Absolutely, and I hope none of my comments are taken in a way that disparages how amazing ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion et al. are. I'm just debating how humanlike they are.
> Is that really an illusion (implying its fake and potentially useless)
I don't think that because it's an illusion means that its useless. Magnets look like telekinesis, but that effect being an illusion doesn't mean that magnets are useless; far from it, and once we admit that they are what they are, they become even more useful.
> Plus, different models will excel at different thing. GPT's model will excel at synthesizing answers from far more information than a single human will ever be able to know. Does it really matter if it's not identical to human reasoning on a philosophical or biological level, if it can do things humans can't do?
It only matters if people are trying to say that ChatGPT is essentially human, that idea is all I was replying to. I completely agree with you here.
But that's the point, they do. Even on HN there are many comments saying that humans are just fancy autocomplete, i.e. there's no fundamental difference between humans and LLMs.
I think that's a straw man. No one disagrees that humans and LLMs produce cognition differently. One uses a wet, squishy brain. The other uses silicon chips. There's no disagreement here.
Well then, that settles the debate!
There's a separate debate on whether the brain produces human thoughts in a similar way to ChatGPT's non-human thought. The question here is whether brains are essentially biological LLMs, and whether GPT's current limitations relative to humans could be overcome simply by scaling up the number of GPT's parameters to match or exceed the number of neurons in the human brain. But whether or not that turns out to be the case, it would not mean that AIs are the same as humans, or use exactly the same processes to think and reason, and no one is claiming that.
I'm saying using a word invented to describe animals behavior, "thought" to describe a large language model has no discernible meaning other than OP thinks it works like an animal brain.
If OP thinks it's an open question whether it works like an animal, OP should find a better word than "thought".
A OS stores "memories" but nobody argues whether the OS fondly recalls the day their son was born.
When people are debating how the LLM works and you call what the LLM does "thought" it's perfectly reasonable to conclude you believe the human brain works essentially the same as an LLM.
I just asked ChatGPT 4.0 and here's my question and the response, in the interest of full disclosure I edited out the part that I thought wasn't relevant so as not to bore:
"...if I call your processes "thoughts" is that the correct term? If not what term should I use?"
"If you want to describe the processes of an AI language model like me, it's more accurate to use terms such as "information processing," "pattern recognition," or "data-driven predictions." While these terms don't fully capture the complexity of the underlying algorithms, they are more appropriate than "thoughts," which implies consciousness and self-awareness that AI models like me do not possess.
Using the term "thoughts" might be misleading, as it could imply that the AI has a subjective experience or a sense of understanding, which is not the case. Instead, I rely on advanced algorithms to generate responses based on the patterns and associations learned from the data during my training."
So ChatGPT doesn't state you used the correct term.
I genuinely wonder if you think ChatGPT is consciouss and self-aware and you used a word that implied that intentionally, or if you just like how the word "thought" sounds and are indifferent to what people think you are implying.
Perhaps you’re right that the term thought has too much baggage. I’m just saying that if you look at it at naively, it’s engaging in forms of abstractions, reasoning, world modeling, invention, and so on that seem a lot like “thought”. If a human told you they were doing those things, you’d say they were thinking, right?
I agree it’s not thought in exactly the way that we are used to using the word, but I think it can be classified as a type of thought.
Yes, I noticed. Putting "non human" in front of thought doesn't help. It's like putting the word "four sides" in front of triangle.
I doubt parent uses the word "thought" to describe how a thermostat, calculator, or "Hello world" program works.
Using it to describe ChatGPT has no discernable semantic meaning other than OP believes ChatGPT works like a human brain.
LLMs'may prove a useful analogy as to how parts of human intelligence operate, an analogy that, at the very least, should be thoroughly researched.
A simple tool can’t. A « mind » that is coming in our world should, right ?
Just like all the marvel and DC where super-human are still accountable for their mistakes, their super powers are no excuse.
Certainly, Midjourney's "creativity" is different from human creativity. But it is producing results that we marvel at. It's creative not because it's doing the exact same philosophical thing humans do, but because it can produce the same effect.
And I think many situations are like that. We can always say that human creativity/reasoning/x will always be different from artificial reasoning. But even today, GPT's statistical model replicates many aspects of human reasoning virtually. Is that really an illusion (implying its fake and potentially useless), or is it just a different way of achieving a similar result?
Plus, different models will excel at different thing. GPT's model will excel at synthesizing answers from far more information than a single human will ever be able to know. Does it really matter if it's not identical to human reasoning on a philosophical or biological level, if it can do things humans can't do?
At the end of the day, some of these discussions feel like bike shedding about what words like "reasoning" mean philosophically. But what will ultimately matter is how well these models perform at real world tasks, and what impact that will have on humanity. It doesn't really matter if it's virtualized reasoning or "real" human reasoning at that point.