Connectionists: Chomsky's apple

[Miguel I. Solano]

Geoff, Gary, Connectionists,

To me the risk is ChatGPT and the like may be 'overfitting'
understanding, as it were. (Especially at nearly a hundred billion
parameters.)

--ms

On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 6:56 AM Barak A. Pearlmutter <barak at pearlmutter.net>
wrote:

> Geoff,
>
> > He asked [ChatGPT] 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.
>
> That's an extremely good point. ChatGPT is way up the curve, well
> above the verbal competence of many people who function perfectly well
> in society. It's an amazing achievement, and it's not like progress is
> stuck at its level. Exploring its weaknesses is not so much showing
> failures but opportunities. Similarly, the fact that we can verbally
> "bully" ChatGPT, saying things like "the square root of three is
> rational, my wife said so and she is always right", and it will go
> along with that, does not imply anything deep about whether it really
> "knows" that sqrt(3) is irrational. People too exhibit all sorts of
> counterfactual behaviours. My daughter can easily get me to play along
> with her plan to become a supervillain. Students knowingly write
> invalid proofs on homeworks and exams in order to try to get a better
> grade. If anything, maybe we should be a bit scared that ChatGPT seems
> so willing to humour us.
>


-- 
Miguel I. Solano
Co-founder & CEO, VMind Technologies, Inc.

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