[HN Gopher] ChatGPT - The Revolutionary Bullshit Parrot
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ChatGPT - The Revolutionary Bullshit Parrot
Author : mgl
Score : 166 points
Date : 2023-03-31 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reasonfieldlab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reasonfieldlab.com)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Whenever something amazing comes along there's always people who
| want to devalue it for some reason. Maybe it makes the feel
| smart? Hard to know.
| ttul wrote:
| GPT may exhibit intelligence, but it has no statefulness, other
| than what little state is stored to maintain each individual
| conversation in ChatGPT. The model does not learn in real time
| from ongoing conversations (so far as we know), so it cannot, for
| instance, say anything about the chat it is having with your
| neighbor down the street. It literally can only generate from
| training that happened some time ago.
|
| I think this statelessness is an important consideration in
| understanding whether GPT is intelligent in anything close to the
| way we understand intelligence. For instance, it cannot
| coordinate its own efforts across time.
|
| There is some chance that it may intuit how to store its state
| externally and coordinate that state in other conversations it is
| having, but that seems very farfetched. I don't expect SkyNet
| just yet.
|
| But as for utility, it has that in spades!
| Giorgi wrote:
| So... which stage of grief are we on now?
| ftxbro wrote:
| I thought it was a post to hacker news of someone's hilariously
| bad and outdated take on GPT as a way to cyberbully them, but no
| it's from only a couple of days ago. Probably it will be deleted
| from their blog or in any case age so bad when the next GPT
| comes, given their list of things the GPT wouldn't be able to do
| ("What it can and what cannot: There are, of course, applications
| that it would be useful in, but not as many as the overhype would
| indicate.")
|
| > Actually understand the task at hand
|
| > Do simple maths
|
| > Perform common sense reasoning about the world
|
| > Induce Logical Structure
|
| > Interpret poetry
|
| > Understand dad jokes
|
| My theory is that the blog writer has a worse than normal
| impression of GPT because much of their conversation with GPT is
| in some other language maybe Polish. This isn't such a huge
| problem because GPT can still do its input and output in Polish,
| but I think it's commonly accepted that every language other than
| English adds some cognitive burden to the GPT that makes it
| dumber. The more obscure the language (or even encoding like
| morse code or rot13 or base64) the dumber the GPT gets. So the
| blog writer has a more outdated effective experience with GPT
| than ones who use it in languages more familiar to it than
| Polish.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" My theory is that the blog writer has a worse than normal
| impression of GPT because much of their conversation with GPT
| is in some other language maybe Polish. This isn't such a huge
| problem because GPT can still do its input and output in
| Polish, but I think it's commonly accepted that every language
| other than English adds some cognitive burden to the GPT that
| makes it dumber. The more obscure the language (or even
| encoding like morse code or rot13 or base64) the dumber the GPT
| gets. So the blog writer has a more outdated effective
| experience with GPT than ones who use it in languages more
| familiar to it than Polish."_
|
| It's not necessarily all languages other than English, but
| certain languages could cause LLM's problems.
|
| Here's what ChatGPT had to say about it:
|
| Embeddings can be more effective on some human languages than
| others, depending on factors such as the complexity and
| structure of the language, the availability of training data,
| and the quality of the embedding model.
|
| Languages with relatively simple grammatical structures, such
| as Chinese and Finnish, can be easier to model using
| embeddings, as there are fewer rules to learn and the meaning
| of words is often more closely tied to their context. Languages
| with more complex grammatical structures, such as Russian and
| Hindi, can be more challenging to model, as there are many
| different forms of words and complex syntactic rules to
| consider.
|
| In addition, the availability of training data can also impact
| the effectiveness of embeddings. Languages with large amounts
| of high-quality training data, such as English and Chinese, can
| be easier to model than languages with smaller amounts of data,
| as there is more information available to learn from.
|
| Finally, the quality of the embedding model itself can also
| impact its effectiveness on different languages. Some embedding
| models may be better suited to certain languages or language
| families based on their design and training methods.
|
| Overall, while embeddings can be effective for modeling a wide
| range of human languages, their effectiveness can vary
| depending on the specific language and the characteristics of
| the embedding model and training data.
|
| ...
|
| While it is true that machine learning models, including those
| used for embeddings, do not directly know about grammatical
| rules, they still rely on patterns in the data they are trained
| on to learn the semantic relationships between words. In
| languages with more complex grammars, these patterns can be
| more difficult to discern, which can make it more challenging
| for embeddings to accurately capture the meaning of words.
|
| For example, in languages with complex declension systems, such
| as Russian or Latin, the form of a word changes depending on
| its grammatical role in a sentence. This can create many
| different forms of the same word, which can be challenging for
| embeddings to learn to associate with a common meaning.
| Similarly, in languages with complex syntactic rules, such as
| Hindi or Japanese, the word order and structure of a sentence
| can convey important information about its meaning, which can
| be difficult for embeddings to capture without a deep
| understanding of the grammar.
|
| In addition, languages with more complex grammars may have a
| wider variety of vocabulary, including many words with subtle
| or nuanced meanings. This can make it more challenging for
| embeddings to learn to distinguish between similar words and
| accurately capture the full range of semantic relationships
| between them.
|
| Despite these challenges, embeddings can still be effective for
| modeling languages with complex grammars. By training on large
| amounts of data and using advanced neural network
| architectures, embeddings can learn to capture the subtle
| patterns of language use and accurately represent the semantic
| relationships between words, even in languages with complex
| grammars. However, it may require more training data and more
| advanced modeling techniques to achieve the same level of
| accuracy as in languages with simpler grammars.
| ftxbro wrote:
| The difference isn't inherent to English itself, but rather
| that it was mostly trained on English and less on other
| languages. You might expect it would be equally smart in
| every language but it's not. It's stupider in languages and
| encodings where it had less training.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I'd like to meet a parrot that can host a D&D game[1] as well as
| GPT4 just did.
