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Comment by PaulHoule

2 years ago

I thought the author was uncharacteristically perceptive for a reporter. Yann LeCun or Geoff Hinton couldn't have come up with a better analogy.

The author is not a random reporter but Ted Chiang, a well-known science fiction author. The movie "Arrival" is based on a story by him.

  • Which explains why this is being promoted:

    He paid for an advertisement, wrote this article as that advertisement or had it ghostwritten, and now it's being hyped.

Analogy of?

  • "Blurry JPEG" for how ChatGPT "compresses" character-based knowledge into vectors. That "compression" process gives ChatGPT an ability to generalize because it learns statistics (unlike JPEG) but like JPEG it is a lossy process.

    • It's a terrible analogy because the entire point of ML systems is to generalize well to new data, not to reproduce the original data as accurate as possible with a space/time tradeoff.

      10 replies →

So they can't afford an actual subject-matter expert for their articles?

  • In a world where supposedly more-tech-industry-aware writers are talking about what "ChatGPT believes" and other such personification... show me a better article.