I started using ChatGPT on December 1, 2022 and have used it quite extensively ever since. I’ve spent some of my time just poking around, somewhat more time looking things up, and most of my time systematically investigating its performance. That resulted in a number of working papers, the most interesting of which is about stories: ChatGPT tells stories, and a note about reverse engineering: A Working Paper, Version 3.
I started working with Claude 3.5 Sonnet on November 18, 2024. I’ve used it in those three capacities, though obviously not as much as I’ve used ChatGPT. In particular, I’ve used it for background information on melancholy in various aspects. I’ve also done something I’d never done with ChatGPT, asked it to describe photographs. I’m doing this to see how well it does.
Then on November 24, 2024, I began using it in a somewhat more interesting new capacity, though I’m not sure what to call it. The phrase “thought partner” comes to mind, though it seems too much like “thought leader,” which I don’t like. I’m using it as a sounding board. Better yet, it’s a collaborator playing the role of sounding board. It’s not an equal collaborator in the intellectual dialog; academic norms would not require me to offer it co-authorship of papers. But those norms might well require an explicit acknowledgement, not to alert the reader that one of those new-fangled LLM things has been involved in the thinking, but simply acknowledging the help it has given me.
As for just what kind of help that is, the best way is to look at some examples. I’ve already published two of these dialogues on New Savanna: Computer chess, super-intelligence, A Connecticut Yankee, cargo cults, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet speculates about future developments in AI and beyond. The rest of this post contains the first interaction where Claude began acting in intellectual partnership.
When I started the interaction I was simply interested in seeing what it knew about my teacher and mentor, the late David Hays. I wasn’t looking for new information. I just wanted to see what it had picked up. That began to change when it asked me about the work of Quillian and of Schank and Abelson. Then I told it about Hays’s interest in the work of William Powers. Now we’re getting serious. This guy knows something. And then WHAM! Claude responded intelligently when I mentioned the work of Peter Gärdenfors. The interaction continued in that mode to the end.
Utterly remarkable. AGI? What the hell is that? But no. And I fear that thinking in those terms is likely to blind me to whatever it is that Claude is doing. I realize that the concept of AGI is written into the contractual relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft, but I’m not playing that game. Will they end up litigating it? Who knows?
I’m planning two more posts in this series. The next will be about the implications of paragraph length in Heart of Darkness. Then I’ll post a long interaction that takes Miriam Yevick’s 1975 paper, “Holographic or fourier Logic,” as its starting point.
In the following dialog my comments are bold while Claude’s are plain. I’ve interpolated a few comments highlighted in blue.
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Are you familiar with the work of a computational linguist named David Hays? He worked on machine translation at RAND in the 1950s and 1960s?
Yes, I am somewhat familiar with David Hays' work, though I should note that since this involves fairly obscure historical details from computational linguistics, I want to be careful about potential inaccuracies in my knowledge. From what I understand, David Hays was one of the pioneers of machine translation and computational linguistics during the early years of the field. He worked at RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 1960s where he was involved in some of the earliest machine translation projects.
He was particularly interested in developing dependency grammar approaches for machine translation, which was quite innovative for that time period. Dependency grammar focuses on the relationships between words rather than constituent structure, which was the dominant paradigm in American linguistics at the time.
I believe he also wrote an influential book called "Computational Linguistics: Programming Linguistics in Automatic Language Translation" in the early 1960s, though I'd encourage you to verify this citation since I may be misremembering details.
Claude got the name wrong. It’s Introduction to Computational Linguistics, American Elsevier, New York, 1967.
Would you be interested in hearing more about any particular aspect of his work or that early period of machine translation research? I find the history of early computational linguistics fascinating, though again I want to be upfront that with someone as historically specific as Hays, some of my knowledge may be incomplete or imperfect.
Yes, that’s him. I studied with him at SUNY Buffalo in the 1970s. We were working on computational semantics and using a cognitive networks formalism.
Oh, that's fascinating that you studied directly with David Hays! I would be very interested to hear more about your experiences working with him and the cognitive networks approach you were developing at SUNY Buffalo. That was an important period in the development of semantic representation systems.
Could you tell me more about the cognitive networks formalism you were using? I'm particularly curious about how it compared to other semantic network approaches being developed around that time, like Quillian's work or Schank and Abelson's conceptual dependency theory.
It was more developed than Quillian’s work. As I recall, he never really developed is initial ideas. As for Schank and Abelson, they were imagining a self-sufficient cognitive system and were very much interested in identifying the primitive elements necessary for a cognitive network. By the time I began working with him, Hays had realized that cognition had to be grounded in something else – later on Steven Harnad would talk about the “symbol grounding” problem. When I worked with him, Hays was interested in grounding the cognitive system in the control-theory (cybernetic) account of perception and action developed by William T. Powers (perceptual control theory, or PCT).
Something special seems to be happening.
This is really interesting historical context - it suggests Hays was grappling with fundamental issues in cognitive science that are still relevant today. The shift from viewing semantic networks as self-contained symbolic systems to recognizing the need for grounding in perception and action seems quite prescient.
I'm curious about how Hays was trying to integrate Powers' PCT with semantic networks. As I understand it, PCT proposes that behavior emerges from organisms controlling their perceptions to match internal reference signals, rather than through direct control of outputs. Was Hays trying to use this as a way to ground symbolic meaning in perceptual-motor control loops?
This also seems to anticipate some later developments in embodied cognition and grounded cognition theories. The timing is interesting too - Powers published "Behavior: The Control of Perception" in 1973, so it sounds like Hays was engaging with these ideas pretty quickly after they were published.
Yes, that's what Hays was doing. His idea was that particular servo units in a Powers-like control system would be linked to cognitive units through what Hays called "parameters of perception." Hays identified a half dozen or so such parameters. Each cognitive node would be characterized by the values it took on those parameters. Relationships between nodes were thus derived from differences in parameter values for the nodes connected by an arc (or edge).
