A prevailing sentiment online is that GPT-4 still does not understand what it talks about. We can argue semantics over what “understanding” truly means. I think it’s useful, at least today, to draw the line at whether GPT-4 has succesfully modeled parts of the world. Is it just picking words and connecting them with correct grammar? Or does the token selection actually reflect parts of the physical world? One of the most remarkable things I’ve heard about GPT-4 comes from an episode of This American Life titled “Greetings, People of Earth”.
  • Veraticus@lib.lgbtEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    [GPT-4] is fed, like, a line of text from some source, but with the last word missing. It guesses what the last word might be, and then it gets told whether or not it got it right so it can adjust its internal math.

    GPT-4 cannot alter its weights once it has been trained so this is just factually wrong.

    “It had to build, in its internal wirings and all its software neurons, some understanding of what an egg is - In other words, to get the next word right, it had to become intelligent. It’s quite a thought. It started with nothing. We jammed huge oceans of text through it, and it just wired itself into intelligence, just by being trained to do this one stupid thing.”

    LLMs are really cool and very useful, don’t get me wrong. But people get excited by what they seem to do and lose sight of what they actually can do. They are not intelligent. They create text based on inputs. That is not what intelligence is, unless you have an extremely dismal view of intelligence that humans are text creation machines with no thoughts, no feelings, no desires, no ability to plan… basically, no internal world at all.

    An LLM is an algorithm, not an intelligence.

      • Veraticus@lib.lgbtEnglish
        01·
        11 months ago

        No? Humans are not algorithms except in the most general sense.

        For example, there has not been any discovery of an algorithm that allows one to predict human actions, and scientists debate whether such a thing could even exist.