alt Hacker NewsI think you're vastly underestimating how little of human intent is really encoded in language in a strict sense, and how much nontrivial inference of intents LLMs do every day with simple queries. This used to be an apparently insurmountable barrier in pre-LLM NLP, and now it is just not a problem.
Suppose I'm in a cold room, you're standing next to a heater, and I say "it's cold". Obviously my intent is that I want you to turn on the heater. But the literal semantics is just "the ambient temperature in the room is low" and it has nothing to do with heaters. Yet ChatGPT can easily figure out likely intent in situations like this, just as humans do, often so quickly and effortlessly that we don't notice the complexity of the calculation we did.
Or suppose I say to a bot "tell me how to brew a better cup of coffee". What is encoded in the literal meaning of the language here? Who's to say that "better" means "better tasting" as opposed to "greater quantity per unit input"? Or that by "cup of coffee" I mean the liquid drink, as opposed to a cup full of beans? Or perhaps a cup that is made out of coffee beans? In fact the literal meaning doesn't even make sense, as a "cup" is not something that is brewed, rather it is the coffee that should go into the cup, possibly via an intermediate pot.
If the bot only understands literal language then this kind of query is a complete nonstarter. And yet LLMs can handle these kinds of things easily. If anything they struggle more with understanding language itself than with inferring intent.
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The LLMs are doing this via chat, not by physically standing in a room inferring context. You have to prompt the LLM that you're in a room next to someone saying it's cold, the most likely answer being a desire to have temperature turned up. Of course that won't always be the case. Could be an inside joke, could be a comment with no intent to have the heat adjusted, could be a room where the heat can't be adjusted, could be a reference to someone's personality bringing down the temperature so to speak.
I know what you're getting at but those examples are reaching
it’s cold -> turn on the heater
I’d never just turn on the heater silently if someone said this to me. I think it means something else.
> Yet ChatGPT can easily figure out likely intent in situations like this, just as humans do
No, it is not "figuring out" anything, much less like a human might. Every time "I'm cold" appears in the training data, something else occurs after that. ChatGPT is a statistical model of what is most likely to follow "I'm cold" (and the other tokens preceding it) according to the data it has been trained on. It is not inferring anything, it is repeating the most common or one of the most common textual sequences that comes after another given textual sequence.