[ExI] Emily M. Bender — Language Models and Linguistics (video interview)

[Gordon Swobe]

On Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 3:02 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

It certainly gives us that impression, but on careful analysis of what is
>> actually going on, we can see that is the human operator who attributes
>> meaning to those symbols. GPT is merely very good at arranging them in
>> patterns that have meaning to *us*.
>>
>
>
> I think that's why this particular example is so important to escape that
> trap, because mathematical structures are objective. Which vertices are
> connected by which edges isn't something that can be faked or
> misinterpreted, it simply is.
>

I thought I had already mentioned that as Giovanni pointed out correctly,
mathematics is a kind of language. The fact that GPT can translate English
words about mathematical relationships into the language of mathematics is
certainly impressive, but it doesn’t “escape that trap.”

When ChatGPT 3.5 first went online, I saw on twitter several examples of
how it had failed to make those translations correctly, and I understand
GPT-4 is much better at it, but it is still merely manipulating the symbols
of English and Math.

-gts

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