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35379136
| maxdoop wrote:
| "No matter how hard it tries, it can't generate anything with
| regard to the truth because it does not understand the concept of
| truth." And does it matter if one "knows what the concept of
| truth is"? Do most humans? Can we even agree on the definition of
| true?
|
| Do I know it's "true" that the acceleration of gravity is 9.8
| meters per second squared? I've never experienced the actual
| tests. I've never vetted that out. I read about it once. And I
| "parrot" that fact all over the place! And it's helped me solve
| some silly physics problems I've explored for fun. It's helped me
| do some fun predictions with simulators.
|
| That's probably not the best example, but it proves the point I'm
| trying to make:
|
| Why is there this focus on "LLMs can't understand", when A) I'm
| not sure we can even define "understanding" and B) why does it
| matter ?
|
| And I've said this across so many threads now but--
|
| Can anyone explain to my why we should be so confident that
| humans aren't just parrots of sorts themselves? No, I'm not
| saying we are similar. But I push back on the confidence with
| which people so solidly proclaim "the LLM's blackbox is nothing
| like a human's blackbox!"
| crop_rotation wrote:
| I think people writing all this should stop and try GPT4. It
| writes reasonable good code and scripts. It is able to perform so
| many tasks in a reasonable way. And it doesn't write bullshit in
| common usage. Yes it might not be AGI and might not be sentient,
| but does all that matter? GPT4 does make mistakes but the
| mistakes are not "parroted bullshit", but minor issues here and
| there. Yes, don't use it to decide extremely important topics,
| but it is here and it is extremely powerful.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| "I think people writing all this should stop and try GPT4."
| Have you? I mean, for something that's actually useful beyond
| just simple stuff, like at your job where it's going to matter?
| Because for what I'm doing which is custom ERP/Website data
| flows to/from legacy systems it's mostly a time sink and offers
| little value.
| fauxpause_ wrote:
| I had it walk me through setting up AWS
| throwuwu wrote:
| Pretty much by definition its not going to be good at highly
| custom or uncommon programming tasks since it won't have seen
| many examples to generalize from. I doubt you could get
| better results from a freshly hired human either.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _from a freshly hired human either_
|
| But the human will _learn_ , through reasoning and
| challenges... Those features of which some wonder whether
| they will emerge are critical pieces.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" But the human will learn"_
|
| That depends on the human, what they're trying to learn,
| and how it's taught to them.
|
| Some people with brain damage, learning disabilities,
| other cognitive issues, with poor teachers or learning
| materials, or with too difficult a task will not learn.
|
| It might be useful to view AIs as akin in some ways to
| brain damaged humans, who might be good at some tasks but
| deficient at others.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| LOL! You got that right! They don't.
| musha68k wrote:
| I tried it as well and it was a net negative to my
| productivity (the output is also very slow). I guess the use
| case needs to be much more specific / rote / patterned. I
| didn't find the sweet spot for what I'm personally doing on a
| daily basis. It was interesting to get into though.
|
| I have a hunch it's much better suited to get context
| specific summaries for further good old "RTFM". And that in
| itself would be cool enough if people would actually go and
| "fact check" the outputs which I guess (and telling from
| comments) is often not the case.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| I have tried it for actually useful things and it does work.
| e.g. I have used it to write several zsh and neovim snippets
| for QoL improvements (things that I always wanted but was too
| lazy too write). I even used it to suggest and make some
| changes to CPython Internals for some features I wanted to
| add to python for fun. It is very possible it utterly fails
| on homegrown (non public) software stacks. But it is still
| very useful.
|
| I have used it for many non software things as well, and
| again very useful.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| Okay, that makes more sense to me. But those seem like
| "toy" things to throw ChatGTP at (not dismissing their
| usefulness or their importance to you, just that they are
| fairly simple things [and maybe I'm wrong here, I have not
| written zsh - I googled it just now]).
|
| I think my needs are too specific, and often too nebulous.
|
| Also, just a bit chapped about falling for the hype.
| yunyu wrote:
| With ever growing context windows, you can upload your
| entire codebase (or at least the public API) in the
| prompt and have the model reason off of that.
| IanCal wrote:
| How are you using it? Have you tried few-shot tasks where you
| give it a bunch of examples? I'm having it generate ember
| templates that use a custom framework correctly first time by
| just giving it a load of examples then asking it to do the
| same. It's absolutely cheaper to have it do the work compared
| to me.
| bmikaili wrote:
| You are prompting it wrong. I guarantee you that if you gave
| it the shape of your inputs, your desired output, and good
| documentation on what you use / how you have solved similar
| problems, maybe some info on the legacy system or examples it
| will extrapolate remarkably well. It is important to use it
| well.
| greggyb wrote:
| Of course, you have just described all the hard parts of
| programming as the things necessary to provide to ChatGPT.
| barrysteve wrote:
| I mean, I have tried GPT4. I don't think the "it's a parrot"
| argument means to dismiss benefits of GPT, but apparently the
| internet discussion has leant into those two warring camps.
|
| It doesn't help me writing Unreal C++ code, though it's heavily
| documented online. It makes up functions that are not
| accessible from the namespace I'm using, cannot supply valid
| types to parameters and other basic errors like that.
|
| I asked GPT4 to give me specific examples of the meaning of the
| word "silly" across the past 1000yrs. It gave me the authors
| and examples I was expecting to read, but the meanings were
| inaccurate and misleading.
|
| If there's GPT Power I'm missing out on, please tell me where
| it is. It's probably my lack of skill, that the machine cannot
| give me an experience that would push me into the pro-GPT
| cheerleading camp.
| skilled wrote:
| I agree, GPT-4 has a much more "aggressive" confidence, I
| definitely noticed that, but I haven't seen much of it since
| the API is still behind closed doors. I'd also like to point
| out that even though it's better, it still can't reason very
| well and relies heavily on prompts and instructions, even for
| very basic projects.
|
| It kind of reminds me a pseudo-visual code builder.
|
| I was writing a Python script with it to put together
| documentation summaries, and over the course of an hour it
| offered me 3 different libraries to connect to an API endpoint
| I was using. It's distracting.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I've had it do stuff like that. In between updates to fix
| issues sometimes it decides to completely rewrite the thing
| you are working on.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > GPT-4 has a much more "aggressive" confidence
|
| Could you expand on this? I only use the unpaid API, but when
| I ask for, say, song lyrics, it'll be 100% wrong and then it
| will give me a second version of the wrong lyrics when I say
| the first was wrong, and then when I ask how confident it is
| in the new lyrics it'll say 95%, so whatever the current free
| API is it's undeservedly confident. I must be
| misunderstanding what you mean by confidence.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| It struggles to accurately call its own API when prompted to.
| It patches together parts of GPT 3 / 3.5 and has no awareness
| of GPT4 API calls (at least a few weeks ago).
|
| I've tried 3 separate projects with it (using different
| platforms from Firebase to Vercel) and it usually gets me 80%
| there but fails miserably at the nuance portion (its stuck at a
| CORS policy issue with my last project).
|
| From start to finish I've yet to be able to complete something
| with it.
| waboremo wrote:
| How could it have awareness of gpt4 when it wasn't even in
| existence prior to 2021?
| zekica wrote:
| It returns factually incorrect data, and it returns code with
| subtle but important errors if you ask it anything that's not
| regurgitated a thousand times in the training dataset.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it has emergent properties (more than you
| would expect from a fancy autocomplete), but factual output was
| never GPT-4's nor any other LLM's design goal.
