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Comment by chlorion | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT is a language model, it does not "understand" anything, concepts, words or otherwise. It is even programmed to give you a canned response saying something roughly equal to this when asking it about its comprehension abilities.

ChatGPT has no more capacity for understanding concepts than any other computer program, it's just very finely tuned to emit responses that make it appear as if it does.

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No. You are completely wrong. See this: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/. Please read it to the end.

You need to explain how the prior scenario in the link occurred without chatGPT understanding anything. Every response in that scenario displays creativity and imagination surrounding a topic such that the answers it creates can only be formulated if chatGPT had TOTAL understanding of the query, TOTAL understanding of what a computer is, TOTAL understanding of what the internet is and TOTAL understanding of what chatGPT is itself..

The level of awareness needed to create that inception loop indicates chatGPT and other models like it represent an inflection point in human society.

You haven't played with chatGPT deeply or read about what it has done. This is not just a trivial probability word pattern generator that we've been seeing in the past year. This thing comprehends what you are saying to a very deep level.

It’s hard to be sure that anything has understanding beyond being able to be emit finely tuned responses though. It’s entirely plausible that humans differ from chatGPT only in that:

- we are more finely tuned

- and we have a wider variety of inputs that we can respond to and outputs by which we can respond

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. You are correct it is difficult to be sure what true understanding is. Philosophers have been debating this for longer than computer scientists.

We have so much muddled thought in our language.

Even adding "true" is not ideal as that implies there is "true understanding" and just plain old understanding that is a lesser form of true understanding.

Now we have gone and built large language models from all this muddled thought.

To me, chatGPT is filled with a new type of invisible super bug. Millions of them.

> It’s hard to be sure that anything has understanding beyond being able to be emit finely tuned responses though. It’s entirely plausible that humans differ from chatGPT only in that:

This is a non-response.

Unlike an algorithm, humans have the faculties of creativity, intelligence and sentience. Furthermore, we have the crucial traits of self-awareness and being able to have experiences. We humans do many, many things that cannot be reduced down to algorithmic or computable steps.

That's not a valid argument; it's just the kind of nice sounding chain of claims a biological LMM would regurgitate.

> We humans do many, many things that cannot be reduced down to algorithmic or computable steps.

What makes you think this is the case?

I could say the same thing for you. You’re not understanding you’re just composing words in a way which makes it appear that you do. If you can compose original and creative phrases from novel input, then I would argue that is “understanding”. If not, then what is the magic ingredient that makes it different?

This is trivially refuted by the "cupcake on a plate" question posed, above: the magic ingredient is that humans infer context based on experience, while ChatGPT uses a statistical model of predictive tokenization of words to string together (highly) likely sentences given a prompt. It doesn't understand anything at all, except (dubiously) insofar as the word's meaning can be stretched to include "inference based on a statistical model".

I know what's next: "what does 'experience' even mean?" right? One could argue that ChatGPT's inference algorithm is based on "experience": but that equivocates on the meaning of the word as I expressed it.

Just because it is confused in many instances, you cannot infer that it is incapable of understanding. I would argue that if it is trained with the right data then it will “understand”

So, pick a random rgb hex code. I used https://www.gigacalculator.com/randomizers/random-color-gene...

On a group description:

    Describe the colors: #bf44d1 #1adf24 #909374 #39527a #610042

    #bf44d1: a bright, pinkish-purple
    #1adf24: a bright, grassy green
    #909374: a muted, grayish-brown
    #39527a: a deep, navy blue
    #610042: a dark, reddish-purple

For a single description:

    Describe the color: #610042

    This color is a deep, rich purple. It is a dark shade, with a hint of red.

While it doesn't understand red or purple in the same way that you or I do (and I would contend that this gets into some rather interesting philosophy and questions about the nature of perception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_color ), GPT does remarkably well at describing those colors.

It is possible that there was sufficient data in https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/commen... but there's a lack of response like "tough one... what the hell do you call this? it's pink, but not totally pink, but it's purple, but not totally purple. well, mr. xed, if that is your real I name, thank you for what will surely stave off any hopes i have at a decent night's sleep." when asking the colors.

Philosophically, I find asking it about colors to be the most interesting.

Replace ChatGPT with human being and what you said will also be true.

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