Abstract
This article is a commentary on ChatGPT and LLMs (Large Language Models) in general. It argues that this technology has matured to the point where calling systems such as ChatGPT “stochastic parrots” is no longer warranted. But it also argues that these systems continue to have serious limitations when it comes to reasoning. These limitations are much more severe than commonly thought. A large array of examples are given to support these claims.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The version of ChatGPT discussed here is based on GPT-3.5, as GPT-4 had not been released at the time this article was written.
People often speak of “compositionality” as the challenge, but that is too vague in my view.
References
Arkoudas, K., & Bringsjord, S. (2014). Philosophical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. In: K. Frankish & W. M. Ramsey (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 34–63). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139046855.004
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Mitchell, M. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610–623). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
Christiano, P. F., Leike, J., Brown, T., Martic, M., Legg, S., & Amodei, D. (2017). Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences. In I. Guyon et al. (Eds.), Advances in neural information processing systems (Vol. 30, pp. 4299–4307). Curran Associates, Inc.
Dziri, N., Lu X., Sclar, M., Li, X. L., Jiang, L., Lin, B. Y., ... Choi, Y. (2023). Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Arkoudas, K. ChatGPT is no Stochastic Parrot. But it also Claims that 1 is Greater than 1. Philos. Technol. 36, 54 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00619-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00619-6