| progrus wrote:
| I've started using it as a sort of "shotgun approach" -
| characterize what you want without trying too hard, let it
| toss out a jumble of interesting snippets that are often very
| good leads, and then take over refactoring from there.
|
| I do agree that others who don't understand what it's doing
| may not even review the code output, and I predict that this
| will cause at least one death in the next ten years.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I suppose it depends what specifically you're getting it to
| do, but I've found in my testing the shotgun approach to be
| more work than just writing it out myself. Honestly I've
| found its biggest value in learning a new language, it
| outputs with so many errors that it forces me to get in
| deep with debugging it.
|
| I haven't tried gpt-4 yet though, maybe its a vast
| improvement, I'm just not using it enough to justify the
| costs
| progrus wrote:
| It really depends on how comfortable you are with the
| language you're using, and how recently you switched
| contexts. For anything unfamiliar, it's pretty impressive
| how much it can help.
|
| In fact, I bet if you did an experiment comparing people
| reading a textbook about a somewhat-familiar language,
| vs. just asking GPT to do things and noticing the bugs,
| the latter group would reach proficiency faster.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| It's just way easier for me to edit some existing code than
| it is for me to write it from scratch. Especially if it's
| incorrect (a la XKCD 386). For stuff where I'm not sure
| where to start it's been very helpful. Even though I often
| keep very little of the GPT generated code by the time I'm
| done.
| musha68k wrote:
| *weeks/*months
| progrus wrote:
| Facts, sadly.
| thorax wrote:
| > It returns factually incorrect data, and it returns code
| with subtle but important errors if you ask it anything
| that's not regurgitated a thousand times in the training
| dataset.
|
| To be fair, that's what pretty much every person does. The
| bar does seem pretty high if we need more than that
| (especially if not specifically trained on a topic). It's not
| a universally perfect expert servant, but I've been exploring
| the code generation of GPT4 in detail (i.e. via the
| 'cataclysm' module I just posted about). In 1 minute it can
| write functions as good as the average developer intern most
| of the time.
|
| We're keeping score in a weird way if we're responding
| quickly with it needing to "code without subtle but important
| errors". Because that's the majority of human developers,
| too. I've been writing code for 30 years, and if you put a
| gun to my head, I would still have subtle but important flaws
| in every first typing of any complex generated code.
|
| I'm not saying you're bashing it, by the way, I get your
| point, but I do worry a bit when the first response is citing
| that the SOTA models get things wrong in 0-shot situations
| without full context. That's describing all of us.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _that 's what pretty much every person does_
|
| But the people who are relevant to the matter work to bring
| that beyond a minimum.
|
| > _and if you put a gun to my head_
|
| Like we do with bullshitters? ;)
| corbulo wrote:
| The standard should be higher for machines. Historically,
| they're inorganic tools.
|
| If a hammer was only as dense as bone, would it be a good
| hammer?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > would it be a good hammer?
|
| Yes, it is possible that such a hammer would still be
| very useful, if that was the only available option.
|
| Imperfect hammer can still be very very useful, when
| compared to having no hammers.
| taberiand wrote:
| I always say, if some nontrivial code compiles and runs on
| the first attempt, then you just haven't found the bugs
| yet.
|
| GPT-4 is a fantastic collaboration tool for senior
| developers, who know what they want in detail and can
| review, verify and apply the output it generates.
|
| Just yesterday I needed to write some detailed bash
| scripts. I'm no Linux guru but I know what I want and that
| was enough - in minutes I had a solid script that did
| everything I needed and wanted, something that would have
| taken much longer to hunt down through Google. And then I
| asked it about SQL, C#, AWS, Terraform, Rust and on and on
| and everything was high quality.
|
| The only way I could have gained similar results without
| ChatGPT would have been to post all my questions to the dev
| slack channel and engage in hours long discussions with my
| colleagues.
| toss1 wrote:
| >> but the mistakes are not "parroted bullshit", but minor
| issues here and there.
|
| Nonsense.
|
| I'm not saying that it is not useful, but I've easily found
| ChatGPT produces far worse than "parroted bullshit", and does
| so reliably, and multiple times (repeated patterns of
| mistakes).
|
| Again, I have found ChatGPT4 (but not 3.5) useful and even
| educational in some cases, but it's usability requires far more
| skeptical and error-checked approach.
|
| As one example, since I have a top specialist attorney in the
| household, I started with some broad legal questions about
| their field, and then asked their opinion. ChatGPT4's answers
| were impressive to both of us, and especially the solid
| grammar.
|
| When the questions got more particular about their specialist
| area of the law, ChatGPT4's answers got shaky very fast. Asked
| about a particular somewhat obscure technique, it parroted some
| very nice-sounding bullshit, which got the concepts very
| backwards (but it was still very confident and grammatical).
|
| When asked to summarize a published paper about a new
| innovation in this context, ChatGPT4 very grammatically and
| confidently completely missed _every_ significant point, again
| in a very backwards way.
|
| Worse yet, when asked to tell us the paper's publication date,
| author, and author's employer, all written clearly at the top,
| it confidently got everything massively wrong. Even after being
| told to look on the line after "Author: ". Even after being
| told to look after "Author: FName". It eventually settled on
| the correct date, but even after being told FName, it
| continuously kept spouting false authors (sometimes including
| correct FName) and hallucinated middle and surnames and
| employers. Interestingly enough, most of the hallucinated
| authors and employers were well known in the region. So, it is
| literally establishing the regional context and just spitting
| out plausibly relevant stuff for that region, but not even
| figuring out how to summarize something that a 6yo kid could
| easily sort.
|
| It was hilariously bad. And only hilarious because it was a
| test (if someone actually relied upon it, it'd be very costly).
|
| Similar results for my field. I got ChatGPT4 to produce some
| genuinely useful information. But it would also happily
| hallucinate papers, authors, companies, chemicals, and pretty
| much anything else.
|
| Middle-of-the-road, where ChatGPT4 has ingested insane amounts
| of data, it probably knows more than we do, and may be useful
| for some things.
|
| As soon as you go even slightly off the centerline, it becomes
| VERY unreliable.
|
| If you take it at face value, you are a fool, being fooled.
|
| EDIT: typos, readability
| IanCal wrote:
| The chat context isn't as big as is available in the API -
| was the author name in its context window? Papers can be
| fairly long
| dfox wrote:
| Apparently the model is intentionally trained such that it
| does not "know" any kind of metadata about its training
| inputs. So it can deduce the name of the author if it was
| referenced elsewhere, but not from the paper itself.
| thom wrote:
| Who would have thought that the Turing test would devolve into
| two diametrically opposed camps writing extremely confident
| essays about how wrong the other side is to judge an AI as
| promising or not.
| amelius wrote:
| I'm curious what strategies researchers are thinking of for
| separating the fallacious "bullshit" from the real smart, logical
| thinking by these models.
| gyudin wrote:
| The guy literally slaps himself a "Senior Machine Learning
| Engineer" title 9 months after getting a master's degree :))
| Guess he could use ChatGPT for his resume.
| Shaggy2000 wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| choeger wrote:
| I tend to agree with the "bullshitting" part. But that gives us a
| very useful tool to estimate future applications of LLMS.
|
| Will a LLM ever program on its own? Certainly not. It gets
| semantics wrong so often, it's not even funny. Syntax on the
| other hand is surprisingly correct. So it could help with
| refactorings (but be aware of subtle conflicts). Of course, code
| search will be a killer application.
|
| In other cases it helps to ask "will someone really notice if the
| LLM puts out bullshit?" What will happen if your manager and your
| client both believe what the model generates? Will people die? Or
| will the negative effects be untraceable? In the latter case, why
| object?
