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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Except that ChatGPT can do this because internally it computes embeddings at many levels of abstraction that jointly represent entities (concepts) such as "the couch," "the room," "chopping," "placing," "the closet," etc. IOW, internally, ChatGPT manipulates symbols (distributed representations) of those entities.

Moreover, note that each token embedding inside ChatGPT represents, quite literally, the semantic and syntactic properties of a token in a context at a different level of abstraction. Each token embedding is in fact... a symbol.

The fact that token embeddings are symbols representing other things is one of several reasons why I think that ultimately it may be possible to bridge the "symbolic" and "connectionist" approaches, as I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34278478

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I think your interpretation is too charitable to Marcus' viewpoint. He made the analogy that deep learning practitioners are "looking under the streetlight" for the key to general intelligence. This means he thinks that deep learning itself is not sufficient to reach general intelligence, and there is some missing ingredient. This is a very strong claim, which I don't see any evidence for. Your comment suggests the opposite -- that deep learning may give rise to symbolic reasoning as an emergent property, that there may be no missing ingredient.

Personally, I'm agnostic. Deep learning may reach some sort of asymptote but it may be entirely possible to "build a ladder to the moon."

I have no idea if symbolic reasoning will be purely an emergent property or if it will also require new, as-of-yet-undiscovered breakthroughs. But as I wrote elsewhere on this page, if engineers and scientists on the "connectionist" side find ways to build an AI system that relies on "dumb" computation to reason about symbols representing entities in the external world, they would simultaneously silence and satisfy the critics -- who, as always and as ever, will surely say they were right all along.

I think our personal views agree on this matter.

However, if symbolic reasoning indeed arises as an emergent property, there is no way that Marcus can honestly claim to have been right all along. Remember he is saying that the deep learning guys are looking under the wrong street light.

Given how often the critics have "moved the goal posts" and subtly tweaked their arguments, I'd expect they will claim to have been right about needing symbolic reasoning, no matter how we get there. My perception is that they care mainly about pointing out failure modes and about ultimately being proven "right" -- not about making contributions that can actually improve existing systems. In fact, AFAIK, the critics have made ZERO contributions to improve existing AI systems.

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