> You would realize that all we are doing is using statistics to predict what the next item might be.
I agree that Hinton's original quote doesn't make sense to me either. I suspect he would leverage the phrase "really good" to explain the difference between ChatGPT and, say, a Markov chain. I think that's a little disingenuous, if that's how he means it, but I don't know if I'm right about that.
But I also do not agree that humans use statistics to predict what the next item in a series might be. As evidence, there is the classic example of asking people to predict the next coin toss in the series: "heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads...". They'll either guess heads because it's come up so many times already, or because they assume the coin isn't fair, or tails because it's "overdue" to come up, but none of those are based on statistics per se.
I agree that Hinton's original quote doesn't make sense to me either. I suspect he would leverage the phrase "really good" to explain the difference between ChatGPT and, say, a Markov chain. I think that's a little disingenuous, if that's how he means it, but I don't know if I'm right about that.
But I also do not agree that humans use statistics to predict what the next item in a series might be. As evidence, there is the classic example of asking people to predict the next coin toss in the series: "heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads...". They'll either guess heads because it's come up so many times already, or because they assume the coin isn't fair, or tails because it's "overdue" to come up, but none of those are based on statistics per se.