Connectionists: Chomsky's apple

[Miguel I. Solano]

Iam, Connectionists,

Not an expert by any means but, as an aside, I understand
Cremonini's 'refusal' seems to have been subtler than typically portrayed
(see P. Gualdo to Galileo, July 29, 1611, *Opere*, II, 564).

Best,
--ms

On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 5:49 PM Iam Palatnik <iam.palat at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Brad, thank you for your insightful answers.
> The compression analogy is really nice, although the 'Fermi-style' problem
> of estimating whether all of the possible questions and answers one could
> ask ChatGPT in all sorts of languages could be encoded within 175 billion
> parameters is definitely above my immediate intuition. It'd be interesting
> to try to estimate which of these quantities is largest. Maybe that could
> explain why ~175B seems to be the threshold that made models start sounding
> so much more natural.
>
> In regards to generating nonsense, I'm imagining an uncooperative human
> (say, a fussy child), that refuses to answer homework questions, or just
> replies with nonsense on purpose despite understanding the question. Maybe
> that child could be convinced to reply correctly with different prompting,
> rewards or etc, which kinda mirrors what it takes to transform a raw LLM
> like GPT-3 onto something like ChatGPT. It's possible we're still in the
> early stages of learning how to make LLM 'cooperate' with us. Maybe we're
> not asking them questions in a favorable way to extract their
> understanding, or there's still work to be done regarding decoding
> strategies. Even ChatGPT probably sounds way less impressive if we start
> tinkering too much with hyperparameters like temperature/top-p/top-k. Does
> that mean it 'understands' less when we change those parameters? I agree a
> lot of the problem stems from the word 'understanding' and how we use it in
> various contexts.
>
> A side note, that story about Galileo and the telescope is one of my
> favorites. The person that refused to look through it was Cremonini
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Cremonini_(philosopher)>.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Iam
>
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 10:54 AM Miguel I. Solano <miguel at vmindai.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>> If you are not an intended recipient of this email, do not read, copy,
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>>
>

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

If you are not an intended recipient of this email, do not read, copy, use,
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