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<div>Hybrid AI to which you refer - incorporating logic into LLMS - will not solve the lack of reference. Besides, it is fine to expect much from the future, which however is notoriously hard to predict. If the foundation model is wrong and misguided, adding parts to it may not help. Right now LLMs do not understand.</div><div><br></div>
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On Wednesday, February 14, 2024 at 06:51:18 AM GMT+1, Andras Lorincz <lorincz@inf.elte.hu> wrote:
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<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Aptos, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">I tried to build a tangram together with GPT 4.</span></div>
<div style="text-align:left;text-indent:0px;margin:0px;"><span style="font-family:Aptos, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">Even if I forced it – by prompting – to do it though
programming instead of using DALL-E. It has no "understanding" of</span></div>
<ul style="text-align:left;"><li style="font-family:Aptos, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<span style="font-family:Aptos, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">the world, including neighboring relations</span></li><li style="font-family:Aptos, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<span style="font-family:Aptos, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">physics, including stability</span></li></ul>
<div style="text-align:left;text-indent:0px;margin:0px;"><span style="font-family:Aptos, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">Better prompting may help, of course. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family:Aptos, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">But this is not the real issue. GPT 4 is an associative system, a kind of implicit and/or procedural memory, something
like the person in the Chinese Room if you wish. Cognition and thinking are related to declarative, or explicit memory, using logic, facts and rules, the recollection of factual information, and not predictive associations. </span></div>
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<div style="text-align:left;text-indent:0px;margin:0px;"><span style="font-family:Aptos, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">BUT the mentioned properties can be added. Considerable
effort goes into that direction, see, e.g., LINC (A Neurosymbolic Approach for Logical Reasoning by Combining Language Models with First-Order Logic Provers) and CLOMO (Counterfactual Logical Modification with Large Language Models). Soon we will not be able
to prove that LLMs/GPTs are not capable of understanding. It will look like they do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family:Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif;">------------------------------------</span></p>
<div style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;"><span style="font-family:Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Andras Lorincz<br clear="none">
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<div style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;"><span style="font-family:Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence</span></div>
<div style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;"><span style="font-family:Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Department of Artificial Intelligence</span></div>
<div style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;"><span style="font-family:Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Faculty of Informatics<br clear="none">
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<div style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;"><span style="font-family:Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eotvos Lorand University<br clear="none">
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<div style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;"><span style="font-family:Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Budapest, Hungary
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<div id="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480yqt28187" class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480yqt4383472587"><div dir="ltr" id="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480divRplyFwdMsg"><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size:11pt;" color="#000000"><b>From:</b> Connectionists <connectionists-bounces@mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> on behalf of Weng, Juyang <weng@msu.edu><br clear="none">
<b>Sent:</b> Tuesday, February 13, 2024 6:36 PM<br clear="none">
<b>To:</b> gary.marcus@nyu.edu <gary.marcus@nyu.edu><br clear="none">
<b>Cc:</b> connectionists@mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu <connectionists@mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu><br clear="none">
<b>Subject:</b> Re: Connectionists: An open letter to Geoffrey Hinton: A call for civilized, moderated debate</font>
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<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">Dear Gary, </span></div>
<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);"> You wrote, "LLMs do not really understand what they are saying".</span></div>
<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);"> Those LLMs generated text in a natural language, didn't they?</span></div>
<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);"> Why do you say that LLMs do not understand such text? </span></div>
<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);"> The truly understandable answer to this question is not as simple as you
</span><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:13px;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:rgb(255,255,255);">believe</span><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">! What you "believe"
is not convincing and intuitive to many laymen and media! </span></div>
