There are some activities of daily life that I do without thinking (most of them, in fact). Moving my limbs while walking up the stairs, driving to the corner store and stopping at a traffic light, recognizing a stop sign at a glance, reading the numerals off a mailbox, etc. These are all things that, after you initially learn to do them, get wired up into the fabric of your brain well enough that you can execute them without really thinking about them. They become instinctual.
Interestingly, these are all things that deep neural networks have turned out to be quite good at - instinctual things.
There is also a category of written and oral communication that I do without thinking - instinctually. I don't think deliberately about the choice of each word when writing this post, and certainly not when speaking out loud. Idioms and turns of phrase emerge without deliberate thought or intent. If my social circle has started using certain terminology habitually (e.g. here in the Bay Area, people have been using the adjective "super" a lot, as in "that's super cool"), I'll find myself using it as well without making any deliberate attempt to do so, sometimes to my own chagrin. And even when the topic is something nominally intellectual, I'll sometimes find myself simply regurgitating the general opinion on this topic that I last read from a trusted source.
This seems to exemplify what GPT3 does - a sort of instinctual written communication - and I don't believe it's an example of intelligence any more than a human being able to recognize a stop sign in 100 ms is a sign of intelligence. GPT3 a great pattern-matching engine and it applies pattern-matching on the human language to interpolate a response that is consistent with the patterns it observed.
I don't see any evidence that GPT3 can critically evaluate the information it is is pattern-matching - that it can go beyond what literate humans do instinctually.
Don't get me wrong - GPT3 is surprising and amazing. But not because it signifies anything about AGI. What's amazing to me about GPT3 is it reveals how much ordinary human written and oral communication is instinctual in the same sense that visual processing and image recognition is.
Interestingly, these are all things that deep neural networks have turned out to be quite good at - instinctual things.
There is also a category of written and oral communication that I do without thinking - instinctually. I don't think deliberately about the choice of each word when writing this post, and certainly not when speaking out loud. Idioms and turns of phrase emerge without deliberate thought or intent. If my social circle has started using certain terminology habitually (e.g. here in the Bay Area, people have been using the adjective "super" a lot, as in "that's super cool"), I'll find myself using it as well without making any deliberate attempt to do so, sometimes to my own chagrin. And even when the topic is something nominally intellectual, I'll sometimes find myself simply regurgitating the general opinion on this topic that I last read from a trusted source.
This seems to exemplify what GPT3 does - a sort of instinctual written communication - and I don't believe it's an example of intelligence any more than a human being able to recognize a stop sign in 100 ms is a sign of intelligence. GPT3 a great pattern-matching engine and it applies pattern-matching on the human language to interpolate a response that is consistent with the patterns it observed.
I don't see any evidence that GPT3 can critically evaluate the information it is is pattern-matching - that it can go beyond what literate humans do instinctually.
Don't get me wrong - GPT3 is surprising and amazing. But not because it signifies anything about AGI. What's amazing to me about GPT3 is it reveals how much ordinary human written and oral communication is instinctual in the same sense that visual processing and image recognition is.