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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

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Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#301

Post by omnicognate »

jiggawatts wrote: post #269
omnicognate wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been paying for GPT-4 since it came out and have used it extensively. It's clearly an iteration on the same thing and behaves in qualitatively the same way. The differences are just differences of degree. It's not hard to get a feel for the "edges" of an LLM. You just need to come up with a sequence of related tasks of increasing complexity. A good one is to give it a simple program and ask what it outputs. Then…

Most developers -- let alone humans -- I've met can't run trivial programs in their head successfully, let alone complex ones. I've thrown crazy complicated problems at GPT 4 and had mixed results, but then again, I get mixed results from people too. I've had it explain a multi-page SQL query I couldn't understand myself. I asked it to write doc-comments for spaghetti code that I wrote for a programming competition,…

"In a distinctly non-humanlike way". You can learn a lot about how a system works from how it fails and in this case it fails in a way consistent with the token-prediction approach we know it is using rather than the model-forming approach some are claiming has "emerged" from that. It doesn't show the performance on a marginally more complex example that you would expect from a human with the same performance on the slightly simpler one, which is precisely the point Rodney Brooks is making. It applies equally to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

But I didn't respond to debate the nature or merits of LLMs. It's been done to death and I wouldn't expect to change your mind. I'm just offering myself as a counterexample to your assertion that everyone (emphasis yours) that is unconvinced by some of the claims being made about LLM capabilities (I dislike your "sides" characterisation) is using GPT-3.5.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#302

Post by biorach »

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…

> Now ChatGPT is pretty much Skinner’s work come to life.

I'm pretty sure that is based on a misunderstanding of Skinner, ChatGPT, or both

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#303

Post by biorach »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #291
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But now you have to explain why the same is not true of a human. Just saying a human has a 'mental representation' and a 'mind' is not explaining anything

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#304

Post by leobg »

biorach wrote: post #302
leobg wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now ChatGPT is pretty much Skinner’s work come to life. I'm pretty sure that is based on a misunderstanding of Skinner, ChatGPT, or both

Or very lossy compression of what I mean. I have studied both quite extensively. Not 10,000 hours each, but hundreds for sure.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#305

Post by namaria »

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…

Does free will exist or only hard determinism can be true? You seem to have reached a definitive conclusion. And you seem to think natural selection and evolution of species and autonomous machines prove your point.

You also seem to think that questioning the veracity of your position is engaging in magical thinking. How could I possibly 'enlighten' you if you are sure of being right?

It doesn't matter if I point out that physics hasn't been able to prove materialism. Where is the fundamental particle? Why can't we determine even through which slit did a quantum of light travel? The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics appears to directly contradict your claims of hard determinism being the only valid explanation of reality. But I must be wrong about that. Since clearly you have seen reality for what it is, and I have failed to do so.

Then again, we cannot escape this situation seeing as it is determined.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#306

Post by moffkalast »

20after4 wrote: post #102
quad_eye_oh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but LLMs suggest that learning how to predict and only training on predictions is sufficient to learn anything and to have emergent generative abilities. What if learning to predict the upcoming input is all that's all that is needed for general human intelligence? What if it is all that any animals do?

This right here. I actually am strongly starting to believe that this is indeed what's going on. I read the book Kingdom of Speech a few years ago and that also left me with the perspective that perhaps language has a lot more to do with how we think and perceive the world than most people like to admit. The book has been heavily criticized but I believe it made an interesting point about language.

I mean hasn't it been proven on multiple occasions that humans who never learn a language during their life also don't develop higher cognitive skills and stay on the level of a child? Clearly language plays a notable part in reasoning, and it's frankly no surprise that we're seeing this behaviour from language models.

It's also quite interesting how foundation models and fine tuning appear analogous to being born with a brain that already has six million years' worth of weights in it (trained implicitly through random changes and natural selection), which are then adapted over the course of a lifetime when environment relevant data is gradually obtained.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#307

Post by biorach »

RandomLensman wrote: post #270
tornato7 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that ChatGPT undeniably built a world model good enough to understand the physical and three-dimensional properties of these items pretty well, and it gives me a somewhat workable way to stack them, despite never having seen that in its training data.

You cannot conclude that from the output - the training data will likely contain a lot stacking things. Everyday objects also might have some stacking properties that make these questions easy to answer even with semi-random answers. Plus, some stuff clearly makes no sense or is ignored (like the gummy worms in the center, forgetting about the succulent in some cases). If you want to test world modeling, give it obje…

> For example, a bunch of 7 dimensional objects that can only be stacked a certain way.

That's a ridiculous example.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#308

Post by beebeepka »

foldr wrote: post #293
avereveard wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stating obvious - but inconvenient - truths is political rambling to you? Guy is a treasure.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#309

Post by moffkalast »

astrea wrote: post #131
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.

But you and your brain are much more than the language-forming aspect.

Yes, most of the brain is a glorified microcontroller for running and interpreting data from a billion skin sensors and driving hundreds of muscle actuators, doing depth and object inference from binocular images, locating sounds from the twin microphone array, etc. Language and especially reasoning is a very small part of it all.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#310

Post by [deleted] »

jiggawatts wrote: post #269
omnicognate wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been paying for GPT-4 since it came out and have used it extensively. It's clearly an iteration on the same thing and behaves in qualitatively the same way. The differences are just differences of degree. It's not hard to get a feel for the "edges" of an LLM. You just need to come up with a sequence of related tasks of increasing complexity. A good one is to give it a simple program and ask what it outputs. Then…

Most developers -- let alone humans -- I've met can't run trivial programs in their head successfully, let alone complex ones. I've thrown crazy complicated problems at GPT 4 and had mixed results, but then again, I get mixed results from people too. I've had it explain a multi-page SQL query I couldn't understand myself. I asked it to write doc-comments for spaghetti code that I wrote for a programming competition,…

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