I think this essay is spot on. Most sadly to me, we see this same confusion between the well-understood method of LLM training and the still-incomprehensible method of LLM execution in the Chomsky op-ed in the NYTimes https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html last year. You’d like to believe Chomsky would think harder about this.
Another amusing way to think about this is as follows: On at least two occasions that I know about we’ve created “time capsules” with a collection of clues about human culture—“Golden Record” of Carl Sagan, and the “arts-centric time capsule” by the Odysseus lunar lander”.
The assumption made by those who think a Jimi Hendrix record et al will provide an understanding of human civilization seems to be that some sort of very powerful intelligence, completely different in operation from our own, could iterate over “Little Wing” and ancient Sumerian music notation and get an idea about how we see the world. If there is some intelligence in the universe which might pull this off, the process of deriving the human world from these artifacts would be a very different process than the one which followed: Being asked by the beings who share their planet and their mental architecture to “act like a human”.
If you think of Geoffrey Hinton’s invention, pumped up by a transformer, as one of these aliens, you get the idea.
I think this essay is spot on. Most sadly to me, we see this same confusion between the well-understood method of LLM training and the still-incomprehensible method of LLM execution in the Chomsky op-ed in the NYTimes https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html last year. You’d like to believe Chomsky would think harder about this.
Another amusing way to think about this is as follows: On at least two occasions that I know about we’ve created “time capsules” with a collection of clues about human culture—“Golden Record” of Carl Sagan, and the “arts-centric time capsule” by the Odysseus lunar lander”.
The assumption made by those who think a Jimi Hendrix record et al will provide an understanding of human civilization seems to be that some sort of very powerful intelligence, completely different in operation from our own, could iterate over “Little Wing” and ancient Sumerian music notation and get an idea about how we see the world. If there is some intelligence in the universe which might pull this off, the process of deriving the human world from these artifacts would be a very different process than the one which followed: Being asked by the beings who share their planet and their mental architecture to “act like a human”.
If you think of Geoffrey Hinton’s invention, pumped up by a transformer, as one of these aliens, you get the idea.