[ExI] Bender's Octopus (re: LLMs like ChatGPT)

Giovanni Santostasi gsantostasi at gmail.com
Fri Mar 24 05:33:01 UTC 2023


Jason,
Is that the same paper Gordon is quoting? The link you gave doesn't work.
Giovanni

On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 8:36 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 11:17 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 8:39 PM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't have a lot of faith in a person who has a hypothesis and designs
>>> a thought experiment that is essentially completely irrelevant to the
>>> hypothesis.
>>>
>>
>> As I wrote, I agree the thought experiment does not illustrate her point
>> clearly, at least outside of the context of her academic paper. As I've
>> mentioned, the octopus is supposed to represent the state in which an LLM
>> is in -- completely disconnected from the meanings of words (referents)
>> that exist only outside of language in the real world represented by the
>> islands. But it is a sloppy thought experiment if you don't know what she
>> is trying to say.
>>
>> It is about form vs meaning. LLMs are trained only on and only know (so
>> to speak) the forms and patterns of language. They are like very talented
>> parrots, rambling on and on in seemingly intelligent ways, mimicking human
>> speech, but never having any idea what they are talking about.
>>
>
> There's no way to read this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf
> and come away with the impression that GPT-4 has no idea what it is talking
> about.
>
> Jason
>
>
>
>> -gts
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