Connectionists: Chomsky's apple

[Asim Roy]

IBM Watson Health's failure might provide some insight on "understanding." Here are two articles on Watson Health and some quotes from them.


  1.  Machine learning the hard way: Watson's fatal misdiagnosis * The Register<https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/machine_learning_the_hard_way/#:~:text=IBM%27s%20Watson%20Health%20failed%20at%20the%20time%2C%20like,excelled%20is%20all%20about%20deducing%20questions%20from%20data.>

"You can learn the rules for Jeopardy in a minute. Becoming a doctor takes 10 years. Becoming the best doctor you can be takes a lifetime. Medical data, whether in the literature or in test results, is meaningless or misleading without a lot of implied context. Watson Health couldn't work across lots of fields at once; that needs a general intelligence which AI currently does not have.



IBM's Watson Health failed at the time, like so much AI/ML, because it didn't know what the question was - ironic, since the game of Jeopardy at which it excelled is all about deducing questions from data.  It wanted to automate the highest skilled aspects of healthcare, diagnosis and treatment, but the problem wasn't one of getting the most data and the best algorithm. Rather, the problem was one of meaning."



  1.  What Is The Reason Of IBM Watson's Failure In Healthcare? | by Webcubator Technologies | Medium<https://webcubatortechnologies.medium.com/what-is-the-reason-of-ibm-watsons-failure-in-healthcare-ad2043968a28>
"A leading AI researcher, Yoshua Bengio, said that AI systems could not understand uncertainty and pick up on underlying faint signs that doctors generally can observe.
It was an incredibly huge task to create an AI with the same understanding and insight as a human doctor.
It received intense criticism and a few even alleged that Watson of oncology providing irrelevant and terrible suggestions."

Asim Roy
Professor, Information Systems
Arizona State University
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-----Original Message-----
From: Connectionists connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> On Behalf Of Kagan Tumer
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2023 9:09 AM
To: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Connectionists: Chomsky's apple





I'm very reluctant to use the word "understand" beyond perhaps ChatGPT understanding the structure of language (statistically). Here's an example of a ChatGPT response to a simple arithmetic operation where:



1- chatGPT was wrong;

2- worked out an example that showed it was wrong, but it didn't register that and double down on its wrong conclusion;

3- gave a high level explanation (also wrong) of why it was right even though it was wrong.



you can forgive 1, but 2 and 3 clearly show ChatGPT does not actually understand what it is saying.



Kagan







On 3/14/23 9:54 AM, Natsuki Oka wrote:

> [This email originated from outside of OSU. Use caution with links and

> attachments.]

>

> Judging from the responses below, ChatGPT understands counting and

> sorting to the extent that it can write a correct Python program but

> does not have the understanding to bring the proper execution results.

> count_and_sort.png

> Here's the program that ChatGPT created:

> ---

> sentences = [

>      "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog",

>      "Python is a popular programming language",

>      "I like to eat pizza for dinner",

>      "The capital of France is Paris",

>      "The cat in the hat wears a red and white striped hat",

>      "My favorite color is blue",

>      "The United States has fifty states",

>      "There are seven days in a week",

>      "I enjoy listening to music while I work",

>      "Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world"

> ]

>

> # sort the sentences by number of words sentences.sort(key=lambda x:

> len(x.split()))

>

> # print the sorted sentences with the number of words in parentheses

> for sentence in sentences:

>      num_words = len(sentence.split())

>      print(f"{sentence} ({num_words})")

> ---

>

> The execution of this program yields the following correct results:

> ---

> My favorite color is blue (5)

> Python is a popular programming language (6) The capital of France is

> Paris (6) The United States has fifty states (6) I like to eat pizza

> for dinner (7) There are seven days in a week (7) I enjoy listening to

> music while I work (8) The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog (9)

> Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world (9) The cat in the

> hat wears a red and white striped hat (12)

> ---

>

> Oka Natsuki

> Miyazaki Sangyo-keiei University

>





--

Kagan Tumer

Director, Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute Professor, School of MIME Oregon State University https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://engr.oregonstate.edu/*ktumer__;fg!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!aKzaiQllAsrcYabgwa4CW8lljg8MRiJlagYFw1B6WJfkVkN8gVVEAVKksSlL389oBE8tQJwcVKshbRv7JATYTqX9HJw$<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/engr.oregonstate.edu/*ktumer__;fg!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!aKzaiQllAsrcYabgwa4CW8lljg8MRiJlagYFw1B6WJfkVkN8gVVEAVKksSlL389oBE8tQJwcVKshbRv7JATYTqX9HJw$>

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