[akakww]

GPT models the world through text*

There are many other things that go into modelling the world, like drawing pictures, visualising things, communicating in non-text ways essentially. GPT can only model the world in the ways that text can model the world, which is limited.

[dwohnitmok]

Although a differentiating factor in the near-term, in the grand scheme of things that is merely an implementation detail.

The rise of computing and its myriad encoders is an existence proof that the world we humans know can be, to an arbitrary degree of precision, modeled by 0s and 1s and what are 0s and 1s but the purest essence of text?

Although fraught with many large implementation difficulties, a GPT trained on binary data does not represent a fundamental difficulty vs one trained on text.

[randcraw]

No, and not even close. Text cannot model many things. Try learning surgery using a textbook without pictures. Try driving a racecar competitively or learning a foreign language after only reading a book, even one with pictures.

Models of all kinds are always poor surrogates for reality, and models that cannot employ logic or causality CLEARLY cannot model a world in which mechanisms cause all change.

Statistical models can indeed describe many observations, but can never break out from the echo chamber of copy-catting patterns it has already seen. If a probabilistic engine like a deep net hasn’t been exposed to a concept during training, it will never induce its existence. Imagination requires initiative, the proposal of an unknown and unfamiliar outcome via logical inference or causal induction. Until deep nets can employ both of these skills, they will never master many skills humans use routinely to explain the world or extend our understanding of how it works.

[FeepingCreature]

If logic helps you predict the next word in the text, then a text based model will learn logic.

[p1esk]

What makes you think it’s limited to text? See for example https://openai.com/blog/jukebox