Connectionists: Chomsky's apple

[Iam Palatnik]

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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>
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