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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)

#271

Post by OccamsMirror »

zombot wrote: post #257

The voice of reason. And, as always, the voice of reason is being vigorously ignored. Dreams of big profits and exerting control through generated lies are irresistible. And among others, HN comment threads demonstrate how even people who should know better are falling for it in droves. In fact this very thread shows how Chomsky's arguments fall on deaf ears.

Don't forget exerting control through automated surveillance. What a wonderful tool we have created for detecting whether citizens step out of line without needing giant offices full of analysts.

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

#272

Post by Barrin92 »

PeterStuer wrote: post #269
atdt wrote: post #178

The level of intellectual engagement with Chomsky's ideas in the comments here is shockingly low. Surely, we are capable of holding these two thoughts: one, that the facility of LLMs is fantastic and useful, and two, that the major breakthroughs of AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution. That may change, particularly if the intel…

It indeed baffles me how academics overall seem so dismissive of recent breakthroughs in sub-symbolic approaches as models from which we can learn about 'intelligence'? It is as if a biochemist looks at a human brain, and concludes there is no 'intelligence' there at all, just a whole lot of electro-chemical reactions. It fully ignores the potential for emergence. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying 'AGI has arriv…

>It fully ignores the potential for emergence.

There's two kinds of emergence, one scientific, the other a strange, vacuous notion in the absence of any theory and explanation.

The first case is emergence when we for example talk about how gas or liquid states, or combustibility emerge from certain chemical or physical properties of particles. It's not just that they're emergent, we can explain how they're emergent and how their properties are already present in the lower level of abstraction. Emergence properly understood is always reducible to lower states, not some magical word if you don't know how something works.

In these AI debates that's however exactly how "emergence" is used, people just assert it, following necessarily from their assumptions. They don't offer a scientific explanation. (the same is true with various other topics, like consciousness, or what have you). This is pointless, it's a sort of god of the gaps disguised as an argument. When Chomsky talks about science proper, he correctly points out that these kinds of arguments have no place in it, because the point of science is to build coherent theories.

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

#273

Post by fooker »

atdt wrote: post #178

The level of intellectual engagement with Chomsky's ideas in the comments here is shockingly low. Surely, we are capable of holding these two thoughts: one, that the facility of LLMs is fantastic and useful, and two, that the major breakthroughs of AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution. That may change, particularly if the intel…

> not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence

Science progresses in a manner that when you see it happen in front of you it doesn't seem substantial at all, because we typically don't understand implications of new discoveries.

So far, in the last few years, we have discovered the importance of the role of language behind intelligence. We have also discovered quantitative ways to describe how close one concept is from another. More recently, from the new reasoning AI models, we have discovered something counterintuitive that's also seemingly true for human reasoning--incorrect/incomplete reasoning can often reach the correct conclusion.

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

#274

Post by Nullabillity »

skydhash wrote: post #67
randmeerkat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can help us, just like a calculator can help us solve an equation. A calculator is consistent and doesn’t “hallucinate” answers to equations. An LLM puts an untrustworthy filter between the truth and the person. Google was revolutionary because it increased access to information. LLMs only obscure that access, while pretending to be something more.

I'm not a native english speaker, so I've used for an essay where they told us to target a certain word count. I was close, but the verbiage to get to that word count doesn't come naturally to me. So I used Germini and tell it to rewrite the text targeting that word count (my only prompt). Then I reviewed the answer, rewriting where it strayed from the points I was making. Also I used it for a few programming tasks I…

Word count targets are a rough guideline for how much detail is expected; adding more useless filler is the last thing you want.

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

#275

Post by globnomulous »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #258
user_7832 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The big lesson from the AI development in the last 10 years from me has been "I guess humans really aren't so special after all" Instead I would take the opposite take. How wonderful is it, that with naturally evolved processes and neural structures, have we been able to create what we have. Van Gogh’s paintings came out of the human brain. The Queens of the Skies - hundreds of tons of metal and composites - flying…

"I guess humans really aren't so special after all" This is a crazy take to me. As compared to what? The machines that we built? Until we discover comparably intelligent life in the universe I think it's fair to say that we are indeed very special.

https://davidhume.org/texts/empl1/dm

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

#276

Post by PeterStuer »

Barrin92 wrote: post #272
PeterStuer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It indeed baffles me how academics overall seem so dismissive of recent breakthroughs in sub-symbolic approaches as models from which we can learn about 'intelligence'? It is as if a biochemist looks at a human brain, and concludes there is no 'intelligence' there at all, just a whole lot of electro-chemical reactions. It fully ignores the potential for emergence. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying 'AGI has arriv…

>It fully ignores the potential for emergence. There's two kinds of emergence, one scientific, the other a strange, vacuous notion in the absence of any theory and explanation. The first case is emergence when we for example talk about how gas or liquid states, or combustibility emerge from certain chemical or physical properties of particles. It's not just that they're emergent, we can explain how they're emergent a…

Nobody claims mistical gaps. There is no deus ex machina claim in emergence. However e.g. stable phenomena at a higher model level might be fully dynamic at a lower level model.

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

#277

Post by imadierich »

loveparade wrote: post #201
atdt wrote: post #178

The level of intellectual engagement with Chomsky's ideas in the comments here is shockingly low. Surely, we are capable of holding these two thoughts: one, that the facility of LLMs is fantastic and useful, and two, that the major breakthroughs of AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution. That may change, particularly if the intel…

> AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution I would push back on this a little bit. While it has not helped us to understand our own intelligence, it has made me question whether such a thing even exists. Perhaps there are no simple and beautiful natural laws, like those that exists in Physics, that can explain how humans think and…

[dead]

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

#278

Post by guappa »

to-too-two wrote: post #120
jbentley1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think we should probably stop listening to Chomsky" I've been saying this my whole life, glad it's finally catching on

Why? He's made significant contributions to political discourse and science.

I think it's safe to say that anyone who voted for Trump disagrees to his contributions.

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

#279

Post by guappa »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #33
icedrift wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t that just a Turing test? I’m perfectly willing to bet that there are LLMs that can pass a Turing test, even against a mind like Chomsky.

Just ask for an opinion on who's right between israel and palestine and an AI will refuse to reply :D

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

#280

Post by _glass »

loveparade wrote: post #201
atdt wrote: post #178

The level of intellectual engagement with Chomsky's ideas in the comments here is shockingly low. Surely, we are capable of holding these two thoughts: one, that the facility of LLMs is fantastic and useful, and two, that the major breakthroughs of AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution. That may change, particularly if the intel…

> AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution I would push back on this a little bit. While it has not helped us to understand our own intelligence, it has made me question whether such a thing even exists. Perhaps there are no simple and beautiful natural laws, like those that exists in Physics, that can explain how humans think and…

I think it is important to realize, that we need to understand language on our own terms. The logic of LLMs is not unlike alien technology to us. That being said, the minimalist program of Chomsky lead to nowhere, because just like programming, it found edge case after edge case, reducing it further and further, until there was no program anymore that resembled a real theory. But it is wrong to assume that the big progress in linguistics is in vain, the same reason Prolog, Theorem provers, type theory, category theory is in vain, when we have LLMs that can produce everything in C++. We can use the technology of linguistics to ground our knowledge, and in some dark corner of the LLM it might already have integrated this. I think the original divide between the sciences and the humanities might be deeper and more fundamental than we think. We need linguistic as a discipline of the humanities, and maybe huge swaths of Computer Science is just that.
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