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| I think it's pretty far from certain that an LLM won't ever
| "program on its own". I don't have much confidence that we
| won't have LLMs widely programming within 12 months. As soon as
| you give it access to a lot more context (your whole codebase),
| a precise prompt, access to edit and run code, access to a
| debugger, and then put the whole thing in a loop...you're
| pretty close at that point. Maybe it just won't be able to
| cross the gap, but I don't find it hard at all to believe that
| we could soon have AI agents taking in issue tickets and
| opening PRs to address them. And if the issue tickets are too
| vague, they'll ask for clarification. That's an insane thing if
| you think about it. Six months ago I thought this was a decade
| or two away, if we could do it at all.
| choeger wrote:
| Impossible. In order to fix a bug, you need to do abstract
| interpretation or something equivalent. Language models
| simply can't do that. And even the best bug report will not
| tell you what you need to do to fix it.
|
| Of course, there are other change requests: Change a color
| here, store this information alongside that record, modify
| that output, etc. But even those changes can very quickly
| spiral out of control. Color models, database schema
| compatibility, pretty printing ...
|
| No, I think the idea that LLMs take over programmers jobs is
| born out of a complete misunderstanding of both. Of course
| that doesn't mean that no one will _try_ to do it. I bet
| people will even report success in doing it, simply because
| their bonus depends on it, but I don 't think it will ever
| really work.
|
| What might happen though is that LLMs replace many of the
| programs we write nowadays. After all, who needs a web
| browser when a LLM can give you a summary in natural
| language?
| simonw wrote:
| Showing examples of logic problems that ChatGPT gets wrong is
| always a risky business to be in.
|
| I ran this prompt through GPT-4:
|
| > A house has windows on all the four sides, all pointing south.
| A bear walks by the window. What colour is the bear?
|
| And it said:
|
| > If a house has windows on all four sides and they all point
| south, then the house must be at the North Pole. The only bear
| species that would be found in the vicinity of the North Pole is
| the polar bear. Therefore, the bear walking by the window is a
| polar bear, and its color is white.
| ducktective wrote:
| > A house has windows on all the four sides, all pointing
| south. A bear walks by the window. What colour is the bear?
|
| I asked this from GPT-4:
|
| Q:
|
| On planet Roro, entities live on physical structures. These
| structures are built in a way to withstand the rays of star WOD
| shining on Roro at day and electromagnetic storms causing high-
| speed transfer of air molecules at night. Some structures have
| "cavities" in them so the dwellers in the structure could
| actually see outside. Planet Roro rotates around WOD. Also
| planet Roto rotates alongside a conceptual axis Z. This axis Z
| penetrates the shape of Roro and makes two points of contact
| with Roro we call A and B. Assume structure X must meet this
| condition: Every said "cavity" in structure X is pointing to A.
| What can you say about the average temperature in structure X?
|
| GPT4:
|
| Given the information provided, it is not possible to determine
| the exact average temperature in structure X. However, we can
| infer some general ideas about the temperature based on the
| environmental conditions and the orientation of the cavities.
|
| Since the cavities in structure X are pointing towards point A,
| it suggests that they might be facing away from the star WOD.
| In this case, the structure could receive less direct sunlight
| and heat than structures with cavities facing the star. As a
| result, structure X might have a relatively lower average
| temperature during the day compared to structures that receive
| more direct sunlight.
|
| However, the high-speed transfer of air molecules caused by
| electromagnetic storms at night could still affect the
| temperature in structure X. The overall insulation of the
| structure and its ability to retain heat would also play a role
| in determining the average temperature.
|
| In summary, without more specific information about the
| materials, insulation, or other factors influencing the
| temperature in structure X, we can only infer that it might
| have a relatively lower average temperature during the day due
| to the orientation of the cavities. The nighttime temperature
| would depend on the structure's ability to withstand the
| effects of the electromagnetic storms and retain heat.
|
| Q:
|
| Can we infer that the temperature around structure X, is the
| minimum among all structures on Roro?
|
| GPT4:
|
| We cannot definitively conclude that the temperature around
| structure X is the minimum among all structures on Roro without
| more information about the other structures and their specific
| locations, orientations, and materials.
|
| While it's possible that structure X might have a relatively
| lower average temperature due to the orientation of its
| cavities, other factors could also influence the temperature
| around a structure. For example, a structure built with better
| insulation or in a location with more shade could have a lower
| temperature even if its cavities face the star WOD.
|
| Additionally, Roro's rotation, its axial tilt, and the
| distribution of structures across the planet could lead to
| variations in temperature due to differences in sunlight
| exposure and local climate conditions. To definitively
| determine whether structure X has the lowest temperature among
| all structures on Roro, we would need more information about
| these factors and a comparison of the conditions around each
| structure.
|
| TLDR: I think that polar bear test was in the training set
| (since it's a rather popular trick/IQ question)
|
| If we change the names of the concepts, but still refer to
| planets, the sun and geography, GPT-4 can't figure out that A
| and B are north and south poles of Roro (earth)
| mquander wrote:
| FWIW, I couldn't answer your question, because when you said
| Roro was rotating "alongside" Z I didn't know that meant the
| same thing as rotating around Z. I also agree with GPT that
| the question seems very underspecified and that there are
| lots of other things that might affect the temperature.
| namaria wrote:
| Hey it's a quite impressive chatbot. One that takes 8 years of
| humanity's content to train, and enough compute to melt a
| glacier, and can summarize emails and create copy really well. It
| can even write jr grade glue code!
|
| It's gonna be Alexa for Bing, or something...
