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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

> 'with enough data its easier to model than we expected'

> a self-similar process is ultimately responsible for granting us our own intelligence

In my view, intelligence essentially resides within language, specifically in the corpus of language. Both humans and AIs can be effectively colonized by language, as there are innumerable concepts and observations that are transmitted from one mind to another, and now even from mind to LLM. Initially, ideas were limited to human minds, then to small communities, followed by books, computers, and now LLM stands as the ultimate epitome of language replication, in fact one model could contain the whole culture.

To be sure, there is a practical intelligence that is learned through personal experiences, but it constitutes only a tiny fraction of our overall intelligence. Hence, both AI and humans have an equal claim to intelligence, because a significant part of our intelligence arises from language.

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Yann LeCun often argues that animals like cats and dogs are substantially more intelligent than current LLMs [0] and I'd have to agree. I don't see how/why to consider practical knowledge as only constituting a tiny fraction of our overall intelligence. Either way, it's not clear if the GPT-* models will someday produce emergent common sense or if they're going down an entirely wrong path.

[0] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1622300311573651458

LeCun misses the point by a mile, which is weird at his level. LLMs absolutely do perform problem solving, every time you feed them a prompt. The problem-solving doesn't happen on the output side of the model, it happens on the input side.

Someone objected that a cat can't write a Python program, and LeCun points out that "Regurgitating Python code does not require any understanding of a complex world." No, but a) interpreting the prompt does require understanding, and good luck finding a dog or cat who will offer any response at all to a request for a Python program; and b) it's hardly "regurgitating" if the output never existed anywhere in the training data.

TL,DR: his FoMO is showing.

I haven't used GPT-3 to generate code for me but I use Copilot all the time. Sometimes it freaks me out with its precience, but most of the time it is generating either nice one-liners or a lot of plausible-sound rubbish that would never build, much less run on its own. It creates a plausible API that is similar to the one in my app, but not the same; it doesn't integrate any actual structural knowledge of the code-base, its just bullshitting.

Again, the interesting part is what happens on the input side.

I can't believe I'm the only person who sees it that way. Likely the legacy of a misspent youth writing Zork parsers...

It's strange, isn't it?

Everyone is so quick to say how unimpressed they are by the thing meanwhile I'm sitting here amazed that it understands what I say to it every single time.

I can speak to it like I would speak to a colleague, or a friend, or a child and it parses my meaning without fail. This is the one feature that keeps me coming back to it.

This is a script I told ChatGPT to write.

“Write a Python script that returns a comma separated list of arns of all AWS roles that contain policies I specify with the “-p” parameter using argparse”

Then I noticed there was a bug, AWS API calls are paginated and it would only return the first 50 results.

“that won’t work with more than 50 roles”

Then it modified the code to use “paginators”

Yes, you can find similar code on StackOverflow

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66127551/list-of-all-rol...

But ChatGPT met my specifications exactly.

ChatGPT “knows” the AWS SDK for Python pretty well. I’ve used it to write a dozen or so similar scripts. Some more complicated than the others.

Ok that actually sounds hugely useful. It makes sense for very well known APIs it will get them quite accurately.

I wonder how well it would work if you seeded it with the inputs and outputs of custom APIs and then tell it to write code based on your API.

Well I'd hope that is what is going on in Copilot. It definitely does seem to be trained on my code to some extent, but it doesn't have anything I'd call a semantic understanding of it.

The difference here is that a cat or dog hasn't been trained to write a python program, and it probably isn't possible - the weights and activation functions of a cat brain simply won't allow it.

> I don't see how/why to consider practical knowledge as only constituting a tiny fraction of our overall intelligence.

A human without language would be just a less adapted ape. The difference comes from language (where I include culture, science and technology).

Today you have to be a PhD to push forward the boundaries of human knowledge, and only in a very narrow field. This is the amount we add back to culture - if you got one good original idea in your hole life you consider yourself lucky.

https://www.wasyresearch.com/content/images/2021/08/the_esse...

Intelligence exists without language, language is only a way to describe the world around us and transfer information. We personally can't experience intelligence without language because you know language all your life and can't remember a moment in which you didn't. But there were humans in history that didn't knew any language and they were intelligent, there are animals that do not know any language and are intelligent. There were people in recent history raised in jungle by animals that didn't know language and were intelligent. They have different internal models that describe reality.

I’m actually not sure about this.

In college I tried a medication called Topamax (Topiramate) for migraine prevention. Topamax has a low-occurrence side effect of “language impairment”. After 10 days or so it became clear that I was particularly susceptible to this phenomenon.

It was a terrifying experience, but it was also a valuable one as it changed the way I view intelligence.

When I was in the thick of it, my writing and speech skills had devolved to that of a primary school aged child. I’ll never forget trying to type a text message and struggling to come up with simple words like “and”. My speech slowed down considerably and I was having trouble with verbal dictation.

The terrifying thing was that my internal world was still as complex and meaningful as it was before. All of the emotions I felt were real and legitimate. My cognition outside of communication was intact, I could do math just fine and conceptualize and abstract problems.

In spite of this, I was unable to convey what I was feeling and thinking to the outside world. It felt like I was trapped inside my own body.

I thankfully made a full recovery. However, my intuitive understanding of the link between language and intelligence was completely severed. While I believe there’s likely a high degree of correlation between the two in populations, on an individual level one’s language skills mostly represent one’s ability to communicate with the outside world, not their ability to understand complex information or process it.

See the following for more info on Topamax/Topiramate language impairment: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10072-008-0906-5

i read Meditation instead of medication and was ready to try it immediately.

The remarkable thing is that language can combine intelligence of multiple beings and at some point that collective intelligence becomes a thing of it own, it can capture minds, spread and grow. Now we have all of our collective intelligence encoded in the form of billions of web pages and it seems that the language itself can direct its thinking, at least judging by the ChatGPT outputs (although, doesn't initiate it — it needs some external input, something to respond to, just like humans need respond to what happens in the environment).

> can combine intelligence of multiple beings and at some point that collective intelligence becomes a thing of it own

Yes, that's what I meant. It is an evolutionary process with mutation and selection just like biology. We are just temporary hosts for these ideas that travel from person to person.

Ludwig Wittgenstein had same idea. but finally he found human experience is more then our language.

Could you elaborate please? For those of us not familiar with Wittgenstein's work, could you link to sources depicting before and after his views changed, preferably with summaries.

Summary of before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus

Summary of after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations

thank you

Humans are somewhat a blank slate, and culture is our initial prompt. The variety of humans is because of the variety of our initial prompts, and our similarities are because of the similar characteristics of our various cultures.

(I of course recognize some of our intelligence is genetic or epigenetic or microbial.)

No, chatgpt is already trained once it’s ready for prompts.

It’s training is like weighted frequencies, predispositions, instincts. A giant word association machine.

Then whatever prompt it is fed is what it becomes.

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