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?
Real brains aren't perceptrons. They don't learn by back-propagation or by evaluating performance on a training set. They're not mathematical models, or even mathematical functions in any reasonable sense. This is a "god of the gaps" scenario, wherein there are a lot of things we don't understand about how real brains work, and people jump to fill in the gap with something they do understand (e.g. ML models).
Brains are absolutely mathematical functions in a very reasonable sense, and anyone who says otherwise is a crazy person
You think brains aren't turing machines? Like, you really think that? Every physical process ever studied, all of them, are turing machines. Every one. Saying that brains aren't turing machines is no different from saying that humans have souls. You're positing the existence of extra-special magic outside the realm of science just to justify your belief that humans are too special for science to ever comprehend
(By "is a turing machine" I mean that its behavior can be predicted to arbitrary accuracy by a turing machine, and so observing its behavior is mathematically equivalent to running a turing machine)