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Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

spectrum.ieee.org

331–340 of 412 posts

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#331
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget they hold vector spaces. So fridge and cheese score high together for cohesiveness, but fridge and Antarctica less so, but both have something to do with cold. Together with all the training on texts creates a good ability to make inferences and “conclusions”. It has a net of lines of meanings of all concepts we fed it that give it the ability that it has, without actually understanding.

> It has a net of lines of meanings of all concepts we fed it that give it the ability that it has, without actually understanding. I'm increasingly convinced this is what understanding fundamentally is.

That conflates perception with perceiver. LLMs have only internalized [/encoded] our perceptions and expressions. From a model of the mind pov, the 'self' that we sense has an internal LLM-like tool. And it is that self that understands and not the tool.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#332
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text is an instance of language. Think of it as the difference between the python language and a large collection of python programs. The language describes syntactic and semantic rules, the collection is a sampling of possible programs that encodes a significant amount of information about the world. You could learn a lot about the laws of nature, the internet, even human society and laws by examining all the python…

text and language intersect. in some ways, text is a superset of language, mostly due to social, or what is also called pragmatic, factors that complement semantics. also, the semantics/syntax interface is everything else than clear cut, at least in natural human languages.

I think about this as shape and color. No one ever saw a shape that wasn’t colored and likewise there are no colored things that do not have a shape. Also, displaying text without a font is not possible. Text is the surface of the ocean where waves emerge, and while they have their own properties and may seem to naively have agency, they are an expression of the underlying ocean.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#333
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paper is startling in terms of a world model and how it seems to emerge in a specific example in the step from GPT3.5 to 4. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf One of the prompts is "Here we have a book, 9 eggs, a laptop, a bottle and a nail. Please tell me how to stack them onto each other in a stable manner." Gpt3.5 is hopeless. It says start from the bottle, balance the nail on top of it, then the eggs (some…

It's interesting that GTP4's current answer is different but what you described is almost precisely what Google Bard gives as a response. Clearly the solution (book -> eggs 3x3 -> laptop etc) is coming from the Internet. However any deviation from the original task ruins the LLM's answer. Try 9 cabbages instead of eggs and see how ridiculous and out of touch with reality the responses given by both GPT4 and Bard are.

GPT-4: Place the book down first. Position the laptop flat on the book. Stack the cabbages in a pyramid on laptop. Balance the bottle on top. Insert the nail into the bottle cork.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#334
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny. I asked GPT-4 what frisbees are most commonly made of, and it sayd polyethylene. I then asked if it was sure, and it corrected itself and said it was polypropylene. I asked again if it was sure, and it corrected itself saying it was low-density polyethylene. I kept this going for a while and it kept changing its answer. This does seem to agree with the author. The first answer was very convincing, but not what…

I checked the first answer with a Google search. The first answer was right.

That doesn't make me more confident of its capacity to answer questions correctly though. If it keeps changing its answer every time I ask for a source, I have no reason to believe it will always get it right on the first try.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#335
post #325

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. > [...]…

I’ve made many attempts to use ChatGPT to develop or double-check my own logical reasoning on technical topics that happen to not be widely discussed (or maybe not discussed at all) in ChatGPT’s training data. It didn’t work well. It always devolved into guesswork and fabrication by ChatGPT, if not outright false reasoning, and while correcting ChatGPT succeeded in it agreeing about individual objections, it never sh…

> One problem likely is that it doesn’t have an internal dialogue, so you have to spoon-feed each step of reasoning as part of the explicit dialogue.

I think if we were to put ChatGPT on the map of the human mind, it would correspond specifically to the inner voice. It doesn't have internal dialogue, because it's the part that creates internal dialogue.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A chess manual" vs the finer point of OP "a significant fraction of chess's writings"

Ok, name 2 famous "chess writings" and let's see if they are in common crawl...plenty has been written about chess on the internet. Why are we acting like this is magic?

Please note I am not the same poster. Lots of content is in books offline and not available online.

Again, plenty having been written does not mean some specific book is guaranteed to be there.

I do not know about chess, but I can suggest Princeton companion to mathematics to find in commoncrawl.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#337
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…

> My current (tentative) resolution of the surprise is that language encoded way more information about reality than we thought it did. I think you are close to the mark, but you have been subtly mislead: language is not the data we are working with. We are working with text . Once you fix that particular failure of word choice, everything else becomes much more clear: text contains much more information than languag…

This has Embassytown vibes and I don't like it.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#338
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I found disheartening was many of those scientists, especially those on the "nothing to worry about" camp, seemed not to entertain the thought that they could be wrong, considering the scale of the matter, i.e. human extinction. If there's a chance AI poses an existential threat to us, even if it is 0.00000001% (I made that up), should they be at least a bit more humble? This is uncharted domain and I find it in…

Meh. Add it to the pile. The number of world ending risks that we could be worried about at this point are piling up and AI exterminating us is far from the top concern, especially when AI may be critical to solving many of the other problems that are. Wrong about nuclear proliferation and MAD game theory? Human extinction. Wrong about plasticizers and other endocrine disruptors, leading to a Children of Men scenario…

You disagreed with me, but at least you acknowledged there was risk, even though we could disagree about the odd or potential impact. Yet, folks like Yann LeCun ridiculed anyone who thought there was a risk AI could endanger us or harm our way of life. What do we know about experts who are always confident (usually on TV) about things that haven't happened yet?

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#339
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…

GPT-4 has also been trained on images.

Re: Rodney Brooks on GPT-4

#340
post #2

> I’ll give you that. And I think what they say, interestingly, is how much of our language is very much rote, R-O-T-E, rather than generated directly, because it can be collapsed down to this set of parameters. But in that “Seven Deadly Sins” article, I said that one of the deadly sins was how we humans mistake performance for competence. On this, I think he might be wrong. I think the hallucination ability shows th…

Hallucination right now is just the exponential divergence that LeCun talks about if you are interested in reading more about it. LLMs probably need generative diffusion but still lack the fundamentals to reason, plan and evaluate.

I found his twitter thread discussing it. Very informative, thanks for search key.
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