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Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

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Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#301

Post by maaaaattttt »

user_7832 wrote: post #236
loveparade wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution I would push back on this a little bit. While it has not helped us to understand our own intelligence, it has made me question whether such a thing even exists. Perhaps there are no simple and beautiful natural laws, like those that exists in Physics, that can explain how humans think and…

> The big lesson from the AI development in the last 10 years from me has been "I guess humans really aren't so special after all" Instead I would take the opposite take. How wonderful is it, that with naturally evolved processes and neural structures, have we been able to create what we have. Van Gogh’s paintings came out of the human brain. The Queens of the Skies - hundreds of tons of metal and composites - flying…

"Brain_s_". I find we (me included) generally overlook/underestimate the distributed nature of human intelligence, included in the AI field. That's why when I first heard of mixture of experts I was thrilled about the idea and the potential. (One could also see similarities in random forest). I believe a path to AGI(tm) would be to reproduce the evolution of human intelligence artificially. Start with small models training bigger and bigger models and let the bigger successfull models (insert RL, genetic algos, etc.) "reproduce" and teach newer models from scratch. Having different model architecture cohabit could maybe even lead to the kind of specializations we see in parts of the brain

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#302

Post by energy123 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #272
PeterStuer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It indeed baffles me how academics overall seem so dismissive of recent breakthroughs in sub-symbolic approaches as models from which we can learn about 'intelligence'? It is as if a biochemist looks at a human brain, and concludes there is no 'intelligence' there at all, just a whole lot of electro-chemical reactions. It fully ignores the potential for emergence. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying 'AGI has arriv…

>It fully ignores the potential for emergence. There's two kinds of emergence, one scientific, the other a strange, vacuous notion in the absence of any theory and explanation. The first case is emergence when we for example talk about how gas or liquid states, or combustibility emerge from certain chemical or physical properties of particles. It's not just that they're emergent, we can explain how they're emergent a…

> There's two kinds of emergence, one scientific

I am not aware of any scientific kind of emergence. There's philosophical emergence, and its counterpoint - ontological reductionism.

Most people have an intuitive sense that philosophical emergence is true, and that bubbles up in their writing, taken as an axiom that we're all supposed to go along with.

On closer inspection, it is not clear to me that this isn't simply a confusion or illusion caused by the tendency of the human mind to apply abstractions and socially constructed categories on top of complicated phenomena, and those abstractions are confused for actual effects that are different from the underlying base-level phenomena being described.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#303

Post by xron »

atdt wrote: post #178

The level of intellectual engagement with Chomsky's ideas in the comments here is shockingly low. Surely, we are capable of holding these two thoughts: one, that the facility of LLMs is fantastic and useful, and two, that the major breakthroughs of AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution. That may change, particularly if the intel…

Chompsky's central criticism of LLMs is that they can learn impossible languages just as easily as they learn possible languages. He refers to this repeatedly in the linked interview. Therefore, they cannot teach us about our own intelligence.

However, a paper published last year (Mission: Impossible Language Models, Kallini et al.) proved that LLMs do NOT learn impossible languages as easily as they learn possible languages. This undermines everything that Chompsky says about LLMs in the linked interview.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#304

Post by thomassmith65 »

js8 wrote: post #270
thomassmith65 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chomsky's problem here has nothing to do with his politics, but unfortunately a lot to do with his long-held position in the Nature/Nurture debate - a position that is undermined by the ability of LLMs to learn language without hardcoded grammatical rules: Chomsky introduced his theory of language acquisition, according to which children have an inborn quality of being biologically encoded with a universal grammar ht…

I don't see how the two things are related. Whether acquisition of human language is nature or nurture - it is still learning of some sort. Yes, maybe we can reproduce that learning process in LLMs, but that doesn't mean the LLMs imitate only the nurture part (might as well be just finetuning), and not the nature part. An airplane is not an explanation for a bird's flight.

The great breakthrough in AI turned out to be LLMs.

Nature, for an LLM, is its design: graph, starting weights, etc.

Environment, for an LLM, is what happens during training.

LLMs are capable of learning grammar entirely from their environment, which suggests that infants are too, which is bad for Chomsky's position that the basics of grammar are baked into human DNA.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#305

Post by vrighter »

K0balt wrote: post #192
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can LLMs actually parse human languages? Or can they react to stimuli with a trained behavioral response? Dogs can learn to sit when you say "sit", and learn to roll over when you say "roll over". But the dog doesn't parse human language; it reacts to stimuli with a trained behavioral response. (I'm not that familiar with LLM/ML, but it seems like trained behavioral response rather than intelligent parsing. I believe…

Animals definitely parse human language, some to a significant extent. Like an airplane taking off, things that seem like “emergent behavior” and hard lines of human vs animal behavior are really matters of degree that, like the airplane, we don’t notice until it actually takes flight… then we think there is a clean line between flying and not flying, but there isn’t. The airplane is gradually becoming weightless unt…

There actually is a clean line between flying and not flying. And that's when the lift generated is greater than the pull of earth's gravity. The fact that it "feels" weightless gradually doesn't change the fact that if liftweight, plane is flying. There is no "semi flying". If it's already airborne and lift becomes less than weight, then it stops flying and starts gliding.

