Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics

Re:Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI ... by caddemon on Friday April 14, 2023 @07:26AM (#35568219)

As someone very language-focused, it has actually done the opposite for me: challenged some of my beliefs about how language enables intelligence. It's obviously skilled at language use, but most of its outputs where it has to make any sort of arguments or inferences read as incredibly stupid to me (even the ones that "tricked" people early on, some of them tricked me but in a way where I was about to write a response because I was annoyed at how bad the reasoning was).

Of course that's not a criticism of the ML achievement, except that everyone and their mother has started making some extreme arguments about the thing.

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Re:Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI ... by jrsdav on Friday April 14, 2023 @09:08AM (#35569181)

Are you familiar with Pinker’s research presented in book The Language Instinct?

In his research, he argues that it’s the other way around; we have an innate intelligence for acquiring language.

To put it another way, language has made us more knowledgeable (because it’s a great mechanism for building and transferring context), but intelligence or aptitude for language was present before we developed languages.

Does this align with how your views were reshaped post LLMs?

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Re:Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI ... by aastronaut on Saturday April 15, 2023 @03:56AM (#35578590)

i think

> language enables intelligence

was just a poor choice of words here. i understood GP as "the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language"[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

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