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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

> I'm going to call this goalpost shifting.

That's completely fair. On the other hand, without a theory of mind it can't really educate or inspire people, the only thing it can do is maybe trick them about the authorship of something. But once people learn the techniques for identifying this kind of writing, it can't even do that anymore. To me this is like the front end of something, but it still needs a back end.

Don't get me wrong, it's super cool research and seems like a huge step forward, and I'm excited to see where it goes. But I also don't see this AI running a successful presidential campaign or whatever, at least within the next couple years.

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It made me consider: - The existence of this model I hadn't heard of - Bitcoin (sigh) - Testing it out on a forum, trying to become a well known poster - picking a forum with many different types of posters - some of which you dislike

And that got me thinking about what I could do with this thing, whether I should, what I wanted to try out...

So the BS random ideas were still inspiring a bit.

On the other hand, without a theory of mind it can't really educate or inspire people

I wouldn't agree with that, either. How often have we heard of someone gaining useful insights by considering ideas that were misapplied or just plain wrong? Entire branches of physics have evolved that way. As far as successful presidential campaigns are concerned... well, let's not even go there.

If there's such a thing as a 'theory of mind', it applies to the reader, not the writer.

I think I disagree.

For example, I delayed in writing this comment because the cat was on my lap, and I couldn't fit the laptop and the cat both. You get that. I know you do, even if you don't own a cat, and even if you're reading this on a phone or a desktop.

GPT-3 does not understand about the cat. To GPT-3, they're just words and phrases that occur in the vicinity of each other with certain probability distributions. As a result, it can't write something and know that there's something there in your mind for it to connect to.

Cyc would handle the bit about the cat differently. It would ask "Did you mean cat-the-mammal, cat-the-Caterpillar-stock-symbol, or cat-the-ethernet-cable-classification?" It has categories, and some notion of which words fit in each category, but it still doesn't understand what's going on.

But you the human understand, because you have a lap, and you've at least seen a cat on a lap.

> But you the human understand, because you have a lap, and you've at least seen a cat on a lap.

You really think GPT-3 never came across a comment about a cat in lap? 50% of all the pictures on the internet are cats sitting on people. GPT-3 doesn't need to understand it to echo this common knowledge.

Airplanes don't look like birds at all but they do fly.

I don't see how any number of comments about cats in laps can allow it to synthesize the following logical chain: cat-on-lap -> pauli exclusion principle -> laptop NOT on lap -> laptop awkward to reach -> delayed comment

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