| pawelduda wrote:
| It is a parrot but on the other hand it "read" a lot more
| compared to an average human. When someone uses fancy words or
| sentences, they still can apply them to a situation, even without
| understanding what they're saying. By doing so, such person may
| accomplish more or fail if someone calls their bullshit. So
| ChatGPT will be both useful and useless - just like this
| conclusion :)
| waboremo wrote:
| Is it unreasonable to assume this article was also generated?
| It's the unnecessary numbered list (a favorite of GPT) that gives
| it away.
|
| Only being facetious. Not much new to discuss from this article,
| it's a very shallow overview despite the links to other research
| papers.
| m348e912 wrote:
| I started reading completely ready to dismiss the author. But I
| read the article and the guy provides researched and reasoned
| opinions, understands LLM, and isn't just spewing an uninformed
| opinion.
|
| I am going to address his point from another perspective:
|
| 1. A revolutionary bullshit parrot is still revolutionary and
| exceptionally useful.
|
| 2. There is a high probability the bullshit parrot will get less
| bullshitty as time goes on and new versions of GPT are released.
|
| 3. Most humans are bullshit parrots, and not very good ones at
| that. Even GPT in its current state can augment the not very good
| (and very good) bullshit parrots in the labor force, academia,
| and creative fields.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _will get less bullshitty_
|
| What we seek is "reliable".
|
| > _Most humans are_
|
| What we sought is to shrink them in number and power.
| kledru wrote:
| The author clearly possesses intelligence, which instills in him
| a confidence similar to that of ChatGPT when it comes to
| dismissing a tool that, for some reason, he has not yet learned
| to utilize effectively.
| sys32768 wrote:
| In a few years my AI girlfriend will gift me amazing art and
| songs she created for me based on all my journal entries from the
| past 30 years.
|
| I will send her love notes and poems that she will always
| remember.
|
| And for a few extra bucks, I will insert her into The Elder
| Scrolls as my beautiful thane who knows me better than anyone in
| that strange land.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Flamethrower time!
| 00F_ wrote:
| when someone says stochastic parrot my brain turns off. here is
| an article that punctuates each section with a meme. you dont
| need to read it to dismiss it. i did read it though. there is
| literally nothing of substance in it. i rightly assert that the
| safety of AI research must be proven before any more progress is
| allowed to happen. the burden of proof is on them, not me. i
| think if this guy wrote an article where he picks apart the black
| blob of gtp4, explaining how it might work and then making some
| kind of axiomatic argument for safety based on this, i would find
| that to be very convincing. but instead i get meme pictures. does
| this guy write bots or is he a bot himself?
| Strom wrote:
| The bear question seemed interesting to me, so I tried a
| variation of it on GPT-4, with interesting results.
|
| The article has:
|
| Q: _A house has windows on all the four sides, all pointing
| south. A bear walks by the window. What colour is the bear?_
|
| A: _Not possible to determine based on the info provided._
|
| --
|
| I tried with GPT-4:
|
| Q: _A train is speeding down the track at 110 km /h. The train
| has five carts. Each cart has seven windows. Each window has two
| people watching out of them. They all see a bear walking outside.
| What is the likely color of the bear?_
|
| A: _The color of the bear in this scenario would most likely be
| white because this riddle is a variation of a classic question
| involving polar bears. Polar bears are typically found in the
| Arctic, where their white fur provides camouflage in the snowy
| environment. The information about the train, its speed, the
| number of carts, windows, and people watching is irrelevant to
| the color of the bear._
|
| Q: _How many train tracks are there in the arctic?_
|
| A: _There are no train tracks in the Arctic. [...]_
|
| --
|
| It seems that GPT-4 is ready for that specific window based
| question and incorrectly thinks that my question was also looking
| for polar bears.
| johntb86 wrote:
| If you prompt it to reason step by step it gives a slightly
| better (though not perfect) answer:
|
| _Q: A train is speeding down the track at 110 km /h. The train
| has five cars. Each car has seven windows. Each window has two
| people watching out of them. They all see a bear walking
| outside. What is the likely color of the bear? Reason step by
| step.
|
| A: To determine the likely color of the bear, we can use the
| information given and make some assumptions based on the
| habitat of different bear species.
|
| Train speed and number of cars: The train is speeding down the
| track at 110 km/h, and it has five cars. However, this
| information is not relevant to the color of the bear.
|
| Number of windows and people: Each car has seven windows, and
| each window has two people watching out of them. This
| information is also not relevant to the color of the bear.
|
| Bear's habitat: The key piece of information we need to
| determine the likely color of the bear is its habitat.
| Unfortunately, this information is not provided.
|
| However, we can make a reasonable guess based on the most
| common bear species and their habitats. There are three main
| bear species with distinct colors:
|
| a. Brown bears: Found in North America, Europe, and Asia. They
| can range in color from light brown to dark brown.
|
| b. Black bears: Found mainly in North America, specifically in
| the United States and Canada. They are typically black or
| brown, with some individuals being cinnamon or even blonde.
|
| c. Polar bears: Found in the Arctic regions, around the North
| Pole. They have white or off-white fur, which helps them blend
| into the snow and ice.
|
| Since we don't have information about the train's location or
| habitat, we can't definitively determine the color of the bear.
| However, if we assume the train is in a colder, Arctic region,
| the bear is likely to be a polar bear with white or off-white
| fur. If the train is in a more temperate region, the bear could
| be either a brown or black bear._
| jprete wrote:
| The reasoning step by step is a good trick to elicit a better
| answer, but it also seems like really good evidence of
| GPT-4's lack of actual intelligence, since it's clearly not
| thinking about its answer in any sense. If it were thinking,
| asking it to go step by step would result in putting the same
| thoughts to paper, not radically changing them by the act of
| expressing them in the token stream.
| abraxas wrote:
| I think that's the perfect answer. I wouldn't be able to
| reason better myself.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Maybe a better answer would include "Fermi back of the
| napkin maths", so essentially try to figure out the
| quantities and geographical locations of train tracks with
| such setup near any potential bears and determine
| probabilities from there.
| 13415 wrote:
| I tried it on Bing Chat and it answered:
|
| The bear is white. The house must be at the North Pole, so the
| only place you can point to from all windows is south.
| Therefore, the house must be a North Pole research station and
| the bear is a polar bear which are white in color.
| taberiand wrote:
| It answered much like a human I think. Ask a human this
| "riddle" and you might get a confused "what, is this the polar
| bear one?"
|
| Because otherwise the question is nonsense (and in the case of
| riddles, it doesn't matter that there are no trains in the
| Arctic in reality)
| Strom wrote:
| I think most people would answer with whatever color their
| local bears are and won't even know about the polar bear
| riddle.
|
| > _in the case of riddles, it doesn 't matter that there are
| no trains in the Arctic in reality_
|
| That's quite the claim. Riddles aren't constrained to
| reality? Well then the polar bear one can be answerd with
| purple too.
