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Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

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Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#191

Post by codr7 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #169
GolfPopper wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can LLMs actually parse human languages? IMHO, no, they have nothing approaching understanding. It's Chinese Rooms[1] all the way down, just with lots of bell and whistles. Spicy autocomplete. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Go ask the operator of a Chinese room to do some math they weren't taught in school, and see if the translation guide helps. The analogy I've used before is a bright first-grader named Johnny. Johnny stumbles across a high school algebra book. Unless Johnny's last name is von Neumann, he isn't going to get anything out of that book. An LLM will. So much for the Chinese Room.

Give Johnny a copier and a pair of scissors and he will be able to perform more or less the same; and likely get more out of it as well, since he has a clue what he is doing.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#192

Post by K0balt »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #152
krackers wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restricted to linguistics, LLM's supposed lack of understanding should be a non-sequitur. If the question is whether LLMs have formed a coherent ability to parse human languages, the answer is obviously yes. In fact not just human languages, as seen with multimodality the same transformer architecture seems to work well to model and generate anything with inherent structure. I'm surprised that he doesn't mention "uni…

Can LLMs actually parse human languages? Or can they react to stimuli with a trained behavioral response? Dogs can learn to sit when you say "sit", and learn to roll over when you say "roll over". But the dog doesn't parse human language; it reacts to stimuli with a trained behavioral response. (I'm not that familiar with LLM/ML, but it seems like trained behavioral response rather than intelligent parsing. I believe…

Animals definitely parse human language, some to a significant extent.

Like an airplane taking off, things that seem like “emergent behavior” and hard lines of human vs animal behavior are really matters of degree that, like the airplane, we don’t notice until it actually takes flight… then we think there is a clean line between flying and not flying, but there isn’t. The airplane is gradually becoming weightless until it breaks contact with the ground, and animals use and understand language, but we only notice when it seems human.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#193

Post by codr7 »

catigula wrote: post #155
calibas wrote: post #99

The fact that we have figured out how to translate language into something a computer can "understand" should thrill linguists. Taking a word (token) and abstracting it's "meaning" as a 1,000-dimension vector seems like something that should revolutionize the field of linguistics. A whole new tool for analyzing and understanding the underlying patterns of all language! And there's a fact here that's very hard to disp…

Unfortunately you've undermined your point by making sweeping claims about something that is the literal hardest known problem in philosophy (consciousness). I'm not actually comfortable saying that LLMs aren't conscious. I think there's a decent chance they could be in a very alien way. I realize that this is a very weird and potentially scary claim for people to parse but you must understand how weird and scary con…

If they are, knowing what they potentially know about humans by now, they would probably do their best to hide it.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#194

Post by catigula »

codr7 wrote: post #193
catigula wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately you've undermined your point by making sweeping claims about something that is the literal hardest known problem in philosophy (consciousness). I'm not actually comfortable saying that LLMs aren't conscious. I think there's a decent chance they could be in a very alien way. I realize that this is a very weird and potentially scary claim for people to parse but you must understand how weird and scary con…

If they are, knowing what they potentially know about humans by now, they would probably do their best to hide it.

I don't think their experience of consciousness would be very analogous to what you and I understand.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#195

Post by f30e3dfed1c9 »

icedrift wrote: post #15
next_xibalba wrote: post #10

Chomsky is always saying that LLMs and such can only imitate, not understand language. But I wonder if there is a degree of sophistication at which he would concede these machines exceed "imitation". If his point is that LLMs arrive at language in a way different than humans... great. But I'm not sure how he can argue that some kind of extremely sophisticated understanding of natural language is not embedded in these…

From what I've read/watched of Chomsky he's holding out for something that truly cannot be distinguished from human no matter how hard you tried.

I think that misses the point entirely. Even if you constructed some system the output of which could not be distinguished from human-produced language but that either (1) clearly operated according to principles other than those that govern human language or (2) operated according to principles that its creators could not adequately explain, it would not be of that much interest to him.

He wants to understand how human language works. If I get him right — and I'm absolutely sure that I don't in important ways — then LLMs are not that interesting because both (1) and (2) above are true of them.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#196

Post by asveikau »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #145
asveikau wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've heard, Chomsky had a stroke which impacted his language. You will, unfortunately, not hear a recent opinion from him on current developments.

Geez, talk about irony. That's terrible.

He's currently 96, and I started noticing in his 2022-2023 interviews that he seemed to lose a bit of the spark, so while it is always sad and moving to see such things, I don't know how much Chomsky left we were getting anyway.

Tempus fugit.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#197

Post by downboots »

petermcneeley wrote: post #110
downboots wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are you aware of the weight comparison of a gallon of water vs a gallon of butane ?

No im not. A gallon is a measure of volume? This is a USA unit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dadjokes/comments/flr7tc/which_weig...

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#198

Post by automatoney »

calibas wrote: post #99

The fact that we have figured out how to translate language into something a computer can "understand" should thrill linguists. Taking a word (token) and abstracting it's "meaning" as a 1,000-dimension vector seems like something that should revolutionize the field of linguistics. A whole new tool for analyzing and understanding the underlying patterns of all language! And there's a fact here that's very hard to disp…

Word embeddings (that 1000-dimension vector you mention) are not new. No comment on the rest of your comment, but that aspect of LLMs is "old" tech - word2vec was published 11 years ago.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#199

Post by idiotsecant »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #152
krackers wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restricted to linguistics, LLM's supposed lack of understanding should be a non-sequitur. If the question is whether LLMs have formed a coherent ability to parse human languages, the answer is obviously yes. In fact not just human languages, as seen with multimodality the same transformer architecture seems to work well to model and generate anything with inherent structure. I'm surprised that he doesn't mention "uni…

Can LLMs actually parse human languages? Or can they react to stimuli with a trained behavioral response? Dogs can learn to sit when you say "sit", and learn to roll over when you say "roll over". But the dog doesn't parse human language; it reacts to stimuli with a trained behavioral response. (I'm not that familiar with LLM/ML, but it seems like trained behavioral response rather than intelligent parsing. I believe…

I'm not sure if it's even up for debate that they parse human language, in fact they do it better than most people do. Parsing is just breaking up language into it's component ideas and fitting those ideas to one another to achieve meaning. We can meaningfully argue whether they are capable of novel reasoning (probably not) or whether they can apply knowledge from one domain to another (sometimes!) but parsing seems undeniable.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#200

Post by SoftTalker »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #173
jmb99 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go ask the operator of a Chinese room to do some math they weren't taught in school, and see if the translation guide helps. That analogy only holds if LLMs can solve novel problems that can be proven to not exist in any form in their training material.

They do. Spend some time using a modern reasoning model. There is a class of interesting problems, nestled between trivial ones whose answers can simply be regurgitated and difficult ones that either yield nonsense or involve tool use, that transformer networks can absolutely, incontrovertibly reason about.

Have any LLMs solved any of the big (or even lesser known) unanswered problems in math, physics, computer science?

It may appear that they are solving novel problems but given the size of their training set they have probably seen them. There are very few questions a person can come up with that haven't already been asked and answered somewhere.

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