Computer scientist and “godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton says this about chatbots:
“People say, It’s just glorified autocomplete . . . Now, let’s analyze that. Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete.”
This got me thinking about what I do at work, for example in a research meeting. I spend a lot of time doing “glorified autocomplete” in the style of a well-trained chatbot: Someone describes some problem, I listen and it reminds me of a related issue I’ve thought about before, and I’m acting as a sort of FAQ, but more like a chatbot than a FAQ in that the people who are talking with me do not need to navigate through the FAQ to find the answer that is most relevant to them; I’m doing that myself and giving a response.
I do that sort of thing a lot in meetings, and it can work well, indeed often I think this sort of shallow, associative response can be more effective than whatever I’d get from a direct attack on the problem in question. After all, the people I’m talking with have already thought for awhile about whatever it is they’re working on, and my initial thoughts may well be in the wrong direction, or else my thoughts are in the right direction but are just retracing my collaborators’ past ideas. From the other direction, my shallow thoughts can be useful in representing insights from problems that these collaborators had not ever thought about much before. Nonspecific suggestions on multilevel modeling or statistical graphics or simulation or whatever can really help!
At some point, though, I’ll typically have to bite the bullet and think hard, not necessarily reaching full understanding in the sense of mentally embedding the problem at hand into a coherent schema or logical framework, but still going through whatever steps of logical reasoning that I can. This feels different than autocomplete; it requires an additional level of focus. Often I need to consciously “flip the switch,” as it were, to turn on that focus and think rigorously. Other times, I’m doing autocomplete and either come to a sticking point or encounter an interesting idea, and this causes me to stop and think.
It’s almost like the difference between jogging and running. I can jog and jog and jog, thinking about all sorts of things and not feeling like I’m expending much effort, my legs pretty much move up and down of their own accord . . . but then if I need to run, that takes concentration.
Here’s another example. Yesterday I participated in the methods colloquium in our political science department. It was Don Green and me and a bunch of students, and the structure was that Don asked me questions, I responded with various statistics-related and social-science-related musings and stories, students followed up with questions, I responded with more stories, etc. Kinda like the way things go here on the blog, but spoken rather than typed. Anyway, the point is that most of my responses were a sort of autocomplete—not in a word-by-word chatbot style, more at a larger level of chunkiness, for example something would remind me of a story, and then I’d just insert the story into my conversation—but still at this shallow, pleasant level. Mellow conversation with no intellectual or social strain. But then, every once in awhile, I’d pull up short and have some new thought, some juxtaposition that had never occurred to me before, and I’d need to think things through.
This also happens when I give prepared talks. My prepared talks are not super-well prepared—this is on purpose, as I find that too much preparation can inhibit flow. In any case, I’ll often finding myself stopping and pausing to reconsider something or another. Even when describing something I’ve done before, there are times when I feel the need to think it all through logically, as if for the first time. I noticed something similar when I saw my sister give a talk once: she had the same habit of pausing to work things out from first principles. I don’t see this behavior in every academic talk, though; different people have different styles of presentation.
This seems related to models of associative and logical reasoning in psychology. As a complete non-expert in that area, I’ll turn to wikipedia:
The foundations of dual process theory likely come from William James. He believed that there were two different kinds of thinking: associative and true reasoning. . . . images and thoughts would come to mind of past experiences, providing ideas of comparison or abstractions. He claimed that associative knowledge was only from past experiences describing it as “only reproductive”. James believed that true reasoning could enable overcoming “unprecedented situations” . . .
That sounds about right!
After describing various other theories from the past hundred years or so, Wikipedia continues:
Daniel Kahneman provided further interpretation by differentiating the two styles of processing more, calling them intuition and reasoning in 2003. Intuition (or system 1), similar to associative reasoning, was determined to be fast and automatic, usually with strong emotional bonds included in the reasoning process. Kahneman said that this kind of reasoning was based on formed habits and very difficult to change or manipulate. Reasoning (or system 2) was slower and much more volatile, being subject to conscious judgments and attitudes.
This sounds a bit different from what I was talking about above. When I’m doing “glorified autocomplete” thinking, I’m still thinking—this isn’t automatic and barely conscious behavior along the lines of driving to work along a route I’ve taken a hundred times before—; I’m just thinking in a shallow way, trying to “autocomplete” the answer. It’s pattern-matching more than it is logical reasoning.
P.S. Just to be clear, I have a lot of respect for Hinton’s work; indeed, Aki and I included Hinton’s work in our brief review of 10 pathbreaking research articles during the past 50 years of statistics and machine learning. Also, I’m not trying to make a hardcore, AI-can’t-think argument. Although not myself a user of large language models, I respect Bob Carpenter’s respect for them.
I think that where Hinton got things wrong in the quote that led off this post was not in his characterization of chatbots, but rather in his assumptions about human thinking, in not distinguishing autocomplete-like associative reasoning with logical thinking. Maybe Hinton’s problem in understanding this is that he’s just too logical! At work, I do a lot of what seems like autocomplete—and, as I wrote above, I think it’s useful—but if I had more discipline, maybe I’d think more logically and carefully all the time. It could well be that Hinton has that habit or inclination to always be in focus. If Hinton does not have consistent personal experience of shallow, autocomplete-like thinking, he might not recognize it as something different, in which case he could be giving the chatbot credit for something it’s not doing.
Come to think of it, one thing that impresses me about Bob is that, when he’s working, he seems to always be on focus. I’ll be in a meeting, just coasting along, and Bob will interrupt someone to ask for clarification, and I suddenly realize that Bob absolutely demands understanding. He seems to have no interest in participating in a research meeting in a shallow way. I guess we just have different styles. It’s my impression that the vast majority of researchers are like me, just coasting on the surface most of the time (for some people, all of the time!), while Bob, and maybe Geoff Hinton, is one of the exceptions.
P.P.S. Sometimes we really want to be doing shallow, auto-complete-style thinking. For example, if we’re writing a play and want to simulate how some characters might interact. Or just as a way of casting the intellectual net more widely. When I’m in a research meeting and I free-associate, it might not help immediately solve the problem at hand, but it can bring in connections that will be helpful later. So I’m not knocking auto-complete; I’m just disagreeing with Hinton’s statement that “by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand.” As a person who does a lot of useful associative reasoning and also a bit of logical understanding, I think they’re different, both in how they feel and also in what they do.
P.P.P.S. Lots more discussion in comments; you might want to start here.
P.P.P.P.S. One more thing . . . actually, it might deserve its own post, but for now I’ll put it here: So far, it might seem like I’m denigrating associative thinking, or “acting like a chatbot,” or whatever it might be called. Indeed, I admire Bob Carpenter for doing very little of this at work! The general idea is that acting like a chatbot can be useful—I really can help lots of people solve their problems in that way, also every day I can write these blog posts that entertain and inform tens of thousands of people—but it’s not quite the same as focused thinking.
That’s all true (or, I should say, that’s my strong impression), but there’s more to it than that. As discussed in my comment linked to just above, “acting like a chatbot” is not “autocomplete” at all, indeed in some ways it’s kind of the opposite. Locally it’s kind of like autocomplete in that the sentences flow smoothly; I’m not suddenly jumping to completely unrelated topics—but when I do this associative or chatbot-like writing or talking, it can lead to all sorts of interesting places. I shuffle the deck and new hands come up. That’s one of the joys of “acting like a chatbot” and one reason I’ve been doing it for decades, long before chatbots ever existed! Walk along forking paths, and who knows where you’ll turn up! And all of you blog commenters (ok, most of you) play helpful roles in moving these discussions along.