It seems to me that, while the form/meaning distinction in this paper is certainly a fascinating one if your interests tend towards philosophy of language, this has very little to say about supposed inherent limitations of language models, and does not affect forecasts of existential risk.
Ok, let me spell it out explicitly. In a section called “Large LMs: Hype and analysis,” the linked paper says that claims that LLM can “understand,” “comprehend,” and “know” are “gross overclaims.” The paper supports this contention by pointing to evidence that “in fact, far from doing the “reasoning” ostensibly required to complete the tasks, [LLMs] were instead simply more effective at leveraging artifacts in the data than previous approaches.”
Here is where the imagination comes in. Imagine that you think that all mental state attributions to artificial systems are confused in exactly this way. Imagine that you think that artificial neural nets can’t reason at all. Now imagine that someone tells you that we should all be very concerned that misaligned superintelligent AI systems will destroy us.
Your response to that would be something like: it is deeply confused to think that superintelligent AI systems are something we need to worry about, and the people who are worried about them simply do not understand what is going on under the hood in machine learning models. Worries about existential risk from superintelligent AI stem from the same kind of confusion as attributing understanding to existing systems: the tendency of people who are not technically literate to anthropomorphize the systems they interact with.
Imagine that you think that artificial neural nets can’t reason at all.
Is this a real position that real living intelligent people actually hold, or is it just one of the funny contrarian philosopher beliefs that some philosophers like to around with for fun?
It seems to me that, while the form/meaning distinction in this paper is certainly a fascinating one if your interests tend towards philosophy of language, this has very little to say about supposed inherent limitations of language models, and does not affect forecasts of existential risk.
Ok, let me spell it out explicitly. In a section called “Large LMs: Hype and analysis,” the linked paper says that claims that LLM can “understand,” “comprehend,” and “know” are “gross overclaims.” The paper supports this contention by pointing to evidence that “in fact, far from doing the “reasoning” ostensibly required to complete the tasks, [LLMs] were instead simply more effective at leveraging artifacts in the data than previous approaches.”
Here is where the imagination comes in. Imagine that you think that all mental state attributions to artificial systems are confused in exactly this way. Imagine that you think that artificial neural nets can’t reason at all. Now imagine that someone tells you that we should all be very concerned that misaligned superintelligent AI systems will destroy us.
Your response to that would be something like: it is deeply confused to think that superintelligent AI systems are something we need to worry about, and the people who are worried about them simply do not understand what is going on under the hood in machine learning models. Worries about existential risk from superintelligent AI stem from the same kind of confusion as attributing understanding to existing systems: the tendency of people who are not technically literate to anthropomorphize the systems they interact with.
Is this a real position that real living intelligent people actually hold, or is it just one of the funny contrarian philosopher beliefs that some philosophers like to around with for fun?
I think this is really the position of the stochastic parrots people, yes.
I don’t think it’s plausible, but I think it partly explains their relentless opposition to work on AI safety.
I think this is an actual position. It’s the stochastic parrots argument no? Just a recent post by a cognitive scientist holds this belief.
I don’t think there were any factual claims in that article from a skim; entirely just normative claims and a few rhetorical question.