Part of the problem is the strong illusion of coherence we get from reading a passage produced by AI such as GPT-3 because of our own abilities. It is just an algorithm, and there is no reason to expect that it could ever deliver any kind of reasoning. But GPT-3 is a language smoke machine, entirely hollow of any actual human trait or psyche. Supposedly there is no smoke without fire, no language without mind. It appears that many of us fall victim of a mind-language causation fallacy. It cannot have any human-like internal representation. Why would a computer program, based on AI or not, and designed to digest hundreds of gigabytes of text on many different topics, know anything about biology or social reasoning? It has no actual experience of the world. This is really strange, and in some ways amusing-if not worrying. What mesmerizes me is that people go to the trouble of suggesting what kind of reasoning that AI like GTP-3 should be able to engage with. So how could we hope to program it into a machine? As philosopher John Searle put it, only 'machines with internal causal powers equivalent to those of brains' could think.Īnd for all our advances in cognitive neuroscience, we know deceptively little about human thinking. Reconstructing the thinking that is at the origin of the language content we observe is an impossible task, unless you study the thinking itself. In the middle stands a mysterious black box a thousand times smaller than the human brain in capacity and nothing like it in the way it works. The source is language the product is language. That's because AI such as GPT-3 works by 'digesting' colossal databases of language content to produce, 'new', synthesized language content. And it certainly allows for a good laugh.īut if the goal is to get some thinking into the system, then we are nowhere near. GPT-3 shows AI will certainly lead to better experiences than what has been available until now. If the goal is to create a system that can chat, fair enough.

A system that could understand what it was writing or had any sense of what the world was like would not generate such aberrant 'solutions' to a problem.

This is despite the system having access to information on the web that grape juice is edible.Īnother passage suggests that to bring a table through a doorway that is too small you should cut the door in half. Yet, it is profoundly unable to reason or show any sign of 'thinking'.įor instance, one passage written by GPT-3 predicts you could suddenly die after drinking cranberry juice with a teaspoon of grape juice in it. It boasts a wide range of vocabulary, owing to an unprecedentedly large knowledge base from which it can generate thematically relevant, highly coherent new statements. All it takes is the digestion of a database of human-produced language by a computer program, AI-based or not.īased on the relatively few samples of text available for examination, GPT-3 is capable of producing excellent syntax.

But language can be easily generated without a living soul.

And some people tend to assume that language is the ultimate sign of thought. Language and thought, though obviously not the same, are strongly and intimately related.

Anthropic gpt3 ai series skype jaan