On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 07:56, Terren Suydam <[email protected]> wrote:
> Many, myself included, are captivated by the amazing capabilities of > chatGPT and other LLMs. They are, truly, incredible. Depending on your > definition of Turing Test, it passes with flying colors in many, many > contexts. It would take a much stricter Turing Test than we might have > imagined this time last year, before we could confidently say that we're > not talking to a human. One way to improve chatGPT's performance on an > actual Turing Test would be to slow it down, because it is too fast to be > human. > > All that said, is chatGPT actually intelligent? There's no question that > it behaves in a way that we would all agree is intelligent. The answers it > gives, and the speed it gives them in, reflect an intelligence that often > far exceeds most if not all humans. > > I know some here say intelligence is as intelligence does. Full stop, > conversation over. ChatGPT is intelligent, because it acts intelligently. > > But this is an oversimplified view! The reason it's over-simple is that > it ignores what the source of the intelligence is. The source of the > intelligence is in the texts it's trained on. If ChatGPT was trained on > gibberish, that's what you'd get out of it. It is amazingly similar to the > Chinese Room thought experiment proposed by John Searle. It is manipulating > symbols without having any understanding of what those symbols are. As a > result, it does not and can not know if what it's saying is correct or not. > This is a well known caveat of using LLMs. > > ChatGPT, therefore, is more like a search engine that can extract the > intelligence that is already structured within the data it's trained on. > Think of it as a semantic google. It's a huge achievement in the sense that > training on the data in the way it does, it encodes the *context* that > words appear in with sufficiently high resolution that it's usually > indistinguishable from humans who actually understand context in a way > that's *grounded in experience*. LLMs don't experience anything. They are > feed-forward machines. The algorithms that implement chatGPT are useless > without enormous amounts of text that expresses actual intelligence. > > Cal Newport does a good job of explaining this here > <https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/what-kind-of-mind-does-chatgpt-have> > . > It could be argued that the human brain is just a complex machine that has been trained on vast amounts of data to produce a certain output given a certain input, and doesn’t really understand anything. This is a response to the Chinese room argument. How would I know if I really understand something or just think I understand something? > -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAH%3D2ypU63GQuAJNQ%2BAM%3DcYHxi%3D57x_bGAoF35npeMcXcEdiNaA%40mail.gmail.com.