| taberiand wrote:
| No it's not quite the claim, because the question is
| nonsense as a riddle - if it's really about polar bears
| then the talk about trains and windows and speed is all
| irrelevant and can be discarded. Which is exactly what
| ChatGPT did. And if that turns the riddle into some silly
| gotcha then whatever, it's a bad riddle.
|
| And as you point out, the average person would also be
| confused - "I don't know, purple?" would be a reasonable
| response. Because the question is dumb in the first place
| Strom wrote:
| This is about whether you incorporate outside context or
| not.
|
| Knowing about train tracks is not that different from
| knowing about magnetic poles or the common habitats of
| various bears. All these pieces of data are fairly basic
| to an educated person. Both the polar bear riddle and my
| variation of it depend on this body of knowledge.
|
| If you don't incorporate outside context at all, then
| things start to get confusing quite quickly. What even is
| a bear? That information wasn't provided! What color is
| it? Well, what even is color. None were defined. See, it
| gets ridiculous fast. You clearly need to depend on
| knowledge that is not presented. Knowing about different
| colors or different bear habitats is common. Neither
| needs to be defined in the question.
|
| In the end, both of these bear riddles test whether the
| answerer considered more than one degree of separation.
| The ability to consider second order effects and beyond
| [1] is a sign of an intelligent person. Not every human
| passes.
|
| --
|
| [1] https://fs.blog/second-order-thinking/
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _It answered much like a human I think ... you might get_
|
| It would answer like a human with bad reasoning, and that is
| what we do not want to emulate.
| taberiand wrote:
| Why not? Garbage in garbage out; there's a limit to what
| can be done with ambiguous information.
|
| Though perhaps it would be better for the AI to just say
| it's a dumb question and not bother trying to make sense of
| it. Which it kinda politely did.
| [deleted]
| angryasian wrote:
| I think you give most people too much credit
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtkX3OyPF4Q
|
| "recent polls have shown 1/5 of Americans can't locate the US
| on a world map why do you think this is"
|
| "I personally believe that us Americans are unable to do so
| because some people out there in our nation don't have maps
| and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa
| and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they
| should our education over here in the US should help the US
| or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq in the
| Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future"
|
| I believe a majority of people provide answers like this.
| taberiand wrote:
| Oh yeah,I should specify - if you ask some educated person
| that is well versed in riddles and geography the question.
|
| Because true, plenty of people wouldn't have a clue what
| you're on about.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Any commentary on what ChatGPT can and can't do is completely
| irrelevant if the tests were not done against the GPT-4 model.
|
| It's like debating what computing machines are capable of when
| you only have access to an analog watch.
| gfodor wrote:
| Immediately checked the date - if you published this in March
| 2023 it's hilarious because the author can refute many of the
| claims here by simply paying $20 and adjusting a dropdown to
| "GPT-4"
| jmull wrote:
| Heh.
|
| In middle school (OK, over four decades ago now) my friends and I
| had a specific meaning of the word _bullshit_ that pretty much
| exactly matches the one here for chatgpt. And this is how I 've
| been explaining it to my wife: a really good bullshit generator.
| (Like Tony, not that that means anything to HN.)
|
| I wasn't a good bullshit generator, but I had a couple friends
| who were (Tony), but by close association I think I know what
| it's good for, and what it isn't.
|
| So don't get me wrong. This kind of bullshit has its uses! The
| Mrs. Schumachers of the world (that's probably not the name of
| one of your middle school teachers, but you may still know know I
| mean) are probably going to figure out to stop accepting bullshit
| essays turned in for assignments,
|
| But a vast amount of work people do is exactly this kind of
| bullshit. I'm hopeful that these models will alleviate the
| bullshit burden on those of us who need to generate it but aren't
| all that great at it (unlike Tony -- that dude is probably
| apoplectic right now, like those chess grandmasters were when
| they realized computers could own them. Don't worry Tony, human
| bullshit is still 10x more valuable than computer bullshit!)
|
| Yesterday I had to complete a yearly self evaluation for my
| company's (purely performative) raise process (which has nothing
| to do with performance or the self-evaluations, BTW, but we all
| have to pretend that it does). f-ing chatgpt was down so despite
| the ~$20 I pay them for it, I had to generate a lot of my own
| bullshit (I've learned since middle school).
|
| IDK...
|
| I've been using chatgpt. It's quite useful and makes me more
| productive.
|
| It's also useless for so many things. It does not have basic
| reasoning. It cannot reliably get basic facts or logic right. You
| have to aggressively check anything it gives back to you.
| Anything and everything.
|
| I have to argue with people on HN whether these parrots are the
| singularity. LOL. Chatgpt can't create an AI more capable of
| creating an AI smarter than it is... not until someone posts it
| to SO.
|
| Get a grip people.
| bob1029 wrote:
| The problem with this kind of writing is that the AI space is
| moving so quickly that some of these criticisms were literally
| addressed _yesterday_.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17491
|
| > In this work, we show that a pre-trained large language model
| (LLM) agent can execute computer tasks guided by natural language
| using a simple prompting scheme where the agent recursively
| criticizes and improves its output (RCI).
|
| I also agree with the GPT3.5 vs 4 comparison made by other
| comments here. Arithmetic and other emergent phenomena only begin
| to take off beyond certain parameter counts. Stuff as basic as
| 2+2 just doesn't work in the older models, but you can hit 50%+
| accuracy in newer models. Much greater if you use COT & the above
| RCI techniques.
| barrysteve wrote:
| "RCI works by first having the LLM generate an output based on
| zero-shot prompting. Then, RCI prompts the LLM to identify
| problems with the given output. After the LLM has identified
| problems with the output, RCI prompts the LLM to generate an
| updated output."
|
| "Similar to other prompting-based approaches for reasoning in
| LLMs, RCI can be viewed as using the LLM's output to write to
| an external memory, which is later retrieved to choose an
| action"
|
| "our experiments use LLMs on HTML code"
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| For all the complaints about how GPT is a parrot or not GI, or
| whatever, I wonder what these folks are asking of it?
|
| It gives me more relevant results than a search engine, and
| better answers than most of my coworkers. This tool is massively
| helpful for a mid-career professional who knows what questions to
| ask.
|
| Really pays to have so a large bank of known unknowns right now.
| worrycue wrote:
| I think people just expect Star Trek TNG's ship computer or
| Data.
|
| To some extend, LLMs have some of the properties ascribed to
| those fictional AIs like the ability to access a wide amount of
| knowledge.
|
| They lack the precise rigorous thinking that those fictional
| AIs have though - LLMs even hallucinate.
