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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

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Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#291

Post by mrtranscendence »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #255
ramraj07 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. > [...]…

ChatGPT does not fulfill that definition because it does not have any “mental representation”; it has no mind with which to form a “mental model”. It emulates understanding — quite well in many scenarios — but there is nothing there to possess understanding; it is at bottom simply a very large collection of numbers that are combined arithmetically according to a simple algorithm.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#292

Post by Biganon »

namaria wrote: post #259
anon84873628 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Care to enlighten us a little? What is there even to debate? The position expressed by your parent comment is so uncomfortable that it's constantly being challenged, but that doesn't make it wrong. Or are "thoughts" some sort of magical fluff not bound by the laws of physics? Are we constantly pulling ourselves by our bootstraps? Giving birth to entirely new brain activity out of nothingness?

This is just woo woo nonsense. Until someone can find an explanation that makes more sense than "natural selection slowly gave apes the ability to think abstractly and they started thinking about themselves", I won't believe in any kind of free will, and now the meta is reaching the point where we create entirely new brains out of silicon.

"They just repeat stuff!"

So do we

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#293

Post by foldr »

avereveard wrote: post #198
ramraj07 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well not in the field he's a professional clickbaiter targeting a specific, well defined eco chamber.

Accusing Chomsky of being a ‘clickbaiter’ is maybe the most absurd thing I’ve heard all month. You think he’s trying to get additional views for his TikTok videos?

His recent political ramblings and Epstein-adjacency are extremely embarrassing (at best), but he's not some kind of cheap online attention whore.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#294

Post by jiggawatts »

croes wrote: post #239
jiggawatts wrote: post #110

This is a terrible article written by someone who doesn't seem to have even tried GPT 4. Their only example references GPT 3.5, for example, and then they waffle on about only vaguely related topics such as level 5 self-driving. This quote in particular stood out as ignorant: “What the large language models are good at is saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” That…

>The elephant flew to the Moon. Doesn't prove anything. So GPT-4 is trained on Wolframs example or many people tried it on GPT-4 and corrected the wrong answer.

Wolfram pulled that out of a hat in an interview that was just a week or two ago. The data used for training GPT-4 is from before September 2021.

The point Stephen was trying to make was not about any specific sentence.

The point is that while forcing these models to get better through gradient descent, their only option for "going downhill" and improving the loss function is to go above and beyond mere grammar. That's because syntax and grammar only take them so far, and the only available source of improvement is to gain a general-purpose understanding of the world that the text they're seeing is describing.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#295

Post by Al0neStar »

leobg wrote: post #264
ramraj07 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He’s doing the same to ChatGPT that he did to Skinner in the 1960s. Back then, it put him on the map, and he lives in the illusion that he was right. Now ChatGPT is pretty much Skinner’s work come to life. The BFS book Chomsky critiqued was literally “Verbal Behavior” - a book about how intelligence arises from “dumb” reinforcement learning of words. Obviously Chomsky must now claim that ChatGPT only pretends to be i…

There is a difference between text and language and so far LLMs have told us nothing about language. LLMs being able to generalize to languages with a much smaller training corpus shows that maybe Chomsky is right about universal grammar.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#296

Post by foldr »

leobg wrote: post #264
ramraj07 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He’s doing the same to ChatGPT that he did to Skinner in the 1960s. Back then, it put him on the map, and he lives in the illusion that he was right. Now ChatGPT is pretty much Skinner’s work come to life. The BFS book Chomsky critiqued was literally “Verbal Behavior” - a book about how intelligence arises from “dumb” reinforcement learning of words. Obviously Chomsky must now claim that ChatGPT only pretends to be i…

It’s a significant misunderstanding of Chomsky’s life’s work to think that ChatGPT would prove it wrong. Chomsky’s primary claim is a claim about how language acquisition works in humans. He argues, for example, that certain locality constraints on linguistic dependencies are ‘built in’ and not learned inductively. Thus a human does not ‘learn’ that (i) is ambiguous and (ii) is not:

(i) How often did you tell John that he should take out the trash? [how often did you tell, or how often to take it out]

(ii) How often did you tell John why he should take out the trash? [only means how often did you tell]

Nothing that ChatGPT can do suggests that Chomsky was wrong about this kind of thing. It’s really more of a blow to a certain kind of work in AI that was partly inspired by Chomsky – but not something that he himself ever took much interest in.

Now it’s true that Chomsky appears to be in the camp that says ChatGPT doesn’t really understand anything. But the focus of his own work has never been on debunking AI, or making claims about the true nature of understanding, or anything of that ilk.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#297

Post by zo1 »

zmmmmm wrote: post #169
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.

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.

This is why I am starting to think that it is very important for us to be able to "introspect" and reason about the thoughts/feelings we're having. It allows us to have an internal feedback loop that I think a lot of people lack.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#298

Post by [deleted] »

Biganon wrote: post #292
namaria wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Care to enlighten us a little? What is there even to debate? The position expressed by your parent comment is so uncomfortable that it's constantly being challenged, but that doesn't make it wrong. Or are "thoughts" some sort of magical fluff not bound by the laws of physics? Are we constantly pulling ourselves by our bootstraps? Giving birth to entirely new brain activity out of nothingness? This is just woo woo non…

[deleted]

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#299

Post by copperx »

namaria wrote: post #253
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.

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.

> Language is a way to encode thought. It's not what thoughts are made of.

What about people who think verbally and don't have a "mind's eye"? In that case, thoughts and their encoding might be closer to 1:1.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#300

Post by foldr »

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.

I see that Watumull is one of the coauthors. I'm not sure what's going on with that, but Watumull is the common thread running through other bad papers with otherwise-sensible linguists' names tacked on to them, such as this bizarre paper about recursion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3884515/ I haven't had a chance to read the NYTimes editorial, but I would be skeptical how much of it is really coming from Chomsky. He's 94 at this point, and while he's not senile in a medical sense, I don't think his judgement is what it used to be.
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