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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?

#281

Post by Animats »

netsharc wrote: post #143
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…

> deep understanding of self and awareness Come on... you're making it sound like the thing is sentient. It's impressive but it's still a Chinese Room. Although, for searching factual information it still failed me.. I wanted to find a particular song - maybe from Massive Attack or a similar style - with a phrase in the lyrics, I asked Chatty, and it kept delivering answers where the phrase did not appear in the lyri…

No, ChatGPT is not a "Chinese Room". It's not big enough.

The classic "Chinese Room" is a pure lookup, like a search engine. All the raw data is kept. But the network in these large language models is considerably smaller than the training set. They extract generalizations from the data during the training phase, and use them during generation. Exactly how that happens or what it means is still puzzling.

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

#282

Post by biql »

lossolo wrote: post #79
visarga wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'with enough data its easier to model than we expected' > a self-similar process is ultimately responsible for granting us our own intelligence In my view, intelligence essentially resides within language, specifically in the corpus of language. Both humans and AIs can be effectively colonized by language, as there are innumerable concepts and observations that are transmitted from one mind to another, and now even…

Intelligence exists without language, language is only a way to describe the world around us and transfer information. We personally can't experience intelligence without language because you know language all your life and can't remember a moment in which you didn't. But there were humans in history that didn't knew any language and they were intelligent, there are animals that do not know any language and are intel…

The remarkable thing is that language can combine intelligence of multiple beings and at some point that collective intelligence becomes a thing of it own, it can capture minds, spread and grow. Now we have all of our collective intelligence encoded in the form of billions of web pages and it seems that the language itself can direct its thinking, at least judging by the ChatGPT outputs (although, doesn't initiate it — it needs some external input, something to respond to, just like humans need respond to what happens in the environment).

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

#283

Post by Animats »

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

That's common in the history of science and enginering. First, someone got something to happen more or less by accident, although sometimes the accident happened because they tried a lot of possible things. Then there were attempts to improve on the new thing. Eventually, detailed theoretical understanding of the new thing was achieved, and it got much better. From pottery to semiconductors, that's been the path of progress.

We're now at the point where, by fumbling around, people have developed a sort of brain-like thing that they don't fully understand. That's just the starting point. Now it needs theory.

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

#284

Post by krackers »

G_z9 wrote: post #249
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…

I think you have to loosely interpret "randomly wired" as "fully connected", i.e. no predefined structure (because an actually randomly wired net probably wouldn't learn well). The thing is as we've seen with convnets and now transformers, the structure of the network actually matters quite a bit. Even though a fully connected network could theoretically learn the right weights so that it emulates a convnet, in practice this is too hard to do. See the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748190

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

#285

Post by piersj225 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #275
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #273

This misses that key point that all this prediction can give rise to what looks like astonishing human-level creativity and across many genres. The last decade and half have shown us that with enough data we can pick out patterns well enough to be able to "categorize". But to create , that seemed like a whole another human level outside the realm of mere prediction. Turns out it isn't. What exactly allows LLMs to hav…

Can it be the next Eminem tho?

Someone on Reddit has challenged it to a rap battle

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/10zfvc7/chat_gpt_r...

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

#286

Post by taejavu »

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #273

This misses that key point that all this prediction can give rise to what looks like astonishing human-level creativity and across many genres. The last decade and half have shown us that with enough data we can pick out patterns well enough to be able to "categorize". But to create , that seemed like a whole another human level outside the realm of mere prediction. Turns out it isn't. What exactly allows LLMs to hav…

I can’t answer your question but I would push back on the claim that it’s done the requested task very decently.

There is nothing uniquely Eminem or Dennett about their respective parts. Eminem has never released a verse with as simplistic rhyme scheme as what’s been produced.

Part of the mystique in your question is by assuming that’s it’s done the Eminem/Dennett part of the request justice, when it could really be anyone else’s name attached. I’m impressed that it can create a rap battle about consciousness, but I don’t think it’s done much more than that.

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

#287

Post by blackbear_ »

est wrote: post #177

I've read many articles explains how gpt-3 work, and did a great job. What buffles me is the context consistency. ChatGPT was a huge leap compared to previous models. I have never seen it failed once. I often use "this" or "that" in my conversation with ChatGPT and it would guess 100% correct what I am refering to. Sometimes I paste a chunk of code and ask for questions of a specific part of it, ChatGPT fully underst…

> I failed to find the reason why ChatGPT worked as in contrast that gpt-3/2/1 never really worked (well)

The answer may be as simple as "it has a lot more parameters", plus the additional fine-tuning from human conversation data.

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

#288

Post by GaggiX »

Dr_Birdbrain wrote: post #99
bottlepalm wrote: post #96

The easiest way for ChatGPT to generate good output is to plain understand it. Given the vast amount of input data fed into it, it has no choice, but to start reducing the input into fundamental rules which is basically what understanding is. Understanding is a form of compression. More efficient for a neural network to understand a concept than memorize permutations. Same with statistics and markov chains, people fo…

I used to believe this, but then I saw the demo of ChatGPT attempting to play chess. The rules of chess are much simpler than any structure of the real world we might hope for it to understand—and yet it failed to learn the rules of chess. Based on this, I am pretty sure it has not learned any meaningful structure.

I know the rules of chess, including en passant, threefold repetition and all the weird castling requirements, but I would still have a lot of difficulty playing chess by keeping the state of the board in my mind and playing by saying e4, e5, Nf3, etc. out loud.

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

#289

Post by imtringued »

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…

I use the thing almost every day and the disappointment doesn't get better. After all, it behaves like a machine. It doesn't respond without your input and when you ask it something and then are unhappy with the result and change the prompt to add some extra words, it gives you something completely different even though all I wanted is the existing response plus one thing. If I ask it in more than one prompt, then it will forget or repeat things. It behaves like a random word predictor because that is how it was built. They didn't give it a memory or the initiative to respond automatically.

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

#290

Post by mxkopy »

taejavu wrote: post #286
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #273

This misses that key point that all this prediction can give rise to what looks like astonishing human-level creativity and across many genres. The last decade and half have shown us that with enough data we can pick out patterns well enough to be able to "categorize". But to create , that seemed like a whole another human level outside the realm of mere prediction. Turns out it isn't. What exactly allows LLMs to hav…

I can’t answer your question but I would push back on the claim that it’s done the requested task very decently. There is nothing uniquely Eminem or Dennett about their respective parts. Eminem has never released a verse with as simplistic rhyme scheme as what’s been produced. Part of the mystique in your question is by assuming that’s it’s done the Eminem/Dennett part of the request justice, when it could really be…

Once (if?) the chatGPT servers are up I'm going to ask for a rap battle between 42 Dugg and Daniel Dennett to test exactly this hypothesis.

I'm confident that the output will be stylistically different but maybe only superficially. After all some of the first generative NNs that made waves were image style transfer models, and they're fairly small. Who's to say chatGPT can't do a natural language equivalent of the same?

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