The lift is an emergent behavior of molecules interacting (mostly) with the wings. But there is a hard clean cutoff between "flying" and "not flying".

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#306

Post by mopsi »

to-too-two wrote: post #120
jbentley1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think we should probably stop listening to Chomsky" I've been saying this my whole life, glad it's finally catching on

Why? He's made significant contributions to political discourse and science.

He has also made significant contributions to the denial of the Khmer Rouge genocide and countless other atrocities committed by communist regimes across the world. Almost everything he's written on linguistics has been peer-reviewed, while almost none of his political work has undergone the same scrutiny before publication, and it shows.

  Noam Chomsky, the man who has spent years analyzing propaganda, is himself a propagandist. Whatever one thinks of Chomsky in general, whatever one thinks of his theories of media manipulation and the mechanisms of state power, Chomsky's work with regard to Cambodia has been marred by omissions, dubious statistics, and, in some cases, outright misrepresentations. On top of this, Chomsky continues to deny that he was wrong about Cambodia. He responds to criticisms by misrepresenting his own positions, misrepresenting his critics' positions, and describing his detractors as morally lower than "neo-Nazis and neo-Stalinists."(2) Consequently, his refusal to reconsider his words has led to continued misinterpretations of what really happened in Cambodia.

  /---/

  Chomsky often describes the Western media as propaganda. Yet Chomsky himself is no more objective than the media he criticizes; he merely gives us different propaganda. Chomsky's supporters frequently point out that he is trying to present the side of the story that is less often seen. But there is no guarantee that these "opposing" viewpoints have any factual merit; Porter and Hildebrand's book is a fine example. The value of a theory lies in how it relates to the truth, not in how it relates to other theories. By habitually parroting only the contrarian view, Chomsky creates a skewed, inaccurate version of events. This is a fundamentally flawed approach: It is an approach that is concerned with persuasiveness, and not with the truth. It's the tactic of a lawyer, not a scientist. Chomsky seems to be saying: if the media is wrong, I'll present a view which is diametrically opposed. Imagine a mathematician adopting Chomsky's method: Rather than insuring the accuracy of the calculations, problems would be "solved" by averaging different wrong answers.
https://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#307

Post by johnisgood »

globnomulous wrote: post #275
OccamsMirror wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I guess humans really aren't so special after all" This is a crazy take to me. As compared to what? The machines that we built? Until we discover comparably intelligent life in the universe I think it's fair to say that we are indeed very special.

https://davidhume.org/texts/empl1/dm

I am pleasantly surprised that David Hume's writings have been mentioned. I love his works.

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#308

Post by johnisgood »

krige wrote: post #248
csomar wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it has made me question whether such a thing even exists I was reading a reddit post the other day where the guy lost his crypto holdings because he input his recovery phrase somewhere. We question the intelligence of LLMs because they might open a website, read something nefarious, and then do it. But here we have real humans doing the exact same thing... > I guess humans really aren't so special after all No they…

> But here we have real humans doing the exact same thing... I'd wager that a motivation in designing these systems it so they do not make these mistakes. Otherwise what's the point, really.

Our own, and other people's mistakes shape us, and our understanding. What even is perfect, anyway?

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#309

Post by guappa »

SirHumphrey wrote: post #293
guappa wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's safe to say that anyone who voted for Trump disagrees to his contributions.

In Europe he is quite a controversial figure even on the left part of political spectrum- mainly because of his takes on Srebrenica genocide (and recently on the Ukraine war).

News to me. Source?

Re: Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)

#310

Post by suddenlybananas »

_glass wrote: post #280
loveparade wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution I would push back on this a little bit. While it has not helped us to understand our own intelligence, it has made me question whether such a thing even exists. Perhaps there are no simple and beautiful natural laws, like those that exists in Physics, that can explain how humans think and…

I think it is important to realize, that we need to understand language on our own terms. The logic of LLMs is not unlike alien technology to us. That being said, the minimalist program of Chomsky lead to nowhere, because just like programming, it found edge case after edge case, reducing it further and further, until there was no program anymore that resembled a real theory. But it is wrong to assume that the big pr…

>That being said, the minimalist program of Chomsky lead to nowhere, because just like programming, it found edge case after edge case, reducing it further and further, until there was no program anymore that resembled a real theory

As someone who has worked in linguistics, I don't really see what you're talking about. Minimalism is not full of exceptions (please elaborate on a specific example if you have one). Minimalism was created to make the old theory, Government and Binding, simpler.

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