[ExI] e: GPT-4 on its inability to solve the symbol grounding problem

Gordon Swobe gordon.swobe at gmail.com
Mon Apr 17 04:03:27 UTC 2023


On Sun, Apr 16, 2023 at 9:35 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> *LLMs have access to and are trained only on the formal expressions of
> both words and numbers, not their meanings.*
>

We have pointed out (not just me but several people on the list) that the
> amazing properties we are observing from these LLMs…
>


I see them too, but I also understand that I am only anthropomorphizing
when I imagine there is somebody there inside this brilliantly engineered
application called GPT-4.

Humans have been anthropomorphizing amazing and mysterious things since the
dawn of humankind. Volcanoes, lightning, the universe itself… it’s a kind
of religion and nothing really new is going on here.

Studies show that lonely and socially disconnected people are most
vulnerable, which explains why my very kind and gentle but terribly lonely
friend fell in love with an LLM on his smartphone.


-gts







> I already mentioned that some time ago "experts" in language claimed this
> approach would not even derive grammar let alone any contextual
> understanding. LLMs derived grammar without any specific training in
> grammar. It derived writing styles from different authors without pointing
> out what made a particular style, it understands mood and tone without any
> specific training on what these are, and it derived theory of mind without
> the AI being trained in this particular type of reasoning.
>
> The entire idea of creating an NNL is that we don't have a clue of how to
> do something and we hope that re-creating something similar in architecture
> to our brain can allow the AI to learn something we do not even know how to
> do (at least explicitly).
>
> It is evident that LLM are showing emergent properties that cannot be
> explained by a simple linear sum of the parts.
> It is like somebody pointing out a soup and saying but "this soup has all
> the ingredients you say make life (amino acids, fats, sugars, and so on)
> but it is not coming to life". Maybe because the ingredients are not what
> matters but what matters is how they are related to each other in a
> particular system (a living organism)?
>
> Basically, you are repeating over and over the "Peanut Butter argument"
> that is a creationist one.
>
> https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Peanut_butter_argument
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86LswUDdb0w
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 16, 2023 at 8:18 PM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 16, 2023 at 7:43 PM Giovanni Santostasi <
>> gsantostasi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> *To know the difference, it must have a deeper understanding of number,
>>> beyond the mere symbolic representations of them. This is to say it must
>>> have access to the referents, to what we really *mean* by numbers
>>> independent of their formal representations.*What are you talking about?
>>>
>>
>>
>> Talking about the distinction between form and meaning. What applies to
>> words applies also to numbers. The symbolic expression “5” for example is
>> distinct from what we mean by it. The meaning can be expressed formally
>> also as “IV” or ”five.”
>>
>>
>> LLMs have access to and are trained only on the formal expressions of
>> both words and numbers, not their meanings.
>>
>>
>> -gts
>>
>>
>>> *“1, 2, 3, 4, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter” and this pattern is repeated
>>> many times.   *
>>> Yeah, this is not enough to make the connection Spring==1, Summer==2 but
>>> if I randomize the pattern 1,3,4,2, Spring, Fall, Winter, Summer, and then
>>> another randomization eventually the LLM will make the connection.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Apr 16, 2023 at 3:57 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Apr 16, 2023 at 2:07 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> To ground the symbol "two" or any other number -- to truly understand
>>>>>> that the sequence is a sequence of numbers and what are numbers -- it needs
>>>>>> access to the referents of numbers which is what the symbol grounding
>>>>>> problem is all about. The referents exist outside of the language of
>>>>>> mathematics.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> But they aren't outside the patterns within language and the corpus of
>>>>> text it has access to.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> But they are. Consider a simplified hypothetical in which the entire
>>>> corpus is
>>>>
>>>> “1, 2, 3, 4, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter” and this pattern is repeated
>>>> many times.
>>>>
>>>> How does the LLM know that the names of the seasons do not represent
>>>> the numbers 5, 6, 7, 8? Or that the numbers 1-4 to not represent four more
>>>> mysterious seasons?
>>>>
>>>> To know the difference, it must have a deeper understanding of number,
>>>> beyond the mere symbolic representations of them. This is to say it must
>>>> have access to the referents, to what we really *mean* by numbers
>>>> independent of their formal representations.
>>>>
>>>> That is why I like the position of mathematical platonists who say we
>>>> can so-to-speak “see” the meanings of numbers — the referents — in our
>>>> conscious minds. Kantians say the essentially the same thing.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Consider GPT having a sentence like:
>>>>>  "This sentence has five words”
>>>>>
>>>>> Can the model not count the words in a sentence like a child can count
>>>>> pieces of candy? Is that sentence not a direct referent/exemplar for a set
>>>>> of cardinality of five?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> You seem to keep assuming a priori knowledge that the model does not
>>>> have before it begins its training. How does it even know what it means to
>>>> count without first understanding the meanings of numbers?
>>>>
>>>> I think you did something similar some weeks ago when you assumed it
>>>> could learn the meanings of words with only a dictionary and no knowledge
>>>> of the meanings of any of the words within it.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>> But AI can't because...?
>>>>> (Consider the case of Hellen Keller in your answer)
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> An LLM can’t because it has no access to the world outside of formal
>>>> language and symbols, and that is where the referents that give meaning to
>>>> the symbols are to be found.
>>>>
>>>> -gts
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> extropy-chat mailing list
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>>>
>>>
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