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GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

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Re: GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

#21

Post by darkkindness »

It's really weird to evaluate GPT-2 based on its ability to say things no reasonable person would ever say. If I were born in Cleveland I wouldn't be jumping to proclaim my fluency in English. If I told you I left my keys out at the pub, I wouldn't immediately repeat myself and say that my keys are now at the pub. If I'm talking about two trophies plus another trophy, I'd probably try to end it with some punchline rather than saying there's three trophies.

A lot of the things we write assume the reader can make connections on their own. That's a writing skill. It's the reason why Hemingway's famous "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" is so impactful. As such I've found GPT-2 to be incredible at writing fanfiction.

Re: GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

#22

Post by blazespin »

darkkindness wrote: post #21

It's really weird to evaluate GPT-2 based on its ability to say things no reasonable person would ever say. If I were born in Cleveland I wouldn't be jumping to proclaim my fluency in English. If I told you I left my keys out at the pub, I wouldn't immediately repeat myself and say that my keys are now at the pub. If I'm talking about two trophies plus another trophy, I'd probably try to end it with some punchline ra…

The real immediate value of GPT-2 is human/computer collaboration. Think code completion or completion/prompts in other mediums, such as writing. Many art forms work - music / game design / painting / etc.

Re: GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

#23

Post by blazespin »

the8472 wrote: post #3

> Literally billions of dollars have been invested in building systems like GPT-2, and megawatts of energy (perhaps more) have gone into testing them Huh, seems like the bot that produced the article lacks some understanding about the real world. Maybe it just needs more training until it learns to associate megawatts with power instead of energy. Meanwhile GPT2 completes this sentence to > Literally billions of doll…

GPT2 does learn, right.

I wonder how much of our knowledge of math is self-attention and how much is something else.

For example, much of what I do when I do calculus is mostly self attention. When I solve a calculus problem, I generally don't think through the squeeze theorem, but apply cookbook math.

My current model for the brain is consciously driven self attention. Ie, 80-90% of what we do is just self attention and our conscious brain checks to see how right/interesting it is around 10-20% of the time.

The key therefore really is training your brain on the right data.

This model I find explains quite a lot of things about people and the way they behave / succeed.

Re: GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

#24

Post by darkkindness »

missosoup wrote: post #10
zanek wrote: post #2

I completely agree with Marcus' assessment of GPT-2 and its ilk. They are simply regurgitating words with zero understanding of any words/meaning. It seems that OpenAi and others are peddling this AI when its simply a glorified Eliza on steroids.

> I completely agree with Marcus' assessment of GPT-2 and its ilk. They are simply regurgitating words with zero understanding of any words/meaning. There's a pretty strong argument that most humans also frequently do this. My go-to example is high school physics. The majority of students merely learns to associate keywords in problem statements with a table of equations and a mapping of what numbers to substitute fo…

Just to support your argument further, here is a related snippet from another comment[0] by knzhou:

> Students can all recite Newton's third law, but immediately afterward claim that when a truck hits a car, the truck exerts a bigger force. They know the law for the gravitational force, but can't explain what kept astronauts from falling off the moon, since "there's no gravity in space". Another common claim is that a table exerts no force on something sitting on it -- instead of "exerting a force" it's just "getting in the way".

Here is some food for thought for educators. If GPT-2 also makes sense of the world by regurgitating what it sees, perhaps this is simply the nature of learning by example, and we should accommodate for this. Perhaps it isn't so effective to give students mounds of problem sets offering clear premises and easy-to-grade answers. Unless you want your students to be GPT-2s.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619

Re: GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

#25

Post by Rioghasarig »

darkkindness wrote: post #21

It's really weird to evaluate GPT-2 based on its ability to say things no reasonable person would ever say. If I were born in Cleveland I wouldn't be jumping to proclaim my fluency in English. If I told you I left my keys out at the pub, I wouldn't immediately repeat myself and say that my keys are now at the pub. If I'm talking about two trophies plus another trophy, I'd probably try to end it with some punchline ra…

Thank you for saying this. This is something so many people miss when trying test the limitations of GPT-2. It just doesn't make sense to test it on strings of text that nobody ever writes.

