this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Machine Learning
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We need a name for the fallacy where people call highly nonlinear algorithms with billions of parameters "just statistics", as if all they're doing is linear regression.
ChatGPT isn't AGI yet, but it is a huge leap in modeling natural language. The fact that there's some statistics involved explains neither of those two points.
It’s not a fallacy at all. It is just statistics, combined with some very useful inductive biases. The fallacy is trying to smuggle some extra magic into the description of what it is.
Actual AGI would be able to explain something that no human has understood before. We aren’t really close to that at all. Falling back on “___ may not be AGI yet, but…” is a lot like saying “rocket ships may not be FTL yet, but…”
The fallacy is the part where you imply that humans have magic.
"An LLM is just doing statistics, therefore an LLM can't match human intellect unless you add pixie dust somewhere." Clearly the implication is that human intellect involves pixie dust somehow?
Or maybe, idk, humans are just the result of random evolutionary processes jamming together neurons into a configuration that happens to behave in a way that lets us build steam engines, and there's no fundamental reason that jamming together perceptrons can't accomplish the same thing?
LLMs might still lack something that the human brain has. Internal monologue, for example, that allows us to allocate more than fixed amount of compute per output token.
You can just give an LLM an internal monologue. It's called a scratchpad.
I'm not sure how this applies to the broader discussion, like honestly I can't tell if we're off-topic. But once you have LLMs you can implement basically everything humans can do. The only limitations I'm aware of that aren't trivial from an engineering perspective are
And the network still uses skills that it learned in a fixed-computation-per-token regime.
Sure, future versions will lift many existing limitations, but I was talking about current LLMs.