Comment by razorbeamz
6 days ago
Yes, but it has seen The Raven, it has seen texts about Dick Cheney, first dates, Queen Elizabeth, time machines and Lin Manuel Miranda.
All of its output is based on those things it has seen.
6 days ago
Yes, but it has seen The Raven, it has seen texts about Dick Cheney, first dates, Queen Elizabeth, time machines and Lin Manuel Miranda.
All of its output is based on those things it has seen.
What are you trying to point out here ? Is there any question you can ask today that is not dependent on some existing knowledge that an AI would have seen ?
The point I'm trying to make is that all LLM output is based on likelihood of one word coming after the next word based on the prompt. That is literally all it's doing.
It's not "thinking." It's not "solving." It's simply stringing words together in a way that appears most likely.
ChatGPT cannot do math. It can only string together words and numbers in a way that can convince an outsider that it can do math.
It's a parlor trick, like Clever Hans [1]. A very impressive parlor trick that is very convincing to people who are not familiar with what it's doing, but a parlor trick nontheless.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
> all LLM output is based on likelihood of one word coming after the next word based on the prompt.
Right but it has to reason about what that next word should be. It has to model the problem and then consider ways to approach it.
8 replies →
> ChatGPT cannot do math. It can only string together words and numbers in a way that can convince an outsider that it can do math
What am I as a human doing when I "Do math" ?
1.I am looking at the problem at hand, identifying what I have and what I need to get
2.I am then doing a prediction using my pretrained neural net to find possible courses of action to go in a direction that "feels" right
3.I am using my pretrained neural net to find pairs of values that I can substitute with each other (Think multiplication tables, standard results, etc...)
4.Repeat till I arrive at the answer or give up.
As a simple example, when I try to find 600×74+42 I remember the steps for multiplication. I recall the associated pairs of numbers from my tables and complete the multiplication step by step. I then recall the associated pairs of numbers for addition of single digits and add from left to right.
We need to remember that just because we are fast at doing this and are able to do it subconsciously it doesn't mean that we can natively do math, we just do association of information using the neural networks we have trained.
sigh; this argument is the new Chinese Room; easily described, utterly wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEUclZdj_Sc
10 replies →
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
-- from the jargon file
> All of its output is based on those things it has seen.
Virtually all output from people is based in things the person has experienced.
People aren't designed to objectively track each and every event or observation they come across. Thus it's harder to verify. But we only output what has been inputted to us before.