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What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

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Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#481

Post by bikamonki »

bottlepalm wrote: post #412
bikamonki wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except ChatGPT "is not aware" that it understands.

At what point of the machine telling you it is aware do you believe that it is actually aware? The building blocks are the same - neural nets. The language outputs are the same enough to fool a human. So what’s that elusive secret sauce that makes you ‘aware’ and other things not?

Secret sauce, no clue. Some folks are working on AGI precisely looking for that secret sauce. ChatGPT is just a tool, a very clever one. Just as a chainsaw cannot drill holes, ChatGPT cannot do many, many other intellectual tasks. We have other very clever AI tools. All can fool humans as well. But I imagine the first phones or TVs also fooled humans. Tools, just tools so far. I think even if we ever build an artificial brain and wire it correctly, it will still be just a tool. I think AGI is not a hardware problem but a software one. Given the necessary hardware, can we program AGI?

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#482

Post by tkgally »

famouswaffles wrote: post #450
tkgally wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked as a translator for many years and have been following developments in machine translation closely. In my opinion, ChatGPT does represent a significant advance for machine translation. If you have the time to watch it, I made a video about the topic last week: https://youtu.be/najKN2bXqCo

Hey you might this. Bilingual LLMs really are human level translators. I don't know why this frankly mindblowing fact isn't discussed or researched more but they are. https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...

Thanks for posting that. The results do look good.

The examples are all short and from expository prose passages, though. Do you have any longer examples that include dialog, so the translator has to infer pronoun reference, the identities of speakers in conversations, and other narrative-dependent information? As I show in my video, that’s where ChatGPT is superior to Google Translate et al.—at least with Japanese to English.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#483

Post by williamcotton »

the_af wrote: post #472
williamcotton wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try something like: The current board state is: board = [['', '', ''], ['', '', ''], ['', '', '']]; write a javascript function called bestMove(board) that predicts the best tic-tac-toe move to make given a board. use that function to update the board state and return the board state in JSON form. The response will have a bunch of functions like function bestMove(board) { function getEmptySpaces(board) { function pre…

Interesting. Have you tried playing a full game like this, instead of a single move? In any case, I don't think this is what people expect out of ChatGPT. Your approach is too "programmer centric". I think people expect telling ChatGPT the rules of the game, in almost plain language, and then expect to be able to play a game of Tic Tac Toe interacting with it like one would with a person. This means, not asking it to…

> Interesting. Have you tried playing a full game like this, instead of a single move?

No, but it is correctly running the best move functions so through induction we can see it will successfully play a full game.

> I think people expect telling ChatGPT the rules of the game, in almost plain language, and then expect to be able to play a game of Tic Tac Toe interacting with it like one would with a person.

This is an unreasonable expectation for a large language model.

When a person computes the sum of two large numbers they do not use their language facilities. They probably require a pencil and pad so they can externalize the computational process. At the very least they are performing calculations in their head in a manner very different from the cognitive abilities used when they catch a ball.

Try playing a game like Risk without a board or pieces, that is, without a concrete mechanism to maintain state.

This approach isn’t cheating and an LLM acting as a translator is a key component. This doesn’t “prove that LLMs are useless bullshit generators, snicker snicker” because it can’t maintain state or do math very well, it just means you need to use other existing tools to do math and maintain state… like JS interpreters.

One thing that I think will improve is that a larger scale language model would need less internally specific terms for the solution in order to reliably get the same results.

Also, translations are necessarily lossy and somewhat arbitrary, so these results need to be considered probabilistically as well. Meaning, generate 10 different thunks and have them act as voting on an answers they compute.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#484

Post by Baeocystin »

famouswaffles wrote: post #458
Baeocystin wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has been blowing every single translation task I've thrown it out of the water, even compared to other modern systems. I have no idea why more people aren't talking about that aspect of it either, other than the Anglosphere in general is kind of oblivious to things that aren't English.

I tested Chinese-English translations on a properly bilingual LLM and the results are amazing. You might be interested in seeing https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#485

Post by michannne »

thegabriele wrote: post #93
osswid wrote: post #77

In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play" Minsky shut his eyes, "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty." A…

I keep on stumbling on this story, yet i can't seem to be able to grasp it. We have senses so our brain has some sort of a priori knowledge of the world? We're all almost blind when we born.

