they don't really properly understand.
So unless you're saying that the composite of the googler and of google understand something that neither does individually, your definition has some holes.
Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
#48We have quantum mechanics, a model of the universe that makes predictions with absurd levels of accuracy. Yet we don’t really understand “why” it works—-I don’t think we can claim that we really “understand” the universe. This disproves the claim that making accurate predictions implies understanding. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that the model has some understanding but a model doesn’t necessarily reflect un…
What are you even asking when you're asking why it works. Ultimately, it works the way it does because that's the way things are. I'm not sure what sort of answers you expect when asking why physics acts in a particular fashion. Also here's Feynman ranting about why questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA
Asking "why" may lead to really new physics, though. I assume the reason for discovering the theory of relativity was asking "Why is the speed of light constant in all directions".
Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
#49> If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. This is simply not true. Predicting the next letter or word, or id you abstract it away from things that mean something to you, like the next color of a block in a long chain of colored blocks. You would realize that all we are doing is using statistics to predict what the next item might be. There simply is no need or req…
How do you define understanding when predicting the next color?
Re: I disagree with Geoff Hinton regarding "glorified autocomplete"
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody actually understands how humans actually understand something, just like nobody actually understands how LLMs do what they do. Everybody opining about it is doing just that: offering an opinion. Geoff Hinton’s opinion is worth more than someone else’s, but it is still an opinion.
I don’t know about the human part, but we absolutely understand how LLMs do what they do. They’re not magic.
No we don't. No it's not "magic". No we don't understand what the black box is doing.