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Comment by bigyikes | Hacker News Reader

Lacking “understanding” doesn’t make GPT-3 less impressive and also doesn’t make comparisons to human abilities unwarranted.

I read the prompt, and I expected that this was the beginning of some kind of fiction. In my mind, it sounded like I was reading the beginning of a somebody’s dream. What does it even mean to understand something? Because naively, it looks very much like GPT-3 and I have a shared understanding of the first prompt.

Do I actually think the model understands like a human does? No. But I would bet that, in isolation, the part of my brain which processes and generates language might not understand much either...

Or maybe I’m a bot and neither I nor GPT-3 understand anything at all. Beep boop

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> Lacking “understanding” doesn’t make GPT-3 less impressive

Yes it does. A model that latches on superficial frequentist links between words is much less impressive than one that would understand what those words actually mean, and the latter is how most humans use words. The former is just chinese-rooming, the latter is understanding. Of course, a model that is chinese-rooming something like a coherent text is impressive, but it is less impressive than one that would demonstrate actual grasp of the fact that words mean something.

It's not about impressiveness - surely, it's impressive. However, the article is more or less critiquing the discourse surrounding the model - namely, that there is a strange misconception floating around that it's somehow a general purpose AI that can understand and think about the world similar to a human. Which, of course, it cannot.

If the claims about GPT-3 were accurate, there'd be a lot less of a flare-up about it. Don't claim your software does what it can't.

I fail to see where openai is making any false claims

That's a fundamental skill of marketing: not making false claims while convincing the customers to jump to false conclusions.

>also doesn’t make comparisons to human abilities unwarranted

But it does, that is the point the author is making - GPT cannot understand anything. It's a very silly argument to try and reduce your linguistic perception to be on the same level as GPT just to try and show that it possibly is understanding the text. The author's queries do a very good job at demonstrating that GPT at the very least cannot even tell when it is being asked a question. As you say it isn't unexpected, GPT is a statistical fitter over a selection of language features trained over a large dataset, it isn't intended to perform well in these scenarios - which is exactly the author's point. In order to perform well it would have to have some capability of understanding the sentence. I think it's more apt to say GPT is only capable at recognizing sentence features, it can't understand anything, at most it has built up a vague relationship between certain sentences and possible continuations.

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