No, LaMDA is not sentient. Not even slightly.| garymarcus.substack.com
On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold.| gwern.net
I’ve previously argued that machine learning systems often exhibit emergent capabilities, and that these capabilities could lead to unintended negative consequences. But how can we reason concretely about these consequences?| Bounded Regret
A mystery Large Language Models (LLM) are on fire, capturing public attention by their ability to provide seemingly impressive completions to user prompts (NYT coverage). They are a delicate combination of a radically simplistic algorithm with massive amounts of data and computing power. They are trained by playing a guess-the-next-word| The Gradient
In 1972, the Nobel prize-winning physicist Philip Anderson wrote the essay " More Is Different [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393]". In it, he argues that quantitative changes can lead to qualitatively different and unexpected phenomena. While he focused on physics, one can find many examples of More is| Bounded Regret