Connectionists: Chomsky's apple

[Geoffrey Hinton]

A clever deflection. But can you please say if you think learning disabled
people understand some things even though they do not understand others.
This should be an area in which you actually have some relevant expertise.

Geoff


On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 1:45 PM Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu> wrote:

> I think you should really pose this question to Yann LeCun, who recently
> said “LLMs have a more superficial understanding of the world than a house
> cat“ (
> https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1621861790941421573?s=61&t=eU_JMbqlN1G6Dkgee1AzlA
> )
>
> Curious to hear how the conversation goes.
>
>
> On Mar 10, 2023, at 10:04 AM, Geoffrey Hinton <geoffrey.hinton at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> 
>
> A former student of mine, James Martens,  came up with the following way
> of demonstrating chatGPT's lack of understanding. He asked it how many legs
> the rear left side of a cat has.
> It said 4.
>
> I asked a learning disabled young adult the same question. He used the
> index finger and thumb of both hands pointing downwards to represent the
> legs on the two sides of the cat and said 4.
> He has problems understanding some sentences, but he gets by quite well in
> the world and people are often surprised to learn that he has a disability.
>
> Do you really want to use the fact that he misunderstood this question to
> say that he has no understanding at all?
> Are you really happy with using the fact that chatGPT sometimes
> misunderstands to claim that it never understands?
>
> Geoff
>
>
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