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Emergent Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models
Taylor Webb, Keith J. Holyoak, Hongjing Lu, arXiv, 2023/01/04

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What's really interesting to me about GPT-3 and other large language models (LLM) is that they are not programmed with rules or categories, but instead create them out of the data they're given. As this paper (27 page PDF) argues, "GPT-3 appears to display an emergent ability to reason by analogy, matching or surpassing human performance across a wide range of problem types." The authors continue, "The deep question that now arises is how GPT-3 achieves the analogical capacity that is often considered the core of human intelligence." Now many of the criticisms of LLM point to errors in these pattern recognition capabilities. They sometimes get basic facts wrong, and don't seem to (yet) understand what types of things some things are. But as the authors write, "regardless of the extent to which GPT-3 employs human-like mechanisms to perform analogical reasoning, we can be certain that it did not acquire these mechanisms in a human-like manner." We don't actually teach an LLM the way we would, say, a child. But suppose we did...

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Teachers v ChatGPT: Schools face new challenge in fight against plagiarism
Osmond Chia, The Straits Times, 2023/01/04

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The first paragraph of this news article is the most relevant: "Teachers in Singapore say they will likely have to move from assignments requiring regurgitation to those that require greater critical thinking, to stay ahead in the fight against plagiarism." (Great lede; now that's some solid news writing). Via Sun Sun Lim. Related: Tony Hirst discusses chatGPT on URLs and citations.

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Manhattanville College's Administration Tries to Save School... by Removing its Heart
Bob Frank, Higher Education Inquirer, 2023/01/04

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If you were trying to save a small liberal arts university, where would you spend your money? On the best faculty you can get? Or this: "Compared to nearby, cheaper colleges, Manhattanville is small, with old dormitories, poor student activities, and not much to do during the weekends." To answer the question, you have to really ask what the value proposition of the institution is. Though it's common to think it's the faculty, it turns out (as proven in hundreds of other universities elsewhere) that lower paid staff can do the job of teaching nearly as well (and sometimes better). And anyways, these days, students can get the content almost anywhere. But what students are buying is the environment, the networking, the social life. You can't do that in an old run-down institution. Via Dan Shaulis.

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Followgraph for Mastodon
Gabi Purcaru, Followgraph, 2023/01/04

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This is a great little service that will find people you might want to follow. It works like this: "Followgraph looks up all the people you follow on Mastodon, and then the people they follow. Then it sorts them by the number of mutuals, or otherwise by how popular those accounts are. It then shows the list with Mastodon links to follow them." I added about 16 new follows after using it; the wealth isn't in the top few listings but in the long tail of diverse and interesting people followed by only a few of your followers. Via Laura Hilliger. Here's the code so you can make your own.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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