Thank you for this amazing and clarifying post.
You’re operating far above my pay grade in connection with any of this subject matter, but nonetheless I’m going to dare a different suggestion for the True Names: do you think there’s any merit to -speculators- and -speculations-? I believe these names fit all the excellent and clarifying tests and criteria presented in your post; in particular those referencing counterfactual configurations and process specification through chaining. Furthermore I think they have some advantages of their own. Speculators producing speculations seem more the right relationship between the two main concepts than simulators producing simulacra. (I don’t think they do that!) Also, simulators have such a long history in digital systems of being aimed at deterministic fidelity to a reference system, which could be at odds with the abundant production of counterfactuals I believe you’re actually seeking to emphasize here. Finally, speculations can be fanciful, realistic, or absurd, a nice match to the variety of outputs produced by GPT in the presence of different types of prompting, something you highlight, I think correctly, as a hallmark of GPT’s status as a novel type of AI. One who speculates is a certain type of thinker: I propose that GPT is that type.
What do you think?
One of the most interesting responses I’ve gotten from GPT-3 was to this prompt: “1.e4 c5 2.d4 cxd4”: the first moves of a chess game. GPT-3′s response: “” 3.c3 dxc3 4.Nxc3 g6 5.Nf3 Bg7 6.Bc4 Nc6 7.0-0 Qc7 8.Qe2 e6 9.Bg5 Nf6 10.Rd1 Ne5 11.Be3 0-0 12.a3 d5 13.Nb5 Qc8 14.Nxc7 Qxc7 15.e5 Nfd7 16.Nxd5 Nc4 17.Bxc4 Qxc4 18.Qe4 e5 19.Qxe5 Qc7 20.Rd3 Qc6 21.Qxc4 dxc4 22.Nd4 Rfe8 23.Rfd1 b5 24.Nb3 Rc8 25.Nd2 b4 26.cd3 f6 27.exf6 gxf6 28.Rd4 b3 29.Ke2 Be6 30.Ne4 Rd8 31.Nc5 Bg7 32.Rxd8+ Bxd8 33.a4 bxa3 34.Ra1 Kh8 35.Bf1 Bc3 36.Nxa6 f5 37.Ne6 Be”.
This looks like a chess game, though it is not: toward the end it veers into move-like notations that in fact don’t represent legal moves. But clearly much more than superficial pattern extension is going on. GPT-3 produced something that understands chess notation, has a model of the game, tracks state, and has learned to make good moves. After a few moves it deviates from any actual game I could find evidence of online, but it continues to make objectively excellent moves (for awhile). GPT-3 has generated something that by any standard is simulating chess gameplay (though I still can’t relate to calling GPT-3 itself a simulator here). This isn’t though a simulator in the sense that eg Stockfish is a simulator—Stockfish would never make an illegal move like GPT-3′s creation did. It does seem quite apt to me to speak of GPT-3′s production as speculative simulation, bearing in mind that there’s nothing to say that one day its speculations might not lead to gameplay that exceeds SOTA, human or machine, just as Einstein’s thought experiments speculated into existence a better physics. Similar things could be said about its productions of types other than simulator: pattern extensions, agents, oracles, and so on, in all of which cases we must account for the fact that its intelligence happily produces examples ranging from silly to sublime depending on how we prompt it...