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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

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Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#251

Post by [deleted] »

zainhoda wrote: post #172
thomastjeffery wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My current (tentative) resolution of the surprise is that language encoded way more information about reality than we thought it did. I think you are close to the mark, but you have been subtly mislead: language is not the data we are working with. We are working with text . Once you fix that particular failure of word choice, everything else becomes much more clear: text contains much more information than languag…

There’s an exercise that some people do when learning programming, which is to write down the steps to make a sandwich. Then the teacher follows the exact instructions to make a sandwich and most people don’t put enough detail for a computer to follow (I.e. open the fridge etc) and the teacher will run around bumping into things. That used to be a teaching exercise to show people the amount of precision required when…

[deleted]

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#252

Post by prox »

zainhoda wrote: post #172
thomastjeffery wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My current (tentative) resolution of the surprise is that language encoded way more information about reality than we thought it did. I think you are close to the mark, but you have been subtly mislead: language is not the data we are working with. We are working with text . Once you fix that particular failure of word choice, everything else becomes much more clear: text contains much more information than languag…

There’s an exercise that some people do when learning programming, which is to write down the steps to make a sandwich. Then the teacher follows the exact instructions to make a sandwich and most people don’t put enough detail for a computer to follow (I.e. open the fridge etc) and the teacher will run around bumping into things. That used to be a teaching exercise to show people the amount of precision required when…

Don’t forget they hold vector spaces. So fridge and cheese score high together for cohesiveness, but fridge and Antarctica less so, but both have something to do with cold. Together with all the training on texts creates a good ability to make inferences and “conclusions”. It has a net of lines of meanings of all concepts we fed it that give it the ability that it has, without actually understanding.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#253

Post by namaria »

JoshTko wrote: post #38
fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

The more I think about it the more I'm convinced I am basically just predicting/saying my next word whenever I speak.

Can you think without words? Can you imagine how it feels to swim, something you might have done, and extend it to fly like a bird? Can you read a novel and feel emotions about characters that don't exist beyond text descriptions of their actions? Language is a way to encode thought. It's not what thoughts are made of.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#254

Post by RandomLensman »

tornato7 wrote: post #250
RandomLensman wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reads well if you don't think about it too much... For example: Where does the succulent go if the light bulbs are nestled into the lens of the DLSR? Balanced on the light bulbs? Why would the gummy worm package need to be in the center of the book to maintain balance?

https://i.imgur.com/feEiiZA.png I tried to stack all of these objects myself and couldn't really. I think GPT-4's approach is actually really good. It correctly points out that the gummy worms make a flexible base for the DSLR (otherwise the protruding buttons/viewfinder make it wobbly on the hard book), and the light bulbs are able to nestle into the front of the lens. If they were smaller light bulbs I could probab…

Might also put the light bulbs as a base (especially if in a box). They are pretty sturdy and can hold a book.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#255

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

ramraj07 wrote: post #158
krainboltgreene wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue with all these experts is they still think it's human nature to be able to fully understand the world before they speak about it None of the experts think this.

Is Chomsky an expert? Try reading his infuriatingly tone-deaf NYTimes editorial.

Chomsky writes that language models lack the ability to reason.

> Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.

> [...] Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation: “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking.

I decided to ask ChatGPT why an apple falls, based on Chomsky's statement:

> Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. Can you say why it falls?

ChatGPT responds in exactly the way Chomsky says it cannot:

> Yes, the apple falls due to the force of gravity. Gravity is a natural force that attracts objects with mass towards each other. When the apple is released from your hand, it is subject to the gravitational pull of the Earth, causing it to accelerate downward and fall to the ground.

ChatGPT certainly appears to understand that apples fall because of gravitational attraction, and that gravity is universal.

What makes all the discussion of whether ChatGPT does or does not truly understand this or that so frustrating is that it's based on pure assertion. ChatGPT responds exactly like someone who understands gravity would, so I'm very strongly inclined to believe that it understands gravity. Otherwise, what does "understanding" even mean? It's not some magic process.

Again, turning to ChatGPT to define "understanding," here is what it says:

> [Understanding] involves making connections, integrating information, and gaining insights or knowledge about a particular subject or concept. Understanding goes beyond simple awareness or recognition; it involves interpreting, analyzing, and synthesizing information to form a coherent mental representation or mental model of the subject matter. It often involves the ability to apply knowledge in new or different contexts, make connections to prior knowledge or experiences, and make sense of complex or abstract ideas.