<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);"> That is why Jeffery Hinton can simply give you potshots without valid analysis.</span></div>
<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);"> Best regards,</span></div>
<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">-John Weng</span></div>
<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">Brain-Mind Institute</span></div>
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<div class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_elementToProof"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">On Tue, Feb 13, 2024 at 12:49 AM Gary Marcus <gary.marcus@nyu.edu> wrote:</span></div>
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<div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">Geoff Hinton recently asked:</span></div>
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<div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:rgb(255,255,255);">Which part of this is a misrepresentation: Gary Marcus believes that
LLMs do not really understand what they are saying and Gary Marcus also believes that they are an existential threat.</span></div>
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<div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">That’s an easy one. The second, regarding existential threat. I</span></div>
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<i>do</i> believe that LLMs do not really understand what they are saying. But I do
<i>not</i> believe that LLMs as such pose a (literally) existential threat, nor have I ever said such a thing, not in the Senate, not in my Substack, not here, and not anywhere else. (Anyone with evidence otherwise should step forward.)</span></div>
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<div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">I
<i>have</i> in fact said the opposite; e.g., I have said that the human species is hard to extinguish, because we are genetically and geographic diverse, capable of building vaccines, etc. E.g. in interview with AFP, posted at TechExplore I said that I thought
the extinction threat 'overblown', </span><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(17,85,204);"><a shape="rect" id="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480OWA991bc947-b367-eab1-2ead-1b1571af0d92" href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://techxplore.com/news/2023-06-human-extinction-threat-overblown-ai.html__;!!HXCxUKc!1aqYa3ceLXbEbMlwq37LKL7XidWbHppPrJ38-1eZiwfUUxqbMdizbH3eXbTmdYfzgAxFOpN3rN-a808jNKY$" style="color:rgb(17,85,204);" class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_OWAAutoLink" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https:// techxplore.com/news/2023-06- human-extinction-threat- overblown-ai.html</a></span><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">.</span></div>
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<div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">My actual view is captured here ,
</span><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(17,85,204);"><a shape="rect" id="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480OWA7fae189c-47c2-32e4-ed0a-92de0f401146" href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/ai-risk-agi-risk__;!!HXCxUKc!1aqYa3ceLXbEbMlwq37LKL7XidWbHppPrJ38-1eZiwfUUxqbMdizbH3eXbTmdYfzgAxFOpN3rN-aP5MUOq0$" style="color:rgb(17,85,204);" class="ydp6a4f35d0yiv2945021480x_OWAAutoLink" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://garymarcus.substack. com/p/ai-risk-agi-risk</a></span><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">. </span></div>
<p style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);"><i>although a lot of the literature equates artificial intelligence risk with the risk of superintelligence
or artificial general intelligence, you don’t have to be superintelligent to create serious problems. I am not worried, immediately, about “AGI risk” (the risk of superintelligent machines beyond our control), in the near term I am worried about what I will
call “MAI risk”—Mediocre AI that is unreliable (a la Bing and GPT-4) but widely deployed—both in terms of the sheer number of people using it, and in terms of the access that the software has to the world. ..</i></span></p>
<p style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);"><i>Lots of ordinary humans, perhaps of above average intelligence but not necessarily genius-level, have created
all kinds of problems throughout history; in many ways, the critical variable is not intelligence but power, which often caches out as access. In principle, a single idiot with the nuclear codes could destroy the world, with only a modest amount of intelligence
and a surplus of ill-deserved access. …</i></span></p>
<p style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);"><i>We need to stop worrying (just) about Skynet and robots taking over the world, and think a lot more about
what criminals, including terrorists, might do with LLMs, and what, if anything, we might do to stop them.</i></span></p>
<div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">LLMs may well pose an existential threat to democracy, because (despite their limited capacity for understanding
and fact checking) they are excellent mimics, and their inability to fact-check is to the advantage of bad actors that which to exploit them. </span></div>
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<div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">But that doesn’t mean they are remotely likely to literally end the species. </span></div>
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<div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">I hope that clarifies my view.</span></div>
<div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">Gary</span></div>
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<span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:9.75pt;color:rgb(34,34,34);">Juyang (John) Weng</span></div>
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