Re:Richard Stallman's thoughts on ChatGPT, AI and their impa...
by barrkel on Sunday March 26, 2023 @12:49PM
(#35316550)
Calculators don't understand anything about arithmetic. They have no circuits for understanding, no code for understanding, nothing that could represent what humans mean by understanding.
They implement a set of physical processes that, when operated and interpreted by humans, can be mapped into a subset of arithmetic. There's a correspondence.
Correspondence is the most useful way to think about it IMO. If there's a correspodence between what the machine does, and things we humans understand, then the machine, as a tool, is useful.
Understanding is a loaded word. It has implications beyond correspondence when humans use it; it has aspects of qualia, of fact vs fiction, of situatedness in a graph of comprehension, of consonance or dissonance with a set of other concepts, and so on.
LLMs in my opinion have a good "situatedness" for words and concepts, relative to other concepts. Qualia - consciousness - arguably doesn't matter. Fact vs fiction, they're very shaky on. Consonance vs dissonance, they're useless at - LLMs IME tend to flatter the prompt, constructing arguments in whatever direction a loaded question leads. There's little to no coherence there at all.
They implement a set of physical processes that, when operated and interpreted by humans, can be mapped into a subset of arithmetic. There's a correspondence.
Correspondence is the most useful way to think about it IMO. If there's a correspodence between what the machine does, and things we humans understand, then the machine, as a tool, is useful.
Understanding is a loaded word. It has implications beyond correspondence when humans use it; it has aspects of qualia, of fact vs fiction, of situatedness in a graph of comprehension, of consonance or dissonance with a set of other concepts, and so on.
LLMs in my opinion have a good "situatedness" for words and concepts, relative to other concepts. Qualia - consciousness - arguably doesn't matter. Fact vs fiction, they're very shaky on. Consonance vs dissonance, they're useless at - LLMs IME tend to flatter the prompt, constructing arguments in whatever direction a loaded question leads. There's little to no coherence there at all.