Re: GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

#26

Post by darkkindness »

Rioghasarig wrote: post #25
darkkindness wrote: post #21

It's really weird to evaluate GPT-2 based on its ability to say things no reasonable person would ever say. If I were born in Cleveland I wouldn't be jumping to proclaim my fluency in English. If I told you I left my keys out at the pub, I wouldn't immediately repeat myself and say that my keys are now at the pub. If I'm talking about two trophies plus another trophy, I'd probably try to end it with some punchline ra…

Thank you for saying this. This is something so many people miss when trying test the limitations of GPT-2. It just doesn't make sense to test it on strings of text that nobody ever writes.

Just for fun and to make a point, I threw your reply into Talk to Transformer.

> This is something so many people miss when trying test the limitations of GPT-2. It just doesn't make sense to test it on strings of text that nobody ever writes. To me, the best way to evaluate the usefulness of GPT-2 is to compare it to some actual test that validates a lot of its claims. So... let's do just that.

It might be just chance, but gee -- is this text referring to its own generation as a test to convey a point? The self-referentiality is formidable.

Re: GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

#27

Post by wilg »

fernly wrote: post #19
fernly wrote: post #16

I think he could have wrapped his paper up after showing this one example: > (input) I put two trophies on a table, and then add another, the total number is (GPT-2 continuation) five trophies and I'm like, 'Well, I can live with that, right? GPT-2 correctly inferred that the continuation should be a number of trophies, based on bazillions of similar sentences. But it had no understanding that arithmetic was called f…

Before anyone says that example (or any of the other fluent but _completely nonsensical_ continuations in the article) shows some sort of "understanding," please explain what you would define as understanding? I would (and I think anyone would) offer an operational definition: there is some class of questions to which this system could reply with sensible, actionable responses. Obviously the present system is not abl…

This is a fine definition of understanding.

However, I don't understand why we're leaping to "first-grader" as a low level of intelligence. That level of general intelligence in a machine would be a monumental achievement, I would think.

I also don't understand why you think responding to arithmetic problems, via parsing natural language, while neither being designed to perform arithmetic nor trained on it directly would be "simple".

It's not fair to say the words convey "no information", they do convey information, just not information that is useful to you. There is a ton of information in the structure of the words it generates, and it is often semantically and syntactically correct, and both of those contain information.

This is clearly not particularly useful, but it does demonstrate some sort (and I would argue your sort) of understanding.

The question is not whether it understands math and language as well as a first grader, it's whether it understands anything at all.

Re: GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

#28

Post by breck »

wilg wrote: post #4

I don't agree with the conclusion here. It's all about the input data. GPT-2 is trained on words people actually write on the internet, which is an inherently incomplete dataset. It leaves out all the other information an "intelligence" knows about the world. We know what sources are authoritative, we know the context of words from the visual appearance of the page, and we connect it all with data from our past exper…

The GPT2 paper includes performance on question and answer challenges. IIRC it performs poorly, but better than the field.

Re: GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

#29

Post by abrax3141 »

gog-ma-gog wrote: post #6
gog-ma-gog wrote: post #5

https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/189965935059/human-ps... for an orthogonal point of view—-I feel Marcus is a bit too embroiled in this particular debate to make level-headed criticism on the merits/potential of GPT-2

To elaborate a bit: people like Marcus tend to overload/move the goal posts with what the word “understand” means. I kinda feel like in a world where we have perfectly conversational chat bots that are capable of AI complete tasks—-that if these bots look like Chinese rooms under the hood, he’ll still be complaining that they don’t “understand” anything. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that if you think someth…

Understanding is not hard to understand. To understand is to reason from a model. Reasoning from a model is easy. Discovering the correct model is hard, analogous to the way that algebraic rules are easy, but finding the right equation for a particular problem is hard. Data trained NNs have neither a model, nor do they reason. QED

Re: GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

#30

Post by jlebar »

I just came here to say that

> Every person in the town of Springfield loves Susan. Peter lives in Springfield. Therefore he obviously has no love for that bitch.

is an awesome completion. I would read that short story.

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