Hacker News Reader

Comment by barking_biscuit | Hacker News Reader

Then we have a different definition of understanding. A good half of these debates come down to definitions at this point.

To me, ChatGPT clearly displays degrees of understanding. Often when I ask it to do things like make a certain modification to a piece of code, I'll ask it "why did you choose to do it like that?" and it gives a coherent explanation. That it correctly did what I asked and that it's explanation of why it did that way comport with one another implies understanding in my view. How could it not? What else would that imply? And if I ask a human to do the same thing and get the same result you'd have no problem with saying "well it's able to do that because it understands, and if it didn't understand then it would have zero capability of doing that". So, what's with the double standard?

View on HN

Yes, as I said we have different definitions.

For me, it's matrix multiplications on data made to output things that are approximations to what a human has written before on that question or text you're prompting it.

I know how training a deep neural network works and there's no reading involved for me :)

It's just estimating what a person would write (being trained on a really large data set of what people wrote). If it's trained on gibberish, it will just output gibberish. If I ask you to read a book with gibberish words would you do it? ChatGPT would (according to you) "read it" and recite the gibberish I gave it without a problem.

The matrix multiplications used to build these models don't show any comprehension, agency, or consciousness. Their point is to estimate the next data point given the previous data point, they will perform the same task independent from which training data we give them. That's not reading.

I don't say this might not change in the future, yet treating ChatGPT like a human using words like "reading," "understanding" etc. or intelligence for that matter is just anthropomorphizing for me.

I look at it from a general system theory point of view first and foremost as that's a level of abstraction higher than both humans and machines, yet you can find clear sets of definitions that describe all of these things. They go so far as to include knowledge, understanding and degrees thereof. I've started working my way through "On Purposeful Systems" as I've been finding most people's definitions far too hand wavy to be useful in thinking about the topic. That's been quite interesting.

One thing that stands in my mind from having read that is that the structural properties of the system matter in terms of its possible function, and I'm referring to the exact structure that includes the model trained on the non-gibberish text and treating that as the specific system I'm referring to. It seems when you say ChatGPT you're referring to the entire functional class of objects that implement the transformer architecture, which I'm not.

After thinking about it for a while the second thing I would note is that you're focused only on it's intrinsic function of predicting the next token, which as you say it always performs that function regardless of the training data, and I agree with that. Where we differ, I think, is I'm considering the specific structure which includes the model trained on non-gibberish data as an instrument (not a human!) that we use for it's extrinsic functions. Normally an individual or system's extrinsic functions are so narrow they're a lot easier to define, and we've never interacted with a system until now that the extrinsic function is like "understand what I say and reply accordingly". Think about it from the perspective of would you use or have any utility for GibberishGPT? No, same way I wouldn't read a book of pure gibberish.

to make my point easier: for my definition of to read, to understand and comprehend you need a body, an embodied mind. you need agency and consciousness. ChatGPT has none of those, it's an implementation of several matrix functions.

the specific model you are referring to does nothing, it's not acting (it's not reading anything). you have to press enter for it to work. so it's not reading, you (and OpenAi engineers) are doing its actions for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com