Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

You made two claims: (1) current language models are useless and (2) current language models have reached a ceiling. I said:

How many people are using ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, etc. for economically or personally valuable activities?

If (1) is true, then the answer to that question is "zero" or at least "close to zero". Do you really believe that?

If (2) is true, then it is also true to say that transformer models will never exceed today's capabilities by a significant amount at any time in the future. Do you really believe that?




Yes. The ceiling is the floor.

The limitation is inherent in the core design. There is no overcoming. This is not a hurdle or a wall. It's a design flaw.

Is it totally useless to everyone? No. Not completely. It's like a coherent search engine: a way to find data that is close to other data. But "close to" in this case is only "semantically", and never "logically", so that's that.

Is it going to get any less useless than it is? Only slightly. "It" will never get better. The only better version of "it" is a completely new ground-up redesign that doesn't resemble "it" at all.


Modern neural network architectures are Turing complete [1]. So I don't see any argument for a limit in principle unless you are arguing that a Turing machine can't achieve language understanding. If that's what you're saying, then I wonder who is espousing mysticism here.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.03429


Are you forgetting the distinction between a program and a computer?

Language understanding doesn't magically spawn itself as a process on your computer! Someone has to write that program first.

And that's my point. ChatGPT transforms language, but it does not understand it. For that, we will need a different kind of program.


Language understanding doesn't magically spawn itself as a process on your computer! Someone has to write that program first.

Do you think it's impossible for such a program to emerge as weights in a Turing complete neural network architecture?




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: