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Re:GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about by ssivark on Saturday August 22, 2020 @02:44PM (#24246244)
> I don't know why you think this is true. If statistically B follows A to a high degree, then a sufficiently advanced statistical model will represent "A then B" in some manner.

Yes, but suppose A implied B only if C were true. And in the training corpus C were always true (hence learned A=>B) but in the test corpus suppose C is not true, then the learned statistical rule is wrong.

The problem is that to cover all these possibilities will require not a billion documents but something like exp(billion) documents (exaggerating, but to give you a feel for combinatorial explosions) as @ClumsyPilot explains.

And problem is the real world always keeps “changing” (Eg: whether C is valid or not) compared to the examples you trained on. This is referred to in polite company as “distribution shift” where your underlying statistical distribution keeps evolving.

Re:GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about by hackinthebochs on Saturday August 22, 2020 @04:11PM (#24246912)
But this isn't an issue for statistically modelling causal relationships specifically, this is a core problem of modelling causal relationships at all. The fact that GPT-3 is sensitive to the real world changing, or to having insufficient information to form a universally accurate model says nothing interesting about GPT-3.