alt Hacker NewsMastery of words is thinking?
That's the crazy thing. Yes, in fact, it turns out that language encodes and embodies reasoning. All you have to do is pile up enough of it in a high-dimensional space, use gradient descent to model its original structure, and add some feedback in the form of RL. At that point, reasoning is just a database problem, which we currently attack with attention.
No one had the faintest clue. Even now, many people not only don't understand what just happened, but they don't think anything happened at all.
ELIZA, ROFL. How'd ELIZA do at the IMO last year?
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meindnoch • yesterday at 7:31 PM
So people without language cannot reason? I don't think so.
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> ELIZA, ROFL. How'd ELIZA do at the IMO last year?
What's funny is the failure to grasp any contextual framing of ELIZA. When it came out people were impressed by it's reasoning, it's responses. And in your line of defense it could think because it had mastery of words!
But fast forward the current timeline 30 years. You will have been of the same camp that argued on behalf of ELIZA when the rest of the world was asking, confusingly: how did people think ChatGPT could think?