Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 412 posts

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#311

Post by foldr »

beebeepka wrote: post #308
foldr wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

C'mon, let's not get into it here. As I'm defending Chomsky, I just wanted to be clear that I don't agree with his recent comments on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that I find his association with post-conviction Esptein extremely distasteful at best. Others may disagree, but this isn't the place to have that argument.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#312

Post by LouisSayers »

cornel_io wrote: post #290
LouisSayers wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't possibly know that, given that we don't actually understand how LLMs work on a high level. It's a fair assumption to make however - basically 80/20 rule. AI research isn't a new thing and I bet you could go back 40/50 years where they thought they were about to have a massive breakthrough to human level intelligence. > GPT-4 is three months old and you're confident that its working principle cannot be ext…

There are dozens and maybe hundreds of different approaches that could theoretically get around the limitations of GPT4 that merely haven't been trained at scale yet. There is absolutely no lack of ideas in this space, including potentially revolutionary ones, but they take time and money to prove out.

I'm sure there are lots of ideas, but it doesn't mean they're any good or will necessarily transform AI to the next level.

It's going to take time to figure out what works and what doesn't.

There's a reason why Sam Altman is saying they're not training GPT5, and it's not because they think GPT4 is good enough.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#313

Post by moffkalast »

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…

> If you want to test world modeling, give it objects it will have never encountered, describe them and then ask to stack etc. For example, a bunch of 7 dimensional objects that can only be stacked a certain way.

And when it does that perfectly, I assume you'll say that was also in the training data? All examples I've seen or tried point to LLMs being able to do some kind of reasoning that is completely dynamic, even when presented with the most outlandish cases.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#314

Post by beebeepka »

foldr wrote: post #311
beebeepka wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

C'mon, let's not get into it here. As I'm defending Chomsky, I just wanted to be clear that I don't agree with his recent comments on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that I find his association with post-conviction Esptein extremely distasteful at best. Others may disagree, but this isn't the place to have that argument.

Hey, you started it. I wouldn't have said anything if you hadn't done the exact same thing you accused the other guy of doing.

Yes, I very much disagree with you, hence my reaction.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#315

Post by RandomLensman »

biorach wrote: post #307
RandomLensman wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? You need make sure that a solution requires true understanding and isn't in the training set. If it can reason properly, it shouldn't have a problem with such a problem.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#316

Post by RandomLensman »

moffkalast wrote: post #313
RandomLensman wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you want to test world modeling, give it objects it will have never encountered, describe them and then ask to stack etc. For example, a bunch of 7 dimensional objects that can only be stacked a certain way. And when it does that perfectly, I assume you'll say that was also in the training data? All examples I've seen or tried point to LLMs being able to do some kind of reasoning that is completely dynamic, even…

All examples I tried myself show it failing miserable at reasoning.

It certainly needs better evidence than being able to come up with one of many possibilities of stacking things - aided by human interpretation on top of the text output. Happy to look at other suggestions for test problems.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#317

Post by moffkalast »

blazespin wrote: post #275
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 resolution is actually fairly simple. It's an incredibly brilliant stochastic parrot with some limited reasoning capabilities. Some folks will try to say it cannot reason, but they are wrong, there is extensive proof of that. The only question is how limited are its reasoning capabilities. After spending extensive time on openai/evals, having submitted 3 of my own, and doing a lot of tests, I would argue that an…

That's probably an accurate assessment, the question is mainly if the reasoning can be improved to a notable extent and how much on the current architecture.

I myself assumed that we're pretty close to the end of the S curve when first using 3.5-turbo and figured that hallucinations will be pretty hard to overcome, but with GPT 4 being such a massive improvement on all metrics I'm no longer as sure. GPT 5 will probably be more definitive on what's possible, based on where it starts having diminishing returns.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#318

Post by moffkalast »

sgt101 wrote: post #278
blazespin wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resolution is actually fairly simple. It's an incredibly brilliant stochastic parrot with some limited reasoning capabilities. Some folks will try to say it cannot reason, but they are wrong, there is extensive proof of that. The only question is how limited are its reasoning capabilities. After spending extensive time on openai/evals, having submitted 3 of my own, and doing a lot of tests, I would argue that an…

It's very hard to know because we don't know and can't experiment with its training data. So - it may be doing first principle reasoning, or it may be doing token substitution vs. some known example that it's seen before and is matching to.

> it may be doing token substitution vs. some known example that it's seen before and is matching to

Ah, just like us with literally 99% of stuff taught in school you mean.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#319

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

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.

It must have some representation of the real world, or else it wouldn't be able to generate responses that explain the real world.

At a certain point, there's no difference between emulating understanding and having understanding.

> it is at bottom simply a very large collection of numbers that are combined arithmetically according to a simple algorithm.

If you dissect a human brain, you'll find neurons, synapses, etc. Your brain is also "simply" a machine.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#320

Post by bohadi »

apropos the roomba founder, a nontechnical argument for necessity of embodied AI circa 1980 (5 min video) https://youtu.be/QMMw9fQ452c?t=49

That LLMs learn a world model is very convincing now, but as LeCun has said it's just one piece of the intelligence puzzle, incl. perceiving, actuating shenmede

Post reply on HN