Here is your must-read article for the day, a profile of @emilymbender, and her efforts to deflate the ridiculous hype around large language models such as ChatGPT.
It's also about the people who are behind that hype, and about what their way of thinking has the potential to do to us.
It's worth reading all the way to the end.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html
@ct_bergstrom @emilymbender Would love to see this debate. Is it available somewhere?
On the highlighted part, I think it’s both. We are not a stochastic parrot. Heck, we aren’t even our brains. But our stochastic parrot brain plays a crucial role in making us who we are.
@alter_kaker Weird. I thought Manning had the better take, if those two surely oversimplified descriptions were accurate.
I’d point to people’s (mis)use of grammar as a good example of how we learn language to a large extent through observation and not through formal learning.
@alter_kaker I think that’s also a good example of the problem with relying *solely* on this inductive form of reasoning (which are the same problems with LLMs).
As I said elsewhere, though, ChatGPT et. al. are impressive compared to a child their age.
@alter_kaker Wow, I completely disagree. What learning do children do “every second” that isn’t inductive? Learning through testing boundaries *is* inductive. Quintessentially so. Learning through social feedback is generally inductive. And kids learn as much if not more (probably more) by copying what they see others do than through social feedback.
Perhaps the big difference, which Manning also points out, is that kids learn through multi-modal input. That makes a huge difference.
The first time my son (then just a few years old) went through a tunnel (in our car), two police cars came through the tunnel, passing everyone, flashing their lights.
On the way home we went through the tunnel again. I could see him looking around for the police cars.
I dunno. Seems a lot like self-supervised learning to me. But maybe I’m misunderstanding the debate, which is why I was interested in seeing a transcript or video of it.
@anthony @ct_bergstrom @emilymbender could it be this?
@escapadesrpg The article describes the singularity as “the tech fantasy that, at some point soon, the distinction between human and machine will collapse.”
Umm, no, the singularity would very much not involve machines becoming a thing even remotely close to humans.
But I’m not sure journalists are ruining journalism so much as that these sorts of ignorant, biased articles have always been part of journalism. Critical reading has always been an important part of reading all kinds of text.
Carl T. Bergstrom
Anthony DiPierro
Marc Trius
escapadesrpg