Connectionists: Chomsky's apple

[Gary Marcus]


as a postscript to my note and Richard’s a telling example from Dean Buonomono that reminds us that using words in massively-trained pattern associator  is not the same as understanding how they function.

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> On Mar 16, 2023, at 07:47, Richard Loosemore <rloosemore at susaro.com> wrote:
> 
> Geoff,
> 
> Clever deflection.  ;-)   The learning disabled young adult you mentioned does NOT use a rote-memorized copy of the entire contents of the internet when he tries to answer the question "how many legs does the rear left side of a cat have?"
> 
> What matters is *both* the bad performance and what is going on inside, because that tells us that the cause of the failure is completely different in the two cases.
> 
> Richard
> 
> On 3/10/23 1:03 PM, Geoffrey Hinton wrote:
>> ...
>> Do you really want to use the fact that [a learning disabled young adult] 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