Si tratta di questo articolo:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html
(mi scuso qualora se ne fosse già discusso in lista)
Ne stavo discutendo con colleghi di vari paesi in un'altra mailing list e in
risposta ad alcune critiche fatte all'articolo ho scritto quanto riporto sotto
(scusatemi se lo lascio in inglese ma siccome coinvolge l'uso di ChatGPT
nell'analisi di un testo in inglese traducendolo diventava un'altra cosa)
...
I find your viewpoint highly interesting, even if I somehow disagree on some of
your criticism to Chomsky's article.
I find an analogy between the way ChatGPT learned to master the language in
comparison to human beings and how Alpha Zero learned to master board games in
comparison to human beings.
The deep-learning based approach exploited in both cases (almost) all available
data, either through their availability on the Internet (in the case of the
language) or through sophisticated systematic search through the strategy space
(in the case of board games).
Human beings become master (in both fields) leveraging a much smaller information space:
the number of examples a child is exposed to while learning language is, just by
considering time and space constraints, much smaller than what ChatGPT used. I do not
know of any estimation of this (which would be an interesting thing to do) but I would
say the size is inferior of some orders of magnitude (which to me implies the
"language learning algorithm" inside human brain is exponentially more
efficient then those used in DL - but that's a different story).
Moreover human beings know the "meaning" of their action and are aware of the
fact that they know such meaning.
(See the note at the end supporting my statements.)
This appears to me to be an important difference between the two approaches and
I think is the reason why Chomsky wrote that ChatGTP is not going to teach us
anything useful about how human beings learn and use language.
One more interesting discussion of the Chomsky viewpoint, this time defending
it, I suggest (in case you've not already read it) is the piece of Gary Marcus
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/caricaturing-noam-chomsky
Best, Enrico
NOTE: To test my statements I asked ChatGPT to analyse a paragraph of my mail.
You can read the prompt and the answer further below.
The answer is at best confusing.
ChatGPT fails to identify the text has 2 sentences and not just 1.
It does a wrong analysis of the first sentence, which contain two main clauses
and not one main and one subordinate.
That's particularly interesting since right after the wrong analysis it "explains" that "a
main clause is an independent clause that stands alone as a complete sentence". So, it writes that it
"knows" what a main clause is right after having shown it doesn't know.
And the rest contains a number of additional errors.
So, even if the examples ChatGPT has been exposed to surely contain many
descriptions of grammar rules, it has not been able to get any understanding of
them. A secondary high school student, having received much less data and much
less training is able to do a much better job.
CVD :-)
PROMPT
Please perform the analysis of clause and sentence structure of the text
enclosed below between «»:
«Human beings become master (in both fields) leveraging a much smaller information space:
the number of examples a child is exposed to while learning language is, just by
considering time and space constraints, much smaller than what ChatGPT used. I do not
know of any estimation of this (which would be an interesting thing to do) but I would
say the size is inferior of some orders of magnitude (which to me implies the
"language learning algorithm" inside human brain is exponentially more
efficient then those used in DL - but that's a different story).»
ANSWER (ChatGPT release of Feb.13 - tested on Mar.14th)
The text contains one sentence:
"Human beings become master (in both fields) leveraging a much smaller information space: the
number of examples a child is exposed to while learning language is, just by considering time and
space constraints, much smaller than what ChatGPT used. I do not know of any estimation of this
(which would be an interesting thing to do) but I would say the size is inferior of some orders of
magnitude (which to me implies the "language learning algorithm" inside human brain is
exponentially more efficient then those used in DL - but that's a different story)."
The sentence contains two clauses:
Main clause: "Human beings become master leveraging a much smaller information
space"
Subordinate clause: "the number of examples a child is exposed to while learning
language is, just by considering time and space constraints, much smaller than what
ChatGPT used"
The main clause is an independent clause that stands alone as a complete sentence. It contains a
subject ("human beings") and a predicate ("become master leveraging a much smaller
information space").
The subordinate clause is a dependent clause that cannot stand alone as a complete sentence. It provides
additional information to the main clause by describing the size of the information space that humans use to
become masters in both fields. The subordinate clause contains a subject ("the number of examples a
child is exposed to while learning language") and a predicate ("is much smaller than what ChatGPT
used"). The phrase "just by considering time and space constraints" acts as an adverbial
modifier that further clarifies the subordinate clause.
The text also contains two embedded clauses:
"which would be an interesting thing to do" is an embedded clause that acts as an
object of the verb "know" in the main clause.
"which to me implies the 'language learning algorithm' inside human brain is exponentially
more efficient then those used in DL - but that's a different story" is an embedded clause
that acts as the subject of the verb "is" in the subordinate clause.
Additionally, the text contains a parenthetical remark: "but that's a different
story," which is not syntactically connected to the rest of the sentence.
END OF CHATGPT ANSWER
--
-- EN
https://www.hoepli.it/libro/la-rivoluzione-informatica/9788896069516.html
======================================================
Prof. Enrico Nardelli
Presidente di "Informatics Europe"
Direttore del Laboratorio Nazionale "Informatica e Scuola" del CINI
Dipartimento di Matematica - Università di Roma "Tor Vergata"
Via della Ricerca Scientifica snc - 00133 Roma
home page: https://www.mat.uniroma2.it/~nardelli
blog: https://link-and-think.blogspot.it/
tel: +39 06 7259.4204 fax: +39 06 7259.4699
mobile: +39 335 590.2331 e-mail: narde...@mat.uniroma2.it
online meeting: https://blue.meet.garr.it/b/enr-y7f-t0q-ont
======================================================
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