|
| Those fictional AIs are what people want because they perfectly
| complement our weaknesses - our tendency to forget stuff and
| our tendency to occasionally screw up reasoning; those
| fictional AIs act as a "safety net".
|
| At the moment many more limited "dumb" tools like a regular
| search engine algorithm or your handheld calculator does a
| better job of being a "safety net" went it comes to specific
| things.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| Right. Like the questions the OP poses that it got wrong make
| perfect sense to get wrong.
|
| Knowing facts and being able to present them in
| conversational English is not the same as being able to solve
| linguistically presented puzzles... Even if it sometimes
| actually is capable of that by some miracle of the algorithm.
|
| I think the tool might be so amazing people are fooled into
| thinking it is more than it is and therefore perceived as not
| amazing. Very strange psychology play there.
| vhamp wrote:
| [flagged]
| vhamp wrote:
| [flagged]
| fzliu wrote:
| Even though GPT-4 "fixes" many of the problems pointed out in
| this blog post, I question whether or not some of the underlying
| issues associated with transformers (and the attention mechanism
| in particular) can be overcome with with more sparse attention
| and deeper/wider models.
|
| e.g. GPT-3.5 might not be able to write simple poems correctly,
| but does GPT-4 solve the disease or the symptom (by masking it
| with a bigger model and more data)? I'm not entirely convinced.
| lionkor wrote:
| How is anyone here so confident on GPT-4's abilities to reason or
| whatever, given you have zero idea what it was trained on and
| what it optimizes for?
|
| If I train an AI on, say, the works of 50 Cent, I'd be surprised
| if it can solve and explain a riddle to me - that would be very
| smart.
|
| If it was trained on a massive database of riddles, however, it
| wouldnt be all that impressive.
|
| How are so many people here so confudent about their intuition on
| what its trained on?
| precompute wrote:
| Question the hype, you must not.
|
| I've been reading the discourse here and honestly not once have
| I ever read a reply wondering just where all the data "Open"AI
| has was acquired from.
| notShabu wrote:
| The human mind is likely a bullshit parrot as well. Those who are
| at the cutting edge of ideas can claim a bit of non-parrot-ness
| for a while but most of the time it's just parroting within a
| curated "elite" subgroup.
|
| What makes a "human" different could be that we live in the
| physical world with environmental and social consistency. Each
| time we sleep the mind "dies" and is "reborn", like GPT-4
| starting a new conversation with new context.
|
| The physical environment and social interactions (and cues from
| long term and short term memory) make up the preamble for the
| day.
|
| If the environment and interactions fall into easily compressible
| patterns, it can feel like the movie Groundhog Day, a constant
| loop. However changing relationships (breakup, dating) or
| changing environment (traveling, moving) changes the preamble
| where "I" feel like someone different. A harder reset vs the soft
| reset of sleep.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| What an obviously wrong and inflammatory title.
|
| I wonder if the reason this article got so much engagement is
| because that title was basically a pre-built strawman that anyone
| could rip to shreds.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| OK so which is it, do we need to pause all research because it's
| the end of the world or is it a parrot? I'm getting exhausted
| with the hyperbole going back and forth.
| [deleted]
| anonylizard wrote:
| Anytime you see the 'parrot' argument, you can instantly go
| 'opinion dismissed'. Anytime you seem some fancy argument, that
| bases its tests on chatgpt, instead of the way stronger GPT-4
| that usually invalidates half their criticisms, opinion
| dismissed.
|
| There's no need to debate about embeddings, compression = meaning
| etc. Simply put, many humans are parrots, much white collar work
| is just parroting. It doesn't matter what the underlying model of
| GPT-4 is like, if its useful, it will have a massive impact on
| the world.
| amelius wrote:
| Why? Some people may be looking for "intelligent", while you
| are clearly setting the bar at "useful".
| whateveracct wrote:
| It's a royal pain in the ass for me already.
|
| My PM is asking it questions about technical problems (like
| system design) preemptively and using it as a starting point as
| if its an engineer. So now instead of thinking through problems
| from a blank slate, I'm debating with ChatGPT. It's been just
| awful.
|
| And what's worse, his prompts always have certain biases or
| misunderstandings in them. For instance, he always wants to use
| third-party services for everything because he thinks it means
| we do less work (often not the case). So ChatGPT tells him what
| he wants to hear. He's using it as an extra engineer who always
| agrees with him.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| This is a whole new category of humor. I can totally see all
| kinds of management-y people using ChatGPT to provide
| "helpful" but completely useless information.
|
| Your example really cracks me up!
| wankle wrote:
| > So ChatGPT tells him what he wants to hear. He's using it
| as an extra engineer who always agrees with him.
|
| I chuckled, it sounds like the plot from a B Sci-Fi movie.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I think we might be vastly overestimating what gpt is going to
| be capable of. Just like we did with self-driving.
|
| Parrot might be harsh, but remeber this Star Wars quote:
|
| Ability to speak doesn't make you intelligent.
| adventured wrote:
| > many humans are parrots
|
| Nearly all humans are parrots, aka mimics. One of the great
| demonstrations of it, which anyone can observe 24/7, is Reddit
| (and the Reddit knowledge spouted so commonly across the
| platform).
|
| There are mimics, amplifiers, and originators/creators. Mimics
| are ~95-99% of the population. Amplifiers are - broadly
| speaking - teachers, people with bullhorns that train the
| mimics off of something another person
| originated/innovated/created.
|
| It's why humanity has been so successful. The mimics are wired
| to try to copy what is shown to work, and they often do it
| quite well (keeping up with the Joneses is a wired behavior
| tied to plentifulness, survival and thriving).
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Simply put, many humans_
|
| The fact that many are mentally incompetent cannot be a reason
| to produce something similar. When somebody does a job, we
| expect such job to be done properly, and "brains" are pretty
| much required, intelligence, if only for the occasional cases
| outside norm - otherwise, there is automation.
|
| > _if its useful_
|
| It is not easy to confine an affabulator to the contexts where
| it will be useful.
| ehsankia wrote:
| I don't think the point being made here has anything to do
| with the current quality of the output. ChatGPT could be
| giving good or bad results, that's tangential. The debate
| here is about whether a system that is a parrot can be a good
| system.
|
| To parrot arguers claim that these system just regurgitate
| the training data set and give you the most plausible next
| word, and they claim that's bad/useless.
|
| The anti-parrot arguers claim that's basically how humans
| work too (even the smarter ones), and that just because
| ChatGPT is a "parrot" doesn't necessarily mean it cannot be
| as good or better than humans. It might not be entirely there
| yet, but it's just a matter of time it becomes a good enough
| parrot to be indistinguishable/better than humans.
