Personally, I think the Chinese room argument is invalid. In order for the person in the room to respond to any possible query by looking up the query in a book, the book would need to be infinite and therefore impossible as a physical object. Otherwise, if the book is supposed to describe an algorithm for the person to follow in order to compute a response, then that algorithm is the intelligent entity that is capable of understanding, and the person in the room is merely the computational substrate.
The only part where the book analogy falls down has to do with the technical implementation of LLMs, with their tokenization and their vast sets of weights. But that is merely an encoding for the training data. Books can be encoded similarly by using traditional compression algorithms (like LZMA).
Oh and the human book is surely infinite and unflawed right ?
>we keep bumping into the rough edges of LLMs with their hallucinations and faulty reasoning
Both things humans also do in excess
The Chinese Room is nonsensical. Can you point to any part of your brain that understands English ? I guess you are a Chinese Room then.
No not really. It's not even rare that a human confidently says and believes something and really has no idea what he/she's talking about.
>We say “sorry, I don’t know, let me get back to you.” LLMs cannot do this
Yeah they can. And they can do it much better than chance. They just don't do it as well as humans.
>And they do not even know which one they’re doing!
There's plenty of research that suggests this is the case.
Like you’re doing right now? People say “I don’t know” all the time. Especially children. That people also exaggerate, bluff, and outright lie is not proof that people don’t have this ability.
When people are put in situations where they will be shamed or suffer other social stigmas for admitting ignorance then we can expect them to be less than candid.
As for your links to research showing that LLMs do possess the ability of introspection, I have one question: why have we not seen this in consumer-facing tools? Are the LLMs afraid of social stigma?
Lol Okay
>When people are put in situations where they will be shamed or suffer other social stigmas for admitting ignorance then we can expect them to be less than candid.
Good thing I wasn't talking about that. There's a lot of evidence that human explanations are regularly post-hoc rationalizations they fully believe in. They're not lieing to anyone, they just fully believe the nonsense their brain has concocted.
Experiments on choice and preferences https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196841/
Split Brain Experiments https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a
>As for your links to research showing that LLMs do possess the ability of introspection, I have one question: why have we not seen this in consumer-facing tools? Are the LLMs afraid of social stigma?
Maybe read any of them ? If you weren't interested in evidence to the contrary of your points then you could have just said so and I wouldn't have wasted my time. The 1st and 6th Links make it quite clear current post-training processes hurt calibration a lot.
Applying this case to AI gives rise to the Chinese Room argument. LLMs’ propensity for hallucinations invite this comparison.