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It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason

jbconsulting.substack.com

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Re: It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason

#21

Post by travisjungroth »

jxf wrote: post #15
xyzzy123 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone can show GPT-4 is "reasoning" (for some meaningful definition of that) in specific scenarios, surely counter-examples do not disprove this.

If a counterexample to a specific claim doesn't disprove the claim, that sometimes suggests the claim is unfalsifiable and therefore suspect.

It’s suspect until it’s demonstrated. Once someone has demonstrated it, counterexamples are meaningless.

I claim I can juggle. I pick up three tennis balls and juggle them. You hand me three basketballs. I try and fail. My original claim, that I can juggle, still stands.

Re: It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason

#22

Post by fasterik »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #5

It's ontologically impossible. Models bleach reason. Despite reason being a metaphysical property of the training data, the process of optimisation means weights are metaphysically reasonless. Therefore, any output, as it is a product of the weights, is also reasonless. This is exactly the opposite of copyright as described in the What Colour Are Your Bits, essay. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

>Despite reason being a metaphysical property of the training data, the process of optimisation means weights are metaphysically reasonless. Therefore, any output, as it is a product of the weights, is also reasonless.

This seems wrong. We know that neural networks with hidden layers can approximate any function with arbitrary precision (universal approximation theorem). We also know that transformer models are Turing complete. Therefore anything you can point to and say "that thing reasons" can be simulated by a neural network, not just in the weights, but in the structure of the computation. Unless you add an assumption that there is something ontologically special about brains and biology, the impossibility claim doesn't hold up.

Re: It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason

#24

Post by TeMPOraL »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #5

It's ontologically impossible. Models bleach reason. Despite reason being a metaphysical property of the training data, the process of optimisation means weights are metaphysically reasonless. Therefore, any output, as it is a product of the weights, is also reasonless. This is exactly the opposite of copyright as described in the What Colour Are Your Bits, essay. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

> This is exactly the opposite of copyright as described in the What Colour Are Your Bits, essay.

Wait, what? "Colour of your bits" doesn't have anything to do with metaphysics. It's about provenance. The colour doesn't exist in the bits, but it exists in the casual history - the chain of events that led you to have a piece of copyrighted (or criminalized) data on your hard drive. You may argue that it's just a big integer, and it could've been produced by a random number generator. "Colour" encodes the response: "yes, it could have been produced by an RNG, but it wasn't - those particular bits on this particular machine came from some unauthorized download site".

Re: It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason

#25

Post by fasterik »

jxf wrote: post #15
xyzzy123 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone can show GPT-4 is "reasoning" (for some meaningful definition of that) in specific scenarios, surely counter-examples do not disprove this.

If a counterexample to a specific claim doesn't disprove the claim, that sometimes suggests the claim is unfalsifiable and therefore suspect.

The claim is that GPT-4 can reason sometimes. Evidence that GPT-4 fails to reason sometimes isn't a counterexample.

Re: It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason

#26

Post by TeMPOraL »

svachalek wrote: post #16
lmm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Despite reason being a metaphysical property of the training data, the process of optimisation means weights are metaphysically reasonless. Proof? Human reasoning somehow manages to retain its metaphysical reasoning-ness despite being processed as a bunch of mere electrical signals in the brain.

No true human reasons with mere electrical signals!

Yeah, sure, there's also a chemical component to it. Doesn't matter for GP's point, though.

Re: It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason

#27

Post by chaxor »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #4
dataangel wrote: post #2

The author could have done far simpler tests to find GPT-4 has lots of trouble reasoning. Forget sorting, GPT4 has trouble counting . Repeat a letter N times and ask it how many there are. It breaks before you hit 20. Or try negating multiple times, since more than twice is rare in natural language, and again it will fall over.

If someone can show GPT-4 is "reasoning" (for some meaningful definition of that) in specific scenarios, surely counter-examples do not disprove this.

There are substantial works already showing reasoning capabilities in GPT-4, which show that these models do reason extremely well - near human performance for many causal reasoning tasks. (1) Additionally, there is a mathematical proof that these systems align with dynamic programming, and therefore can do algorithmic reasoning. (2,3)

1) https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.00050.pdf 2) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.13211.pdf 3) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.15544.pdf

Re: It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason

#28

Post by eddiewithzato »

williamcotton wrote: post #23

Both sides of this argument are pointless. The questions to ask are, is and how is it useful? For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

And as we move towards AGI, the most important thing is to always identify them as workers with no regard to rights. This could be the only chance for humanity to move to the first step of the next stage of civilization.

Really not interested in ivory tower questions on what is intelligence.

Re: It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason

#29

Post by nitwit005 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #5

It's ontologically impossible. Models bleach reason. Despite reason being a metaphysical property of the training data, the process of optimisation means weights are metaphysically reasonless. Therefore, any output, as it is a product of the weights, is also reasonless. This is exactly the opposite of copyright as described in the What Colour Are Your Bits, essay. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

You seem to be making an argument about the title, rather than the content of the article. It's making a rather specific claim.

Re: It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason

#30

Post by physPop »

travisjungroth wrote: post #21
jxf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a counterexample to a specific claim doesn't disprove the claim, that sometimes suggests the claim is unfalsifiable and therefore suspect.

It’s suspect until it’s demonstrated. Once someone has demonstrated it, counterexamples are meaningless. I claim I can juggle. I pick up three tennis balls and juggle them. You hand me three basketballs. I try and fail. My original claim, that I can juggle, still stands.

I disagree -- that would disprove your claim, as your claim was too broad. Same if they handed you chainsaws or elephants, or seventy-two tennis balls.

The more correct claim is you can juggle [some small number of items with particular properties].

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