livorno > On 14 Sep 2023, at 10:06, Alberto Cammozzo via nexa > <nexa@server-nexa.polito.it> wrote: > > Segnalo questo pezzo, a mio giudizio molto equilibrato e competente, di Brian > Hayes contra Welch, con un gustoso confronto tra Knuth e ChatGpt. > > Il punto cruciale per me è questo: "we should blame the [] unavoidable > weakness of a protocol in which the most frequent answer is, by default, the > right answer". > <http://bit-player.org/2023/ai-and-the-end-of-programming> > > > Earlier this year Matt Welsh announced the end of programming. He wrote, in > Communications of the ACM: > > I believe the conventional idea of “writing a program” is headed for > extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most > software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained > rather than programmed. In situations where one needs a “simple” program > (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of > parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be > generated by an AI rather than coded by hand. > > A few weeks later, in an online talk, Welsh broadened his deathwatch. It’s > not only the art of programming that’s doddering toward the grave; all of > computer science is “doomed.” (The image below is a screen capture from the > talk.) > > [...] > > I wanted a problem that can be solved by computational means, but that > doesn’t call for doing much arithmetic, which is known to be one of the weak > points of LLMs. I settled on a word puzzle invented 150 years ago by Lewis > Carroll and analyzed in depth by Donald E. Knuth in the 1990s. > [...] > > At this point I must concede that ChatGPT, with a little outside help, has > finally done what I asked of it. It has written a program that can construct > a valid word ladder. But I still have reservations. Although the programs > written by GPT-4 and by Knuth produce the same output, the programs > themselves are not equivalent, or even similar. > > [...] > > Why do the chatbots favor the inferior algorithm? You can get a clue just by > googling “word-ladder program.” Almost all the results at the top of the list > come from websites such as Leetcode, GeeksForGeeks and RosettaCode. These > sites, which apparently cater to job applicants and competitors in > programming contests, feature solutions that call for generating all 125 > single-letter variants of each word, as in the GPT programs. Because sites > like these are numerous—there seem to be hundreds of them—they outweigh other > sources, such as Knuth’s book (if, indeed, such texts even appear in the > training set). Does that mean we should blame the poor choice of algorithm > not on GPT but on Leetcode? I would point instead to the unavoidable weakness > of a protocol in which the most frequent answer is, by default, the right > answer. > > [...] > > For decades, architects of AI believed that true intelligence (whether > natural or artificial) requires a mental model of the world. To make sense of > what’s going on around you (and inside you), you need intuition about how > things work, how they fit together, what happens next, cause and effect. > Lenat insisted that the most important kinds of knowledge are those you > acquire long before you start reading books. You learn about gravity by > falling down. You learn about entropy when you find that a tower of blocks is > easy to knock over but harder to rebuild. You learn about pain and fear and > hunger and love—all this in infancy, before language begins to take root. > Experiences of this kind are unavailable to a brain in a box, with no direct > access to the physical or the social universe. > > LLMs appear to be the refutation of these ideas. After all, they are models > of language, not models of the world. They have no embodiment, no physical > presence that would allow them to learn via the school of hard knocks. > Ignorant of everything but mere words, how do they manage to sound so smart, > so worldly? > > [...] > > > > _______________________________________________ > nexa mailing list > nexa@server-nexa.polito.it > https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa
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