We Don't Know What We're Doing

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Beautifully written in unshowy prose, the 10 stories in this short collection are also very funny. A newly married teacher in Castle View wonders why his wife no longer desires him: “He goes to google ‘why does my girlfriend not get aroused?’ but halfway through typing, Google auto-suggests ‘why does my girlfriend hate me?’.” In addition to extracting the underlying meaning of language, LLMs can learn on the fly. In the AI field, the term “learning” is usually reserved for the computationally intensive process in which developers expose the neural network to gigabytes of data and tweak its internal connections. By the time you type a query into ChatGPT, the network should be fixed; unlike humans, it should not continue to learn. So it came as a surprise that LLMs do, in fact, learn from their users' prompts—an ability known as in-context learning. “It's a different sort of learning that wasn't really understood to exist before,” says Ben Goertzel, founder of AI company SingularityNET. It is certainly much more than a stochastic parrot, and it certainly builds some representation of the world—although I do not think that it is quite like how humans build an internal world model,” says Yoshua Bengio, an AI researcher at the University of Montreal. There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. Create Account

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In the final story, Nos Da (the Welsh for "good night"), Morris envisions an alternative world where a father watches his family through a camera as he contemplates his mediocre relationship with his new girlfriend. Information is dispensed incrementally, building suspense to a heart-breaking realisation. In this strange new world of deathday parties and Memory Tapes, these characters have little left but their past. The power of great literature lies in its ability to reflect society. Writing about John McGahern, the American author John Updike called it “that tonic gift, the sense of truth – the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own”. Another type of in-context learning happens via “chain of thought” prompting, which means asking the network to spell out each step of its reasoning—a tactic that makes it do better at logic or arithmetic problems requiring multiple steps. (But one thing that made Millière's example so surprising is that the network found the Fibonacci number without any such coaching.) They do not, like most of the characters in this fresh and at times brilliant collection, know what they are doing. But their author certainly does. Sarah GilmartinThe tonic comes in large doses in Thomas Morris's debut short-story collection, We Don't Know What We're Doing, set primarily in the Welsh town of Caerphilly. The troubled, centreless narrators drift through the everyday in search of meaning. They are mostly young – teenagers to twentysomethings – and their listlessness says much about a society that has lost direction. As editor of the Stinging Fly magazine and last year's Dubliners 100 anthology (Tramp Press), Morris may be known to Irish readers already. A native of Caerphilly, he studied at Trinity College and lives in Dublin.

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God lets everything happen for a reason. It's all a learning process, and you have to go from one level to another. Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. Although LLMs have enough blind spots not to qualify as artificial general intelligence, or AGI—the term for a machine that attains the resourcefulness of animal brains—these emergent abilities suggest to some researchers that tech companies are closer to AGI than even optimists had guessed. “They're indirect evidence that we are probably not that far off from AGI,” Goertzel said in March at a conference on deep learning at Florida Atlantic University. OpenAI's plug-ins have given ChatGPT a modular architecture a little like that of the human brain. “Combining GPT-4 [the latest version of the LLM that powers ChatGPT] with various plug-ins might be a route toward a humanlike specialization of function,” says M.I.T. researcher Anna Ivanova.His Welsh heritage comes through in his stories with names such as Rhys, Rhian, Bethan and Gareth. Repeated locations – Caerphilly Castle, Morrisons, the ironically titled Castle View housing development – give the feel of an interlinked collection. Recurring themes have the same effect: absent parents, traumatic pasts, depression and mental illness, double lives. He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying. In Clap Hands the gruelling life as a single mother of Amy, a nursery worker, is poignantly depicted. After her husband remortgages their home and absconds to Australia to find himself, Amy is caught between the demands of her ailing mother and her three children. She emerges as a modern heroine, refusing to take out her loss on the next generation. No one yet knows how ChatGPT and its artificial-intelligence cousins will transform the world, and one reason is that no one really knows what goes on inside them. Some of these systems' abilities go far beyond what they were trained to do—and even their inventors are baffled as to why. A growing number of tests suggest these AI systems develop internal models of the real world, much as our own brain does, although the machines' technique is different. Contrasting nicely with the anxieties of the youngsters, 78-year-old Jimmy, in Strange Traffic, is on the lookout for his third wife: "He was in good enough shape to last another ten years, and where was the point in going lonely all that time?"