Comment by applfanboysbgon
12 hours ago
> Yet ChatGPT can easily figure out likely intent in situations like this, just as humans do
No, it is not "figuring out" anything, much less like a human might. Every time "I'm cold" appears in the training data, something else occurs after that. ChatGPT is a statistical model of what is most likely to follow "I'm cold" (and the other tokens preceding it) according to the data it has been trained on. It is not inferring anything, it is repeating the most common or one of the most common textual sequences that comes after another given textual sequence.
>it is repeating the most common...
This nonsense hasn't been true since GPT-2, and even before that it was a poor description.
For instance, do you think one just solves dozens of Erdős problems with the "most common textual sequence": https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution...
A slight oversimplification, as LLMs are also capable of generating the most statistically plausible textual sequence, which can be a sequence not found in the dataset but rather a synthesized combination of the likely sequences of multiple preceding sets of tokens, but yes, that is in fact what it is doing. Computer software does what it is programmed to do, and LLMs are not programmed to do logical inference in any capacity but rather operate entirely on probabilities learned from a mind-bogglingly large corpus of text (influenced by things like RLHF, which is still just massaging probabilities).
The claims about solving Erdos problems have been wildly overstated, and notably pushed by people who have a very large financial stake in hyping up LLMs. Nonetheless, I did not say that LLMs are useless. If they are trained on sufficient data, it should not be surprising that correct answers are probabilistically likely to occur. Like any computer software, that makes them a useful tool. It does not make them in any way intelligent, any more than a calculator would be considered intelligent despite being completely superior to human intelligence in accomplishing their given task.
>not programmed to do logical inference in any capacity
Yet have no problem doing so when solving Erdős problems. This isn't up for debate at this point.
>The claims about solving Erdos problems have been wildly overstated
These are verified solutions. They exist, are not trivial, and are of obvious interest to the math community. Take it up with Terence Tao and co.
>pushed by people who have a very large financial stake in hyping up LLMs
Libel.
>It does not make them in any way intelligent
Word games.
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