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A comment on Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models. Parent comment

Re:Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large La... by pdonis on Thursday February 09, 2023 @05:40PM (#34732739)
See my response to strbean upthread.
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Re:Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large La... by mietek on Thursday February 09, 2023 @05:46PM (#34732806)
Okay. It seems to me that, in analogy to humans having such a relationship with physical reality, machine learning systems have such a relationship with virtual reality — the environment in which they are trained and deployed.
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Re:Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large La... by pdonis on Thursday February 09, 2023 @05:52PM (#34732872)
> machine learning systems have such a relationship with virtual reality

No, they don't, because they can't take actions in that virtual reality and sense the consequences. They can't test hypotheses about how the reality works. They can't even frame hypotheses about how the reality works.

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Re:Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large La... by spuz on Thursday February 09, 2023 @06:32PM (#34733299)
Right, but some neural networks are trained in virtual 3D physical simulations and are able to apply their knowledge acquired through statistical regression of a simulated world to perform tasks and even make predictions. It's logical that a network trained purely on language has no real understanding of physical reality, but it doesn't preclude that a sense of reality in the way we humans think we have can't be gained by the same statistical analysis of the real world.
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Re:Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large La... by pdonis on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:00PM (#34733565)
> some neural networks are trained in virtual 3D physical simulations and are able to apply their knowledge acquired through statistical regression of a simulated world to perform tasks and even make predictions

As you note, this is very different from using text data as a training set for a language model. I am not familiar enough with this work to comment on it in any detail, but it is not the kind of work I have been addressing in my comments elsewhere in this thread, so my comments should certainly not be taken as any kind of evaluation of what I think this kind of thing is or is not capable of.

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Re:Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large La... by helf on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:46PM (#34734025)
Wait, you mean virtual reality isn’t like the cartoon Reboot!?
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