The point of Minsky's action is to demonstrate to Sussman that Sussman's intent is essentially "if you can't see it, it's not there", but of course the room doesn't become empty when Minsky closes his eyes - the neural net won't lose preconceptions just because you randomly wired it, you just lose the ability to see and control what those preconceptions are.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#486

Post by IIAOPSW »

leereeves wrote: post #102
IIAOPSW wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a robot arm does help understand how muscles work. By having a robot arm to play with, you can pinpoint exactly the abilities which aren't accounted for by your current understanding. Boston Dynamics built that robot dog thing. It took decades to make robotic kinematics that good. The dog demonstrates an understanding of a system of muscles that solves the same problems as its biological counterpart. You say…

> Building a robot arm does help understand how muscles work. I think we're talking about different levels. A robotic arm helps understand the mechanics of an arm, but not cell metabolism, myosin motors, etc. Any understanding of muscles you might get from a robotic arm is superficial. > You say that overgrown text prediction isn't how humans work. To be fair, I did say that, but what I meant was that humans don't wo…

>What types of things do humans not do with text prediction? Anything that doesn't involve the language processing parts of the brain, at least.

Let's separate out the robotics problem from the consciousness problem. Sure the brain solves both, but the things that a computer can't do yet because it has no body aren't fundamental limitations. We can just hook the computer up to a robot body eventually.

So to rephrase, what types of things can the brain of a blind paralyzed person do that text prediction cannot?

>To be fair, I did say that, but what I meant was that humans don't work the way ChatGPT does. Maybe we do use "overgrown text prediction" but we don't use word vectors, tensor calculus, and transformers.

Well, at least not consciously.

Really, the question about the question comes down to which one you care about: figuring out the phenomena of consciousness in general (studying humans as our only accessible reference implementation), or figuring out how human consciousness works in particular. Its easy to conflate the two.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#487

Post by shthed »

jmoak3 wrote: post #87
codeulike wrote: post #32

Wow this is 19,000 words. I like his summary at the end: At some level it’s a great example of the fundamental scientific fact that large numbers of simple computational elements can do remarkable and unexpected things. And this: ... But it’s amazing how human-like the results are. And as I’ve discussed, this suggests something that’s at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of th…

I saw a great comment here, and I will repeat it without the attribution it deserves: We may have realized it's easier to build a brain than to understand one

attribution?

https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/112t8vl/ummm_wtf_bing...

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#489

Post by hypertele-Xii »

fluoridation wrote: post #321
lelanthran wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For now. Give it a truly persistent memory and 100x the size of the dataset I think most people would change their tune. Why does it need 100x the dataset? Sentient creatures, including humans, manage to figure stuff out from as little as a single datapoint . For a human to differentiate between a cat and a dog takes, maybe, two examples of each, not a few million pictures. An adult human who sees a hotdog for the…

>Why does it need 100x the dataset? Sentient creatures, including humans, manage to figure stuff out from as little as a single datapoint. Human brains are not quite blank slates at birth. They're predisposed to interpret and quickly learn from the sort of inputs that their ancestors were exposed to. That is to say, the brain, which learns, is also the result of a learning process. If a mad scientist rewired your bra…

> If a mad scientist rewired your brain to your senses such that its inputs were completely scrambled and then deposited you on an alien planet, it might take your brain several lifetimes to restructure itself enough to interpret this novel input.

Based on anecdotal psychedelic experiences I believe you.

It's kind of amazing how quickly our brains effectively reboot into this reality from scrambled states. It's so familiar, associating with conscious existence feels like gravity. Like falling in a dream, reality always catches you at the bottom.

What if you woke up tomorrow and nothing made any sense?

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#490

Post by FleurBouquet »

vore wrote: post #134
kilgnad wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally I'm tired of people saying it's just a probabilistic word generator and downplaying everything as if they know. If you said something along these lines before... then these papers show that you're not fully grasping the situation here. There are clearly different angles of interpreting what these models are actually doing but people are stubbornly refusing to believe it's anything more then just statistical w…

Doesn't the article say... exactly that? The basic concept of ChatGPT is at some level rather simple. Start from a huge sample of human-created text from the web, books, etc. Then train a neural net to generate text that’s “like this”. And in particular, make it able to start from a “prompt” and then continue with text that’s “like what it’s been trained with”. Just because there are emergent behaviors doesn't mean i…

This is really a problem with our linguistic use of the word "just" and the philosophical misunderstandings it creates.

A tornado is just wind. To argue a tornado is just wind though is really a rhetorical device to downplay a tornado. We are almost never searching for the truth with the word "just" in this way.

To argue chatGPT is JUST a probabilistic next token generator is exactly downplay its emergent properties. This shouldn't be terribly surprising since it is not like undergrads have to take a class in complex systems. I can remember foolishly thinking 15 years ago that the entire field of complex systems was basically a bogus subject. chatGPT clearly has scaling properties that you can't really say it is JUST a probabilistic next token generator. chatGPT is the emergent properties of the system as a whole.

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