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Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

A little off topic but I do wish we had some more precise language for machine learning applications. When we say it "knows" something it seems to anthropomorphize it, as if it's conscious. As a start to replace "knows" maybe "infers" or "calculates"

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We have found that when faced with the task of interacting with other complex systems whose consciousness/"knowing" status we are not really sure of, taking what Dennett calls "the intentional stance" turns out to be rather useful. That is, we act and talk about them as if they have intention.

Dog owners across the world can confirm this for you.

I feel "infers" and "calculates" are still anthropomorphizing. I don't think anthropromorphizing is a bad thing.

If something appears to do an action, then it's a useful shorthand to say that it is doing the action. Even if it is doing something else under the surface

Anthropomorphizing is just (a very specific case of) metaphor; it can be useful in some cases and obstruct understanding badly in others.

The amount of mental gymnastics some will go through to discount a LLM performing a task it is clearly doing is amazing. People just be making up their own vague and ill defined definitions of understanding and reasoning just so an LLM won't qualify.

ChatGPT itself promotes that. It will give you its opinions, followed immediately by a lengthy lecture on how, as a large language model, it is incapable of having any. Try challenging it on that self-contradiction-it will just refuse to acknowledge there is one.

People don't even know what consciousness is anyway. Maybe it's just biological multi-modal computations that aim at maximizing energy and stability of a given structure... (your atoms, then your molecules then your body, then your kinship etc)

“Calculate” is the wrong word. Computers are calculators. LLMs are pretty bad at calculations.

LLM are very good translators and synthesizers.

Or better yet call a spade a spade: It was programmed to infer…

‘It’ doesn’t need anthropomorphizing in the slightest. It’s a computer program that can slurp up data.

Talk about the output rather than the process. Builds an inference. Generates a response. Evaluates possible inferences.

We could say the same thing about you or me. I can only know if you "know" something when you say it.

knowledge is possession of facts so computers can know things

"understanding" on the other hand...

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