Dan, Michael, et al. In response to my previous note in this thread, I received an offline comment with a quotation by Peirce that helps explain the so-called Large Language Models of GPT:
"Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is "saying to himself," that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man's circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood) is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism. [CP 5.421 (1905)]" What those LLMs encode is the language of multiple circles of society, which is "in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism/" From that encoded language, GPT derives answers that are often highly relevant to the questions and comments by somebody who is communicating with GPT. But GPT , by itself, frequently makes stupid mistakes. On one blog, somebody wrote "GPT is dumber than my cat.." As I said before, I agree that the word 'model' in LLM is not appropriate. However, the information encoded in the LLMs is an excellent source for deriving two kinds of models for each "circle of society": (1) an ontology of the information encoded in what that circle says and (2) a syntactic model (in the sense of current linguistic theory) of the language that the people in that circle speak. I am currently working with some colleagues who are developing theoretical methods and computer software for deriving both #1 and #2 above. There is much more to say, and I'll include more later. John
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