Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jibal 408 days ago
That's a non sequitur that mixes apples and giraffes, and is completely wrong about what happens in the Chinese Room and what happens in LLMs. Ex hypothesi, the "rule book" that the Searle homunculus in the Chinese Room uses is "the right sort of program" to implement "Strong AI". The LLM algorithm is very much not that sort of program, it's a statistical pattern matcher. Strong AI does symbolic reasoning, LLMs do not.

But worse, the Turing Test is not remotely intended to be an "analogy for what LLMs are doing inside" so your comparison makes no sense whatsoever, and completely fails to address the actual point--which is that, for ages the Turing Test was held out as the criterion for determining whether a system was "thinking", but that has been abandoned in the face of LLMs, which have near perfect language models and are able to closely model modes of human interaction regardless of whether they are "thinking" (and they aren't, so the TT is clearly an inadequate test, which some argued for decades before LLMs became a reality).
1 comments
semi-extrinsic 408 days ago
> the TT is clearly an inadequate test, which some argued for decades before LLMs became a reality

To be specific, in a curious quirk of fate, LLMs seem to be proving right much of what Chomsky was saying about language.

E.g. in 1996 he described the Turing test as "although highly influential, it seems to me not only foreign to the sciences but also close to senseless".

(Curious in that VC backed businesses are experimentally verifying the views of a prominent anti-capitalist socialist.)

link
YeGoblynQueenne 408 days ago
From my personal notes (I love taking notes on this kind of stuff):

  As far as I can see all of this [he's speaking about the Loebner Prize and
  the Turing test in general] is entirely pointless. It's like asking how we
  can determine empirically whether an aeroplane can fly the answer being if
  it can fool someone into thinking that it's an eagle under some conditions.
https://youtu.be/0hzCOsQJ8Sc?si=MUXpmIwAzcla9lvK&t=2052
link