Connectionists: ChatGPT’s “understanding” of maps and infographics

[Gary Marcus]

I am having a genuinely hard time comprehending some of the claims recently made in this forum. (Not one of which engaged with any of the specific examples or texts I linked.)

Here’s yet another example, a dialog about geography that was just sent to me by entrepreneur Phil Libin. Do we really want to call outputs like these (to two prompts, with three generated responses zoomed in below) understanding? 

In what sense do these responses exemplify the word “understanding”?  

I am genuinely baffled. To me a better word would be “approximations”, and poor approximations at that. 

Worse, I don’t see any AI system on the horizon that could reliably do better, across a broad range of related questions. If these kinds of outputs are any indication at all, we are still a very long away from reliable general-purpose AI. 

Gary


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