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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>For example, GPT-3 knows more trivia than I do.

no it doesn't, GPT-3 is a very sophisticated parrot. it doesn't know any trivia, it knows how to put the most likely string of characters next to the one it just saw, it doesn't matter what the text represents. That's the difference between you and the model.

It's basically the Chinese room. You can make an analog GPT-3 by asking a question, recording your answer, handing someone who doesn't understand a word of your language the giant box of tapes, and she tries to match them together until she appears to make sense to listeners

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AlphaGo doesn't know anything about the game of go. It "just" manipulates symbols, runs instructions on its CPUs and GPUs, illuminates pixels on the screen for a human to see.

It just also "happens" to be the case that if you interpret those pixels as go moves and play those moves against the world champion human go player then eventually that human will hold a press conference announcing to the world that AlphaGo has won the match.

Yes that is entirely true, but the world of Go is very small and unambiguous in terms of goals, rules and so on. A little less than chess, but it's still a game with a well structured world and simple rules. AlphaGo understands as little about Go as Stockfish does about Chess or your TI-83 understands about maths. That they're good at it has almost nothing to do with (generalised) intelligence, and it's no coincidence that the performance of RL say, in games is insanely better than it is when applied to real-world, open-ended problems.

Deep Mind made a 'superhuman' Breakout bot, but if you messed with the panel at the bottom it sucked. It hadn't learned what the panel is or what the game is about, it had just learned to rearrange pixels. You can get away with this in one version of Breakout, but in the real world it's brittle and useless

Ok, fine. It doesn't "know" any trivia. It'll still crush me in a trivia contest:

"Q: Who was president of the United States in 1801? A: Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States in 1801.

Q: What city is in the northwest corner of Ohio? A: Toledo is in the northwest corner of Ohio.

Q: What highway do you take to get to North Lake Tahoe from Oakland? A: Highway 80 is the highway you take to get to North Lake Tahoe from Oakland.

Q: What are Darius's abilities in League of Legends? A: Darius's abilities in League of Legends are: Apprehend, Decimate, Noxian Guillotine, Crippling Strike, Apprehend [sic], and Hemorrhage.

Q: Who did Capablanca defeat to become world chess champion? A: Capablanca defeated Lasker to become world chess champion."

Of those 5 questions, I could answer #1 after deploying a mnemonic and some math, and #2 if you gave me multiple choice of the top 5 cities in Ohio, and I would miss the rest.

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