thecodethinker t1_j96u7y5 wrote on February 19, 2023 at 6:26 PM

Reply to comment by Flag_Red in [R] neural cloth simulation by LegendOfHiddnTempl

I think classification tasks (like image or face recognition) is really useful, but is more niche. We had image recognition before, NNs just do it better. They don’t open up new use cases for recognition.

Same for speech to text and text to speech.

Translation is another huge one, that’s true.

I don’t think NN code autocomplete is a “big real life use case” as we have perfectly correct autocomplete as is and for anything beyond simple programs, I have seen any model give good suggestions. Plus not everyone writes code.

Natural language “understanding” is a weird one. I’m not convinced (yet) that we have models that “understand” language, just models that are good at guessing the next word.

ChatGPTs tendency to be flat out wrong or give nonsensical answers to very niche and specific questions suggests that it isn’t doing any kind of critical thinking about a question, it’s just generating statistically probable following tokens. It just generates convincing prose as it was trained to do.

liquiddandruff t1_j989luo wrote on February 20, 2023 at 12:34 AM

the stochastic parrot argument is a weak one; we are stochastic parrots

the phenomenon of "reasoning ability" may be an emergent one that arises out of the recursive identification of structural patterns in input data--which chatgpt is shown to do.

prove that "understanding" is not and cannot ever be reducible to "statistical modelling" and only then is your null position intellectually defensible

thecodethinker t1_j98puob wrote on February 20, 2023 at 2:45 AM

Where has chat gpt been rigorously shown to have reasoning ability? I’ve heard that it passed some exams, but that could just be the model regurgitating info in its training data.

Admittedly, I haven’t looked to deeply in the reasoning abilities of LLMs, so any references would be appreciated :)

liquiddandruff t1_j98v6ko wrote on February 20, 2023 at 3:30 AM

it's an open question and lots of interesting work is happening at a frenetic pace here

Language Models Can (kind of) Reason: A Systematic Formal Analysis of Chain-of-Thought https://openreview.net/forum?id=qFVVBzXxR2V
Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682

A favourite discussed recently:

Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083

synth_mania t1_j99njvy wrote on February 20, 2023 at 8:44 AM

Dude the first image classification or recognition program used perceptrons, the first model of a neuron. In other words, image classification has been neural networks ever since the beginning

thecodethinker t1_j9a4mvo wrote on February 20, 2023 at 12:33 PM

Yeah, exactly my point about image classification. We’ve had it for a long time already.

synth_mania t1_j9cug1p wrote on February 21, 2023 at 12:01 AM

My point was that you said image classification has been around since before NNs. That is false. Image classification has only ever been done with NNs. Sometimes they are radically different than what is normally used today (e.g. RAMnets and WISARD), but they've always been NNs.