Carl T. BergstromMar 2, 2023

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

Show threadAnthony DiPierroMar 2, 2023
@ct_bergstrom Who are the people behind the downplaying of the technology? That’s what I see much more of.
Show threadAnthony DiPierroMar 2, 2023

@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.

Show threadMarc TriusMar 2, 2023
@anthony @ct_bergstrom @emilymbender when I read the article, this fragment made me stop and think, how much time has this Manning fella spent raising children. Then I laughed out loud in the middle of the meeting I wasn't paying attention at.
Show threadAnthony DiPierroMar 3, 2023

@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.

Show threadMarc TriusMar 3, 2023
@anthony children are never self supervised. They are super social creatures and are getting context clues and social feedback from parents from day one. The most important, complex, and biggest learnings that they get are not about information but about being human. When children learn language for example, they are constantly learning not just vocabulary and how to form sentences or w/e but what things mean, what kind of reaction words elicit, what is and isn't appropriate etc etc
Show threadMarc TriusMar 3, 2023
@anthony why else do you think so much of childhood learning at every stage is about testing boundaries? They are learning how to be human beings in society, eliciting feedback. Self-led, sure. But definitely not self-supervised.
Show threadMarc Trius
@anthony and when you do get kids who are not brought up with plenty of attention and social feedback (eg very poor families where adults are too stressed or busy or ill to provide appropriate supervision of learning), you get antisocial behavior
Mar 3, 2023 at 4:18amWeb
Show threadMarc TriusMar 3, 2023
@anthony the inductive learning you mention below (tunnel - > cop lights) is an almost negligible proportion the learning children do every second
Show threadAnthony DiPierroMar 3, 2023

@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.

Show threadAnthony DiPierroMar 3, 2023
@alter_kaker Self-supervised learning doesn’t mean you let a toddler run into the street. But it does mean that toddler learned how to walk, and to run, through trial and error as opposed to a parent or teacher telling them about Newton’s laws of motion.