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What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

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Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#241

Post by Donckele »

kilgnad wrote: post #156
Rury wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this significant? I mean you can view a moving car as stationary, and reality is the thing that moves around it, or you can view reality as stationary, but the car moves through it. Or you can make analogies between electricity and water. (Frankly, I like viewing neural nets as a numerical method for doing nonlinear multivariate regression, and ChatGPT is nothing but a resulting equation(s) of such). In the en…

Well you're just a jumble of electrons and protons interacting with each other. That's a 100% true interpretation is it not? It's also a view that misses the point that you are a molecular intelligence made of DNA that continually mutates and reconstructs it's physical form with generational copies to increase fitness in an ever changing environment. But that viewpoint also misses the point that you're a human with w…

> Well you're just a jumble of electrons and protons interacting with each other. That's a 100% true interpretation is it not?

NO.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#242

Post by space_fountain »

lelanthran wrote: post #219
cm2012 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now. Give it a truly persistent memory and 100x the size of the dataset I think most people would change their tune.

> For now. Give it a truly persistent memory and 100x the size of the dataset I think most people would change their tune. Why does it need 100x the dataset? Sentient creatures, including humans, manage to figure stuff out from as little as a single datapoint . For a human to differentiate between a cat and a dog takes, maybe, two examples of each, not a few million pictures. An adult human who sees a hotdog for the…

There are fascinating studies from people who have been blind through childhood and have their vision restored late enough that we can talk to them. For example (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28533387/). In particular it takes several months for these previously blind children to learn to distinguish faces from non faces. I recall a pop science article which I can't find the source for now that explained that people with newly acquired sight struggle to predict the border of non moving objects, though they can typically accurately predict border of moving objects and over time they learn to predict for stationary.

So yes after a lifetime of video humans can quickly learn to distinquish animals they've never seen before with a few examples, but the wonder of these AIs is they seem like they're closer to that too. Certainly I can make up a way I want to some words classified, show chat gpt a few examples and it can do the classification.

I think you're mistaking a generalization across a lifetime of experience with learning. And compounding this is that a newborn while not having themselves experienced anything is born with a brain that's the result of millions of years of evolution filled with lifetimes of experience. It's honestly impressive we can get the sort of performance we've gotten with only all the text on the internet and a few months

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#243

Post by paulmd »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #61
bheadmaster wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My brain knows where it's going to go by the end of the sentence as well How would you know that? Sincere question, because to me it feels like my brain is improvising word by word when typing out this sentence. I often delete and retype it until it feels right, but in the process of typing a single sentence, I'm just chaining words one after another the way they feel right. In other words, my brain doesn't exactly…

Here's a theory. Thoughts exist on certain time scales. Everything about perception exists on certain time scales. The brain wave frequencies we use to represent things is directly related to the time scale of the thing it represents. The end of the sentence which you are trying to reach departed on its internal journey though the brain around the same time as whatever triggered the thought. It just so happened to ta…

> Its like a juggling act. The ball with the conclusion is thrown up highest, a bunch of other balls are thrown up in between, and they should all start arriving back in your hands, in the correct order, one at a time, without having known the exact sequence to expect when they were first thrown.

"experience tranquility"

--zenyatta overwatch

Yeah, that metaphor works. ;) As an extremely ADHD person, every thought comes with extra bonus thoughts (and parentheticals!), and the trick is knowing when to introduce each supporting point without re-introducing concepts needlessly but also try to have my bizarre brain make sense. Internet arguing and trying to preemptively address counterarguments with supporting points has seriously broken my brain and it leads to very longwinded posts. Keeping it short and coherent is specifically something I really have to work at because I love to write and people don't want to read a novel every comment. It's a matter of effective communication though.

Personally the description of the transformer as "writes words and then edits the output as a unit once the words are complete" really describes my writing at both a sentence and paragraph level. I'll go back and edit a comment a ton to try and tune it and clarify exact meaning/nuance with the most precise language I can.

