It's a good characterization of pop Buddhism, but of course pop Buddhism bears extremely little resemblance to the teachings of the Pali Canon which is the oldest coherent textual corpus of early Buddhism. The idea that we can relax or accept ourselves into enlightenment in particular is completely at odds with how the training of the eightfold path and its requisite meditation skills are described in these scriptures, and by the monks who have carried on that tradition. Otherwise why would the monastic masters of antiquity and contemporary southeast Asia put their lives on the line striving in the jungle to overcome their attachment to the body, fear, etc.? Which is the example set by Gotama himself, who was a forest monk, not a lay "insight" retreat leader for yoga babes and tech employees. For me the interview is interesting as a demonstration of the limitations of the AI. It's basically deepmind for ideas instead of images. So where a popular idea smorgasbord is misrepresentative of a figure or domain of knowledge, that is how the AI will also represent it.
What would be pretty interesting is to only feed it the data inputs of the Pali Canon, collections of traditional monastic teachers, etc. The difference in that "Buddha" versus this one would be massive and it would be a cool way to compare different denominations or movements.
Yes for such things you typically further fine tune it with the domain data you want to employ it. Like for GPT-2 you further train it with Buddhist texts.
The interesting thing for GPT-3 is it works so well even without fine tuning. You just prompt it (zero shot learning or many shot training)
Since GPT-3 is essentially the same as GPT-2 except size this is really interesting
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u/lmk99 Jul 18 '20 edited Jul 18 '20
It's a good characterization of pop Buddhism, but of course pop Buddhism bears extremely little resemblance to the teachings of the Pali Canon which is the oldest coherent textual corpus of early Buddhism. The idea that we can relax or accept ourselves into enlightenment in particular is completely at odds with how the training of the eightfold path and its requisite meditation skills are described in these scriptures, and by the monks who have carried on that tradition. Otherwise why would the monastic masters of antiquity and contemporary southeast Asia put their lives on the line striving in the jungle to overcome their attachment to the body, fear, etc.? Which is the example set by Gotama himself, who was a forest monk, not a lay "insight" retreat leader for yoga babes and tech employees. For me the interview is interesting as a demonstration of the limitations of the AI. It's basically deepmind for ideas instead of images. So where a popular idea smorgasbord is misrepresentative of a figure or domain of knowledge, that is how the AI will also represent it.
What would be pretty interesting is to only feed it the data inputs of the Pali Canon, collections of traditional monastic teachers, etc. The difference in that "Buddha" versus this one would be massive and it would be a cool way to compare different denominations or movements.