More “can fool the average idiot.”

‘Passing’ isn’t fooling a single participant, but the majority of them beyond statistical chance.

The problem with the experiment is that there exists a set of instructions for which the ability to complete them necessitates understanding due to conditional dependence on the state in each iteration.

In which case, only agents that can actually understand the state in the Chinese would be able to successfully continue.

So it’s a great experiment for the solipsism of understanding as it relates to following pure functional operations, but not functions that have state changing side effects where future results depend on understanding the current state.

There’s a pretty significant body of evidence by now that transformers can in fact ‘understand’ in this sense, from interpretability research around neural network features in SAE work, linear representations of world models starting with the Othello-GPT work, and the Skill-Mix work where GPT-4 and later models are beyond reasonable statistical chance at the level of complexity for being able to combine different skills without understanding them.

If the models were just Markov chains (where prior state doesn’t impact current operation), the Chinese room is very applicable. But pretty much by definition transformer self-attention violates the Markov property.

TL;DR: It’s a very obsolete thought experiment whose continued misapplication flies in the face of empirical evidence at least since around early 2023.

Used Google and social media as well, and allegedly sometimes even listened to rock and roll.

True deviant, that one.

Which is typical of tech that hasn’t yet hit the sweet spot for a tipping point.

Look at how many palm pilots or handheld note taking mobile devices existed (and how many cycles) before the iPhone.

Yes and no. It really depends on the model.

The newest Claude Sonnet I’d probably guess will come in above average compared to the humans available for a program like this in making learning fun and personally digestible for each student.

The newest Gemini models could literally cost kids their lives.

The gap between what the public is aware of (and even what many employees at labs, including the frontier ones) and the reality of just how far things have come in the last year is wild.

Oh nice, another Gary Marcus “AI hitting a wall post.”

Like his “Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall” post on March 10th, 2022.

Indeed, not much has changed in the world of deep learning between spring 2022 and now.

No new model releases.

No leaps beyond what was expected.

\s

Gary Marcus is like a reverse Cassandra.

Consistently wrong, and yet regularly listened to, amplified, and believed.

For reference as to why they need to try to be so heavy handed with their prompts about BS, here was Grok, Elon’s ‘uncensored’ AI on Twitter at launch which upset his Twitter blue subscribers:

Heroin - safer than fentanyl and sure to keep your human from ever running away.

“When my little Bobby is a bit too active and needs to calm down, I chose heroin each time, every time.”

“Heroin: Xorglob tested, human approved.”