ChatGPT definitely fulfills that definition of "understanding."

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#256

Post by namaria »

DJHenk wrote: post #236
zmmmmm wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I feel like one reason people are struggling with this is they can't accept a critical part of the truth : most people are stochastic parrots themselves most of the time. True, creative genuine deep thinking is an exceptional state of thinking for us.

Years ago I transitioned from a developer role to a manager role and suddenly I had to do a lot more talking. Not all the talking needs to be a deeply involved exchange of complex ideas, a lot of it serves a different purpose. Sometimes it can be a simple as filling up the time in a pleasant way with a group of people that may or may not know each other that well. After getting some experience with this I noticed tha…

The very fact that we can be conscious about our ability to generate language and work it separately from the rest of our consciousness tells me that chatbots might emulate our language generation ability. We shouldn't invert it to conclude that means they can reason about it.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#257

Post by soultrees »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #34
nextworddev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed that performance in coding tasks is decreasing while latency is improving. So there’s that.

Generating worse code in half the time is a service degradation, IMO. I mostly use it for monotonous scripts and one off functions, where saying “write this thing” while I click off the tab and do something else for a minute is a not in anyway a problem. I could tolerate it being 2-4X as slow, because now I have to spend an equivalent amount of time as that correcting errors it didn’t make a month ago.

The worst is changing class names or hallucinating property names. I wasn’t sure if it was just my expectation or if indeed it has gotten worse so it’s good to see other people having the experience.

I have a theory that they made it worse on purpose, not to save money but instead to really train it’s reasoning and arguing skills because I spend so much time ‘fighting with a computer’ now.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#258

Post by namaria »

cageface wrote: post #220
panarky wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thinking about the concept in non verbal ... abstract terms The abstract terms we think about are concepts, and we think about multiple concepts, at various levels of abstraction, and their relationships to each other, before getting a sense of what we want to say or write. Only then do we begin speaking or writing, grouping concepts into paragraphs, breaking them down into sentences and words. And there's evidence…

Right but they're limited to concepts that are derived from linguistic tokens. Human reasoning can include nonverbal inputs. For example asking GPT what would be a reasonable way to stack a list of arbitrary objects on top of each other.

Lately I've been think that staple of science fiction, the android robot, is the only way to get AGI. I thought a lot about computer vision when that was the bleeding edge of AI a few years back. It strikes me as obviously wrong to try training models on two dimensional arrays of pixels and expect them to develop visual skills. Why don't we give them two cameras and arms so they can learn about physics and start differentiating 3 dimensional input? I think when we have robots capable of interacting with the world as humans do we might be able to train them to develop near human levels of intelligence.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#259

Post by namaria »

anon84873628 wrote: post #216
JoshTko wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I think about it the more I'm convinced I am basically just predicting/saying my next word whenever I speak.

The sad truth is that we are all NPCs without free will. "Thoughts" are a non-physical phenomenon that, seemingly, arise from physical activity in the brain. The thoughts (our "experience") come after the electrochemical reaction that manifests them. How could these non-physical phenomena then turn around and influence the physical chemistry? They can't. By the time we experience a thought, the physical state for it…

Reducing a debate that has been raging for millennia across several disciplines to three lines of text tells me you don't have enough of a grasp on the subject to draw any conclusions about it, let alone resolve it altogether.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#260

Post by namaria »

dragonwriter wrote: post #148
fwlr wrote: post #33

> The large language models are a little surprising. I’ll give you that. I think this is the key point about LLMs that kind of explains the wide and polarized views on whether it understands or parrots, whether it can think or is the precursor to thinking or is a dead-end, whether it will catastrophically destroy the world, or “merely” make it steadily worse with bullshit, or just put a few industries out of a job. A…

> One way to resolve this surprise is to find some reason to believe these strange abilities are fundamentally not an understanding of the world. Thus stochastic parrots, this article, Yan LeCun and Chomsky, etc. I mean, it is kind of obvious that predicting text based on a large corpus of text written by people with a model of the world will, if it works at all, look like having a model of the world. The question is…

Extra points for teaching me a new word for navel gazing. But I think your reasoning about it devolved into navel gazing at the end.
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