A ton of people read my comments and are like "did an AI write this!?" and yeah only the finest biological neural net.

Another friend described it as "needing to slow his brain down" and perhaps a similar metaphor would be a database pivot - taking sparse facts and grouping them into a clustered dense representation as an argument. It's an expensive operation especially if there's more there than you thought.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#244

Post by Salgat »

lelanthran wrote: post #219
cm2012 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now. Give it a truly persistent memory and 100x the size of the dataset I think most people would change their tune.

> For now. Give it a truly persistent memory and 100x the size of the dataset I think most people would change their tune. Why does it need 100x the dataset? Sentient creatures, including humans, manage to figure stuff out from as little as a single datapoint . For a human to differentiate between a cat and a dog takes, maybe, two examples of each, not a few million pictures. An adult human who sees a hotdog for the…

That's why I'm still skeptical about whether we are heading the right direction with current DNN techniques. We're basically brute forcing extremely complex statistical models that rely on countless data to build those regressions because we don't yet know a good model for training with minimal data.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#245

Post by kilgnad »

aaron_m04 wrote: post #227
kilgnad wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally I'm tired of people saying it's just a probabilistic word generator and downplaying everything as if they know. If you said something along these lines before... then these papers show that you're not fully grasping the situation here. There are clearly different angles of interpreting what these models are actually doing but people are stubbornly refusing to believe it's anything more then just statistical w…

> I think part of it is a subconscious fear. chatGPT/LLMs represent a turning point in the story of humanity. The capabilities of AI can only expand from here. What comes after this point is unknown, and we fear the unknown. I mean, you're right, but isn't it reasonable to fear this? Just about all of us here on HN depend on our brains to make money. What happens when a machine can do this? The outlook for humanity i…

I agree. It is reasonable to fear.

I'm more emphasizing how fear effects our perception of reality and causes us to behave irrationally.

There's a difference between facing and acknowledging your fears versus running away and deluding yourself against an obvious reality.

What annoys me is that there's too much of the later going on. I mean this is what literally happened to the oil industry and tobacco industry. Those execs weren't just lying to other people, they were lying to themselves. That's what humans do when they face a changing reality that threatens to change everything they've built their lives around. And by doing so they ended up doing more harm then good.

An in depth conversation with chatGPT shows that it's more then a statistical word generator. It understands you. This much is obvious. I'm kinda tired of seeing arm chair experts delude themselves into thinking it's nothing more then some sort of trick because the alternative threatens their livelihood. Don't walk the path of the oil or tobacco industry! Face your fear!

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#246

Post by rolenthedeep »

jeremyjh wrote: post #176
hinkley wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things one might want to get out of this is a programming language that feels like human speech but is unambiguous to computers. If the understanding is the hard part, that seems much less likely.

Its not programming anymore its prompting. Prompting it to write and run the program that does what you want.

I think, eventually, this is where we end up. In not too many years, our job is going to be reviewing and debugging machine generated code. A few years after that, we're mostly caretakers and just keeping a human behind the wheel until we decide we don't need to watch the machines anymore.

Things are unfortunately going to get much more interesting much sooner than people expect.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#247

Post by kilgnad »

Donckele wrote: post #241
kilgnad wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you're just a jumble of electrons and protons interacting with each other. That's a 100% true interpretation is it not? It's also a view that misses the point that you are a molecular intelligence made of DNA that continually mutates and reconstructs it's physical form with generational copies to increase fitness in an ever changing environment. But that viewpoint also misses the point that you're a human with w…

> Well you're just a jumble of electrons and protons interacting with each other. That's a 100% true interpretation is it not? NO.

