It is akin to the relativity problem in physics. Where is the center of the universe? What “grid” do things move through? The answer is that everything moves relative to one another, and somehow that fact causes the phenomena in our universe (and in these language models) to emerge.
You are right in that an AI will never know what an apple tastes like, or what a breeze on its face feels like until we give them sensory equipment to read from.
In this case though, its the equivalent of a college student having no real world experience and only the knowledge from their books, lectures, and labs. You can still work with the concepts of and reason against things you have never touched if you are given enough information about them beforehand.
The two rhetorical questions in your first paragraph assume the universe is discrete and finite, and I am not sure why.
While treating an AI like something capable of recieving information is inaccurate, I will assume it is identical to a human for the sake of argument.
It would still be nothing like a college student grappling with abstract concepts. It would be like giving you university textbooks on quantum mechanics written in chinese, and making you study them(it would be even more accurate if you didn’t know any language at all). You would be able to notice patterns in the ways the words are placed relative to each other, and also use this information(theoretically) to make a combination of characters that resembles the texts you have, but you wouldn’t be able to understand what they reference. Even if you had a dictionary you wouldn’t be, because you wouldn’t be able to understand the definitions. Words don’t magically have their meanings stored inside, they are jnterpreted in our heads, but an AI can’t do that, the word means nothing to it.
It is akin to the relativity problem in physics. Where is the center of the universe? What “grid” do things move through? The answer is that everything moves relative to one another, and somehow that fact causes the phenomena in our universe (and in these language models) to emerge.
You are right in that an AI will never know what an apple tastes like, or what a breeze on its face feels like until we give them sensory equipment to read from.
In this case though, its the equivalent of a college student having no real world experience and only the knowledge from their books, lectures, and labs. You can still work with the concepts of and reason against things you have never touched if you are given enough information about them beforehand.
The two rhetorical questions in your first paragraph assume the universe is discrete and finite, and I am not sure why.
While treating an AI like something capable of recieving information is inaccurate, I will assume it is identical to a human for the sake of argument.
It would still be nothing like a college student grappling with abstract concepts. It would be like giving you university textbooks on quantum mechanics written in chinese, and making you study them(it would be even more accurate if you didn’t know any language at all). You would be able to notice patterns in the ways the words are placed relative to each other, and also use this information(theoretically) to make a combination of characters that resembles the texts you have, but you wouldn’t be able to understand what they reference. Even if you had a dictionary you wouldn’t be, because you wouldn’t be able to understand the definitions. Words don’t magically have their meanings stored inside, they are jnterpreted in our heads, but an AI can’t do that, the word means nothing to it.