larryfreeman

My 3 favorite non-fiction books are:

* Mindset by Carol S. Dweck

* Innovating: A Doer's Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong by Luis Perez-Breva

* Fall In Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepeneurs by Uri Levine

These three books really changed my viewpoint and I've been rereading them every year.

Each time I have been laid off, the opportunity afterwards has been significantly better. Perhaps, I have just been lucky.

After my first lay off, I got a job at Sun Microsystems in 1999. I was able to buy a house. After my second lay off from Sun in 2007, I was able to receive a significant promotion as a director. After my third lay off in 2017, I was able to find a great opportunity at Walmart where I no longer have management responsibilities.

If I hadn't lined up my next job so quickly, I definitely would have started my own company or consulting business. The most important thing is to believe in yourself, stay current, and prepare to ride the next wave in technology. :-)

I think that we need a better definition of creativity. I suspect that ChatGPT is merely derivative (like a person who reviews all the ideas out there and attempt to pick the best ones) as opposed to original (breaking the conventions typically by a person with a unique viewpoint). This begs the question of what is the definition of creativity and how can we be sure that human creativity is not also derivative. I am scratching my head on this one. How can we define creativity so that it clear that human beings can be original without being derivative?

If you are asking me. Of course, I've spent many hours on it. I have not seen anything that I would consider original. I am very impressed by the quality of responses and how well context impacts the content. It's seems most amazing at summarization and categorization.

I am very surprised by the results of "Let's play Dungeon and Dragons where you are the Dungeon Master" or Write new song lyrics or Complete the following poem or even write the following essay or chapter of a book.

I am surprised by the quality of the response in terms of flow. It sounds very much like a college undergraduate to my eyes. At the same time, it sounds like a well-read, undergraduate who doesn't fully understanding topics beyond the fundamentals. On the fundamentals, ChatGPT is surprisingly strong.

That's a summary of response based on my many hours of using it.

Thanks! I appreciate the explanation. I think that you put your finger on the major assumption of the argument.

I'm not sure why you disagree with the Chinese Room argument. I would be interested. I agree that Searle was solely a philosopher who did not take an engineering viewpoint.

Searle's main point is that if I have a book that tells me how to respond and I never learn Chinese, then I do not understand Chinese. If you see a flaw in this reasoning, I am very interested.

My point is just that LLM models are a compression of the content available on the internet equivalent to a rule book. It is definitely fascinating how powerful LLMs are as far as summarization and forming coherent responses to input.

I am a big fan of Kahneman and agree with you that it is will be very interesting to ask GPT-4 the questions in that book.

Agreed. LLMs process information on their own.

I thought you were saying it was "obvious" that the processing demonstrated intelligence.

My point was the level of intelligence shown is relative the quality and quantity of the data used for training. The data is where the intelligence is and the model is a compression of that latent intelligence.

Let us disagree on what is "obvious". Given an input and an output, you believe that the complexity of the output proves that intelligence takes place.

I agree that ChatGPT is more than a proxy. Unlike Clever Hans, it is processing the content of the question asked. But it is like Clever Hans in that the query is processed by looking for a signal in the content of the data used to train ChatGPT.

The real question is where this intelligent behavior comes from? Why does statistical processing lead to these insights?

I believe that the processing is not intelligent primarily because I see that holes in the data available leads to holes in reasoning. The processing is only as good as the dynamics of the content that it being processed. This is the part that I believe will become obvious over time.