YES.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#248

Post by kilgnad »

Rury wrote: post #165
kilgnad wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you're just a jumble of electrons and protons interacting with each other. That's a 100% true interpretation is it not? It's also a view that misses the point that you are a molecular intelligence made of DNA that continually mutates and reconstructs it's physical form with generational copies to increase fitness in an ever changing environment. But that viewpoint also misses the point that you're a human with w…

I still don't see your point behind your first 4 paragraphs. How you decide to treat your fellow humans is up to you. Just as you can decide to view your fellow humans however you want. It's entirely possible to treat them like "humans" while still viewing them as nothing but jumbles of molecules and atoms. So again why does perspective matter here (particularly with ChatGPT being a statistical word generator)? Your…

Ok let me make this more clear.

I choose how to view things, yes this is true. But if I choose to treat human beings as jumbles of molecules, most people would consider that viewpoint flawed, inaccurate and slightly insane. Other humans would think that I'm in denial about some really obvious macro effects of configuring molecules in a way such that it forms a human.

I can certainly choose to view things this way, but do you see how such a singular viewpoint is sort of stubborn and unreasonable? This is why solely viewing LLMs as simple statistical word generators is unreasonable. Yes it's technically correct, but it is missing a lot.

There's another aspect to this too. What I'm seeing, to stay inline with the analogy, is people saying that the "human" viewpoint is entirely invalid. They are saying that the jumble of molecules only forms something that looks like a human, a "chinese room" if you will. They are saying the ONLY correct viewpoint is to view the jumble of molecules as a jumble of molecules. Nothing more.

So to bring the analogy back around to chatGPT. MANY people are saying that chatGPT is nothing more then a word generator. It does not have intelligence, it does not understand anything. I am disagreeing with this perspective because OP just linked a scientific paper CLEARLY showing that LLMs are building a realistic model of the information you are feeding it.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#249

Post by G_z9 »

osswid wrote: post #77

In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play" Minsky shut his eyes, "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty." A…

This allegory has haunted me for ten years. I always see it posted here and invariably the poster doesn’t elaborate or explain at all. Im pretty sure the people who post this just do it to look smart. I can’t find an explanation anywhere on the web. I asked chatgtp what it means and it said this:

This allegory, often referred to as an "AI koan," is a story that conveys a deeper meaning about the nature of artificial intelligence and the process of learning.

In the story, Sussman is a novice who is attempting to train a neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe. When Minsky, a renowned AI researcher, asks why the net is wired randomly, Sussman responds that he does not want the net to have any preconceptions of how to play. Minsky then closes his eyes, explaining that he is doing so in order to empty the room.

The meaning of this story is open to interpretation, but one possible interpretation is that it is highlighting the importance of approaching problems with an open mind, free of preconceived notions and biases. By wiring the neural net randomly, Sussman is allowing it to learn through trial and error, without being constrained by prior assumptions about the game. Similarly, by closing his eyes, Minsky is symbolically "emptying the room" of preconceptions and biases, allowing himself to approach the problem with fresh eyes and an open mind.

Overall, the story encourages us to approach complex problems with a beginner's mind, free of preconceptions and biases, in order to allow for creative solutions and new insights to emerge.

Back to human commentary: I’m not sure that makes sense. will someone please explain this stupid allegory and let me finally rest?

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#250

Post by klabb3 »

jmoak3 wrote: post #87
codeulike wrote: post #32

Wow this is 19,000 words. I like his summary at the end: At some level it’s a great example of the fundamental scientific fact that large numbers of simple computational elements can do remarkable and unexpected things. And this: ... But it’s amazing how human-like the results are. And as I’ve discussed, this suggests something that’s at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of th…

I saw a great comment here, and I will repeat it without the attribution it deserves: We may have realized it's easier to build a brain than to understand one

Very well put, although we shouldn’t be too surprised by now. In programming, it’s so easy to add accidental complexity that we are constantly searching for new tools to curb that complexity, and we’re failing. Distilling that further, you only need game of life to find emergent phenomena which we really can’t predict much about, but which we can trivially simulate.

I do think the quote is very powerful, as it highlights a specific assumption we have completely backwards: almost everything is easier than understanding. There are so many fields where trial and error is still the main MO, yet we don’t seem to grok the difference intuitively. We can really only understand a narrow set of simplified systems.

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