Ask HN: Do humans overestimate ChatGPT because of our brains?
No. People are, if anything, underestimating GPT pretty significantly at this point.<p>The entire conversation always involves this endless spiel about how GPT is just generating plausible-sounding text and doesn&#x27;t &quot;really understand&quot; anything. This is not really true, but the larger problem is that it&#x27;s often left as a purely philosophical point with infinitely high goalposts. What would an AI need to be able to do for people to deem it has this magical property of &quot;really understanding&quot; something? This is often left unexplained, in the sense that it is truly debatable if AI can every &quot;really understand&quot; stuff and... blah blah blah. It&#x27;s a low-information discussion, in my view.<p>But GPT really <i>does</i> &quot;understand&quot; stuff in the sense that it does form an internal representation of ideas and concepts in its own latent space, and this is robust to a wide variety of transformations such as variations in wording. It is able to translate between different realizations of the same idea by expressing that idea in different ways: written in English in different styles, written in other languages, rapping; it can even &quot;write a song in object-oriented Python&quot; if you ask it to, and it will do it, and then be able to translate that to an English-language song that rhymes with the same meaning. The fact that it has a many-to-one representation of realizations to vectors in its latent space would seem to be a really good way to quantify what &quot;understanding&quot; means, and that is what GPT is doing.<p>I think as time goes on, we will get a &quot;human of the gaps&quot; phenomenon with these models.