O knows nothing about English initially but is very good at detecting statistical patterns.
Meanwhile, O, a hyperintelligent deep-sea octopus who is unable to visit or observe the two islands, discovers a way to tap into the underwater cable and listen in on A and B’s conversations. A and B start happily typing messages to each other. They soon discover that previous visitors to these islands have left behind telegraphs and that they can communicate with each other via an underwater cable. Say that A and B, both fluent speakers of English, are independently stranded on two uninhabited islands. The goal was to illustrate what large language models, or LLMs - the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT - can and cannot do. She published the paper in 2020 with fellow computational linguist Alexander Koller.
Bender co-wrote the octopus paper.īender is a computational linguist at the University of Washington. But before Microsoft’s Bing started cranking out creepy love letters before Meta’s Galactica spewed racist rants before ChatGPT began writing such perfectly decent college essays that some professors said, “Screw it, I’ll just stop grading” and before tech reporters sprinted to claw back claims that AI was the future of search, maybe the future of everything else, too, Emily M.
