Connectionists: Chomsky's apple

[Richard Loosemore]

You've misunderstood the scenario.

Those "idiots" in the room don't understand the answers they are 
shouting out.

Each one is just reading a fragment from a data ocean.

They have zero understanding.

On 3/10/23 1:49 PM, Geoffrey Hinton wrote:
> So you think that the idiots in the room have no understanding at all, 
> even of simple things like there is an arrogant man who does not think 
> of them as people?
> Idiots understand less than the straight A graduate students who we 
> think of as normal, but they do have some understanding.  I don't 
> think it will help any of us to get to the truth of the matter if we 
> think of understanding as something we have a lot of and idiots and 
> chatGPT have none of.  ChatGPT seems to me to be like an idiot savant 
> whose understanding is different from mine but not entirely absent.
>
> Geoff
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 11:35 AM Richard Loosemore 
> <rloosemore at susaro.com> wrote:
>
>     On 3/9/23 6:24 PM, Gary Marcus wrote:
>     > If a broken clock were correct twice a day, would we give it credit
>     > for patches of understanding of time? If n-gram model produced a
>     > sequence that was 80% grammatical, would we attribute to an
>     underlying
>     > understanding of grammar?
>
>     Exactly!
>
>     There isn't even an issue here.  There shouldn't BE any discussion,
>     because we know what these things are doing.
>
>     An LLM takes all the verbiage in the world, does an average and finds
>     all the question-answer linkages, and then in response to a prompt it
>     goes on a walk through that mess and cleans up the grammar.
>
>     Oversimplified, but that's basically it.  You get back a
>     smushed-together answerish blob of text, like you would if you
>     asked a
>     question in a roomful of idiots and tried to make sense of what
>     happens
>     when they all try to answer at once.
>
>     Among people who understand that, there shouldn't even BE a question
>     like "how much does it understand?".
>
>     Richard Loosemore
>
>
>
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