Do statistics amount to understanding? And does AI have a moral compass? On the face of it, both questions seem equally whimsical, with equally obvious answers. As the AI hype reverberates; however, those types of questions seem bound to be asked time and time again. State of the art research helps probe.
However, we may reasonably hypothesize that Switch Transformer is powering LaMDA, Google’s “breakthrough conversation technology”, aka chatbot, which is not available to the public at this point. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the head of Google’s AI group in Seattle, argued that “statistics do amount to understanding”, citing a few exchanges with LaMDA as evidence.
This was the starting point for Smith to embark on an exploration of whether that statement holds water. It’s not the first time Smith has done this. In the line of thinking of Gary Marcus and other deep learning critics, Smith claims that LLMs may appear to generate sensible-looking results under certain conditions but break when presented with input humans would easily comprehend.
Read the complete article here
