GPT-3 Is “Mindblowing” If You Don’t Question It Too Closely
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Re: GPT-3 Is “Mindblowing” If You Don’t Question It Too Closely
#2A lot of the referenced analysis makes sense, but this article comes across as pessimistic far beyond what any of the commenters they're quoting said or would endorse. Identifying the political leader with the most power over the American colonies demonstrates significant conceptual understanding, even if that's not quite what "president of the United States" means. And innumeracy isn't "odd for a computer system" - there's no fundamental property of numeracy we'd expect to reach out from the motherboard and make a text-based AI good at math.
Re: GPT-3 Is “Mindblowing” If You Don’t Question It Too Closely
#3A lot of the referenced analysis makes sense, but this article comes across as pessimistic far beyond what any of the commenters they're quoting said or would endorse. Identifying the political leader with the most power over the American colonies demonstrates significant conceptual understanding, even if that's not quite what "president of the United States" means. And innumeracy isn't "odd for a computer system" -…
Could we be optimistic for a moment?
There's plenty of time left for progress. Imagine if all of the issues raised in the article were addressed and implemented in GPT-4.
Imagine more iterations, all the way up to GPT-42, sometime in your great grandchildren's lifetime.
Q: What is the difference between what GPT-42 might do, and what you might do to answer this question?
Re: GPT-3 Is “Mindblowing” If You Don’t Question It Too Closely
#4A lot of the referenced analysis makes sense, but this article comes across as pessimistic far beyond what any of the commenters they're quoting said or would endorse. Identifying the political leader with the most power over the American colonies demonstrates significant conceptual understanding, even if that's not quite what "president of the United States" means. And innumeracy isn't "odd for a computer system" -…
A fair amount of the innumeracy is due to Byte Pair Encoding tokenizer garbling numbers to the point that the network can barely see a consistent represention of them-- it's like talking about how innumerate Romans are at adding their numerals.
I don't have the tokenizer handy right now, but a query like "1003 + 580 =" might be tokenized as 100, 3, space, plus, space, 5, 80, space, equals. Not very easy to learn!
Re: GPT-3 Is “Mindblowing” If You Don’t Question It Too Closely
#5It doesn't matter if the GPT really "understands" anything. That's like pondering whether submarines can swim.
The fact is, it is more general-purpose, and generates text that is much more coherent than what we've had before. Decade or two ago even that level of apparent comprehension was science fiction.
Re: GPT-3 Is “Mindblowing” If You Don’t Question It Too Closely
#6A lot of the referenced analysis makes sense, but this article comes across as pessimistic far beyond what any of the commenters they're quoting said or would endorse. Identifying the political leader with the most power over the American colonies demonstrates significant conceptual understanding, even if that's not quite what "president of the United States" means. And innumeracy isn't "odd for a computer system" -…
Could we be optimistic for a moment? There's plenty of time left for progress. Imagine if all of the issues raised in the article were addressed and implemented in GPT-4. Imagine more iterations, all the way up to GPT-42, sometime in your great grandchildren's lifetime. Q: What is the difference between what GPT-42 might do, and what you might do to answer this question?
You'd have to study the GPT architecture to answer that question. For example, there's a comment upthread describing how its arithmetic capacity may be artificially low due to the way it parses math problems. I've seen another analysis, I forget where, explaining that it's fundamentally incapable of certain kinds of complex reasoning because the sequence of transformations producing the output is static and non-rewindable.
While the article's extreme skepticism is unwarranted, most experts do seem to agree that GPT can't scale to general human-level intelligence.
Re: GPT-3 Is “Mindblowing” If You Don’t Question It Too Closely
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could we be optimistic for a moment? There's plenty of time left for progress. Imagine if all of the issues raised in the article were addressed and implemented in GPT-4. Imagine more iterations, all the way up to GPT-42, sometime in your great grandchildren's lifetime. Q: What is the difference between what GPT-42 might do, and what you might do to answer this question?
You'd have to study the GPT architecture to answer that question. For example, there's a comment upthread describing how its arithmetic capacity may be artificially low due to the way it parses math problems. I've seen another analysis, I forget where, explaining that it's fundamentally incapable of certain kinds of complex reasoning because the sequence of transformations producing the output is static and non-rewin…
Thank you for a considered response, SpicyLemonZest. When I posted that question I half expected to be howled down as a troll, a naysayer, or off-topic. I'm glad you did none of that and answered by sharing your thoughts. As humans in the community of HN, we are richer for it.
> most experts do seem to agree that GPT can't scale to general human-level intelligence.
What is it about human-level intelligence that's unreachable by machines, even machines as advanced as V42 of GPT, would you consider? Can you put your finger on it, or make a little start?
Re: GPT-3 Is “Mindblowing” If You Don’t Question It Too Closely
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd have to study the GPT architecture to answer that question. For example, there's a comment upthread describing how its arithmetic capacity may be artificially low due to the way it parses math problems. I've seen another analysis, I forget where, explaining that it's fundamentally incapable of certain kinds of complex reasoning because the sequence of transformations producing the output is static and non-rewin…
Thank you for a considered response, SpicyLemonZest. When I posted that question I half expected to be howled down as a troll, a naysayer, or off-topic. I'm glad you did none of that and answered by sharing your thoughts. As humans in the community of HN, we are richer for it. > most experts do seem to agree that GPT can't scale to general human-level intelligence. What is it about human-level intelligence that's unr…
I doubt there's any property of human-level intelligence that's inherently unreachable by machines. The question is whether GPT-42 would actually be tremendously advanced, or whether we're close to the limit of what the architecture can produce.
The consensus among experts I've read is that known architectural limitations make the GPT-n series unlikely to scale beyond "sounds very human if you don't question it too closely". Algebra, to pick a concrete example, is something that there's reason to believe the GPT-series can't learn effectively - the output generation mechanism is fundamentally incapable of looping or recursion, which severely limits how well it can break things down into subproblems.
Re: GPT-3 Is “Mindblowing” If You Don’t Question It Too Closely
#9It doesn't matter if the GPT really "understands" anything. That's like pondering whether submarines can swim. The fact is, it is more general-purpose, and generates text that is much more coherent than what we've had before. Decade or two ago even that level of apparent comprehension was science fiction.
Indeed, I don't know if you "understand" anything. I know that what you and GPT-3 are doing is rather different, and so it's remarkable that they seem even the tiniest bit similar, but it doesn't really matter whether one is "understanding" or not.
Being so different and yet so similar, it's maddening not to know whether they're converging, or if it's a dead end, or even if it's going in some entirely third direction.
Re: GPT-3 Is “Mindblowing” If You Don’t Question It Too Closely
#10It doesn't matter if the GPT really "understands" anything. That's like pondering whether submarines can swim. The fact is, it is more general-purpose, and generates text that is much more coherent than what we've had before. Decade or two ago even that level of apparent comprehension was science fiction.
> That's like pondering whether submarines can swim.
It's an old adage. But it's less smart than it sounds [1]. Swimming is an action defined by its mechanics- you swim when you do certain precise movements with your body. Understanding (or thinking, in the original formulation) is a process that is defined by its consequences. The consequences of understanding are simply that you respond in an appropriate way to the original stimulus with speech or actions. To go back to the original metaphor, it's not about the specific movements of swimming, it's about going from point A to point B in water. And yes, submarines can do it. And yes, GPT-3 seems to understand a lot, in that it responds to a lot of inputs in a meaningful way.
[1] Take that, Dijkstra!