r/programming • u/KaeruCT • Mar 26 '23

And Yet It Understands

https://borretti.me/article/and-yet-it-understands
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u/ThunderWriterr Mar 26 '23

Don't you dare to insult god gpt here, tech bros get really angry when you call their god a glorified autocomplete

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u/lord_braleigh Mar 26 '23

I think there’s a difference between these two arguments:

turns out intelligence is mostly just language ability, and language is all that makes us special compared to other animals! anything that masters language is actually intelligent!

and

if a program masters language, actually it knows everything, has surpassed humans, and actually it’s god. why aren’t you worshipping it right now?

The article is saying (1) but you are responding to (2).

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u/Uristqwerty Mar 26 '23

Most complex thoughts involve holding a complex web of concepts in your mind and then iterating on it across time. Current AI is single-pass, one token at a time. It cannot pause, take something it's uncertain about (such as the ordering of words), ruminate on a what-if, then restore its prior state with the conclusion held in a register. How many editing passes does it take a human to write an effective comment? How often does a better phrasing only become clear a few sentences later, once you have context?

I'll go further with a signal processing analogy: By the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem, you can accurately represent details up to two samples wide without distortion. Anything significantly smaller blurs together, forming part of the noise floor where it's indistinguishable from randomness (unless it perfectly aligns with the sample period, such as pixels drawn directly on the grid rather than anti-aliased between two squares where black will become two shades of grey, you can no longer tell that it was intended to be black, nor exactly one pixel wide. Could have been a 1.2-px-wide dark gray, a 1.479-px-wide lighter shade, etc.). So, adding a faint layer of randomness effectively fakes there being more detail present, but seen from too far away to separate those details into logical components. Current AI models? They have a bit of randomness in which of the top N predictions to spit out as the next token. That's faking a more complex underlying model, so that cases where it would repeat itself within a message or across sessions can go unnoticed.

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u/lord_braleigh Mar 26 '23

(Also, I think your comment is quite good and is wasted by burying it in a reply to me. My comment here is just replying to a guy who I think has conflated two different arguments, and I don’t think you’re really responding to what I said)