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

[Jason Resch]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 5:36 PM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 3:20 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 4:24 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Bender's point is not that ChatGBT is incapable of generating sensible
>>> sentences about sticks and bears. It is that these LLMs don't know the
>>> meanings of any words whatsoever. Confronted with a word it has never seen,
>>> it must do a statistical analysis to try to find probable next words, never
>>> knowing what any of them mean.
>>>
>>
>> You keep insisting that. But you don't address the fact that our brains
>> learn meaning and understanding from tapping into what amounts to a pure
>> information channel.
>>
>
> The brain is a mysterious organ and neuroscience is still in its infancy.
>

I agree we don't fully understand the brain. Nonetheless that the brain
succeeds in parsing meaning from a data set shows it's possible.

All I can say is that one does not learn the meaning of words only by
> looking at how they are arranged in patterns,
>

You said it is mysterious how the brain does it, so can we say with any
confidence this isn't exactly what the brain does?

which is all these language models do. They've machine-learned the syntax
> of language -- the rules that define how these word-symbols arrange in
> patterns -- and can manipulate and assemble them in patterns that follow
> the same rules -- but I disagree with you that from these rules they can
> know the meanings of the symbols.
>

It understands far more than syntax. It understands facts about the world,
geography, physics, math, computer programming, chemistry, biology, and
mental development of humans.

The test of understanding is checking if it can deploy it's knowledge in
new situations to solve new problems. If it can do that, then it
understands. Based on exchanges I have seen, I believe it can.


Jason
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