Is Chomsky an expert? Try reading his infuriatingly tone-deaf NYTimes editorial.
(i) How often did you tell John that he should take out the trash? [how often did you tell, or how often to take it out]
(ii) How often did you tell John why he should take out the trash? [only means how often did you tell]
Nothing that ChatGPT can do suggests that Chomsky was wrong about this kind of thing. It’s really more of a blow to a certain kind of work in AI that was partly inspired by Chomsky – but not something that he himself ever took much interest in.
Now it’s true that Chomsky appears to be in the camp that says ChatGPT doesn’t really understand anything. But the focus of his own work has never been on debunking AI, or making claims about the true nature of understanding, or anything of that ilk.
Checking in late here, but one of the pillars of Chomsky's argument is the so-called "poverty of the stimulus" -- basically, that human babies simply don't receive enough training data to acquire language as rapidly and correctly as they demonstrably do. Chomsky therefore concludes that there must be some kind of pre-existing "language module" in the brain to account for this. Now, not everyone accepted this idea even at the time, but surely the argument is much less plausible for an LLM which is likely exposed to more training data than even an adult human.
Yes indeed. Of course this doesn't show that Chomsky was wrong about humans. In any case, I've seen no evidence that current LLMs successfully learn the kinds of constraints I was talking about.
I'm pretty sure that is based on a misunderstanding of Skinner, ChatGPT, or both
Regardless his editorial matches how scientists think of the human mind and how OpenAI's own creators describe GPT's design.
> This is in part because GPT-3 is trained to predict the next word on a large dataset of Internet text, rather than to safely perform the language task that the user wants.
> Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.
> [...] Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation: “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking.
I decided to ask ChatGPT why an apple falls, based on Chomsky's statement:
> Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. Can you say why it falls?
ChatGPT responds in exactly the way Chomsky says it cannot:
> Yes, the apple falls due to the force of gravity. Gravity is a natural force that attracts objects with mass towards each other. When the apple is released from your hand, it is subject to the gravitational pull of the Earth, causing it to accelerate downward and fall to the ground.
ChatGPT certainly appears to understand that apples fall because of gravitational attraction, and that gravity is universal.
What makes all the discussion of whether ChatGPT does or does not truly understand this or that so frustrating is that it's based on pure assertion. ChatGPT responds exactly like someone who understands gravity would, so I'm very strongly inclined to believe that it understands gravity. Otherwise, what does "understanding" even mean? It's not some magic process.
Again, turning to ChatGPT to define "understanding," here is what it says:
> [Understanding] involves making connections, integrating information, and gaining insights or knowledge about a particular subject or concept. Understanding goes beyond simple awareness or recognition; it involves interpreting, analyzing, and synthesizing information to form a coherent mental representation or mental model of the subject matter. It often involves the ability to apply knowledge in new or different contexts, make connections to prior knowledge or experiences, and make sense of complex or abstract ideas.
ChatGPT definitely fulfills that definition of "understanding."
At a certain point, there's no difference between emulating understanding and having understanding.
> it is at bottom simply a very large collection of numbers that are combined arithmetically according to a simple algorithm.
If you dissect a human brain, you'll find neurons, synapses, etc. Your brain is also "simply" a machine.
One problem likely is that it doesn’t have an internal dialogue, so you have to spoon-feed each step of reasoning as part of the explicit dialogue. But even then, it never feels like ChatGPT is having an overall understanding of the discussion. To repeat, this is when the conversation is about lines of reasoning about specific points that you don’t find good results for when googling for them.
I think if we were to put ChatGPT on the map of the human mind, it would correspond specifically to the inner voice. It doesn't have internal dialogue, because it's the part that creates internal dialogue.
(edit, archive link)
His recent political ramblings and Epstein-adjacency are extremely embarrassing (at best), but he's not some kind of cheap online attention whore.
Yes, I very much disagree with you, hence my reaction.
Chomsky has been addicted to media attention for decades. Back in the day there were literally people selling cassette tapes of his latest thoughts.