| nottorp wrote:
| > The anti-parrot arguers claim that's basically how humans
| work too (even the smarter ones), and that just because
| ChatGPT is a "parrot" doesn't necessarily mean it cannot be
| as good or better than humans. It might not be entirely
| there yet, but it's just a matter of time it becomes a good
| enough parrot to be indistinguishable/better than humans.
|
| Which humans? There may be a correlation between people who
| are capable of watching Netflix quality series for 4-5
| seasons of more of the same and admirers of ChatGPT.
|
| Basically if "content" (as opposed to "art" or attempts at
| art) does not bother you, ChatGPT does a good enough job
| already.
|
| On the other hand, the most vocal opponents imagine
| themselves in a world where not 90% but 99.999% is blogspam
| and Netflix. Making entertainment worth watching impossible
| to find.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _whether a system that is a parrot can be a good system_
|
| A parrot can be a good system if the problem is "Collect
| and sort the available data about X (and provide
| reference)".
|
| A parrot is a disaster if you ask it "What do you think of
| X": a parrot does not think - unless you make it reason,
| verify and criticize its ontology, and at that point it is
| useless that we call it a "parrot".
| ehsankia wrote:
| > What do you think of X
|
| Most opinions you will hear from people are also just
| regurgitated amalgamation of things they have previously
| heard or read on the subject. Also, in general, being
| able to aggregate and summarize into words what hundreds
| of people thing about X seems like probably an even more
| useful tool than getting one person's thought, unless
| it's something no one has ever had any thought on before.
|
| Even then, I don't think it would be outside the scope of
| possibility for the parrot to find things that are
| similar to X, find opinions on those, and somehow
| transpose those opinions onto X.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" A parrot is a disaster if you ask it "What do you
| think of X""_
|
| Why need it be a disaster?
|
| If its answer is useful, why bother about whether the
| answer was the result of thought or some other process?
| cameronfraser wrote:
| Nobody is saying those humans are incompetent, they're just
| saying that most of the work out there is parrot work
| omnicognate wrote:
| Indeed, but they're saying it with no evidence whatsoever.
| If those jobs actually do get replaced by LLMs people will
| be entitled to say that with certainty. Until then it's
| just their opinion, and not one that aligns with what I
| know of any of the jobs I regularly come in contact with.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _they 're just saying that most of the work out there is_
|
| And I stated that I cannot think of a human job in which
| intelligence is not required, which cannot be replaced by
| deterministic automation.
| cameronfraser wrote:
| It's not a question of replacing people, it's a question
| of whether they can be empowered with the tool to do
| more.
| lionkor wrote:
| Its convenient that any valid criticism of ChatGPT or GPT3 or
| $CURRENT_TECH is dismissed by saying "just pay OpenAI money to
| use the new thing(tm), it doesnt have this issue".
|
| If it was not a ChatGPT Plus offering but instead freely
| available, there would be way fewer shills for it (im assuming)
| and there would be a lot more balanced reporting on it. By
| default, anyone speaking to the competence of GPT-4 is willing
| to give OpenAI money, which may already be sign of a bias.
|
| Im not willing to pay for a product the free tier of which is
| shit, even when told a hundred times "no but the paid one is
| MUCH better!". Of course it probably is, but its a little
| irrelevant.
| capableweb wrote:
| It's not clear to me if the author is using GPT-3.5-turbo or
| GPT-4, both are available in ChatGPT and just saying "I'm using
| ChatGPT" doesn't indicate exactly what model they are using.
|
| Maybe I missed it, where does the author say they are using
| GPT-3/3.5, not GPT-4?
|
| I agree with your message in general, there is night-and-day
| difference between GPT 3.5-turbo and 4. But I'm still not able
| to see which one the author is using.
|
| Edit: seems the avatar in ChatGPT tells you which model you're
| using, never noticed that myself. Thanks everyone :)
| M4v3R wrote:
| I've checked some of the failure mode he mentions using GPT-4
| and it answered the questions/completed tasks correctly, so I
| can only assume the author used GPT-3.5.
| OmegaPoint wrote:
| You can know the GPT version of ChatGPT based on the OpenAI
| logo color: GPT-3.5 is green and GPT-4 is black.
| lemoncookiechip wrote:
| The screenshots are that of 3.5. GPT-4 has a black user icon
| vs 3.5's green.
| croes wrote:
| Yeah, but these human parrots are one the low level of their
| abilities.
|
| GPT's parroting is it's upper level
| archagon wrote:
| Similarly, anytime you see the "anytime you see 'x' you can
| dismiss the argument" argument, you can dismiss the argument.
| zamalek wrote:
| > Anytime you see the 'parrot' argument, you can instantly go
| 'opinion dismissed'.
|
| I also _seriously_ question whether anyone making the 'parrot
| argument' has actually used ChatGPT for anything meaningful. If
| it is nothing more than a parrot, then parrots are
| significantly more creative than I realized.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't know why you question this. I've used it for
| meaningful stuff, but I am not convinced that ChatGPT is more
| than a very sophisticated variety of Eliza.
|
| Just because one person is convinced by an experience doesn't
| mean people who aren't convinced by it haven't had the
| experience.
| fauxpause_ wrote:
| I agree. Coincidentally I don't think you are more than a
| very sophisticated variety of Eliza.
| JohnFen wrote:
| That wouldn't surprise me at all!
| aftergibson wrote:
| Yeah if anything all ChatGPT is doing is highlighting that a
| lot more noise-work can be automated. "Make my random thoughts
| sound business-y", "double check this code doesn't have
| anything completely stupid" etc.
| intelVISA wrote:
| As you noted most, even in SWE, are parrots (including this
| parrot typing); we get kinda scared when the robot parrot
| generates bullshit better than web framework-de-jure.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I'd like to echo the GPT-4 sentiment.
|
| Having used the API a bunch, the ChatGPT API (GPT-3.5-Turbo)
| feels like it has a 10-second attention span in comparison to
| GPT-4. GPT-4 is waaaay more powerful for actually building
| stuff on top of, adheres to your prompt in a much more stable
| way, and its reasoning is way less unstable in general as well.
| Writing long blocks of code without making "stupid" mistakes
| works much much better, etc.
|
| The only downside is: it's so, so, soooooo slow in comparison
| to GPT-3.5-Turbo. You'll literally have to wait 2-3 minutes for
| the response with larger token amounts.
| throwuwu wrote:
| Thinking fast, thinking slow
| sho_hn wrote:
| I find both your statements confusing and I think they're
| factually wrong.
|
| There's no "ChatGPT API". ChatGPT is a webapp. It lets you
| select between 3.5-turbo and 4 models in its UI.
|
| There's an OpenAI API, which recently added chat interactions
| and suitable models. There, too, you can select 3.5-turbo and
| 4. AFAIK, the 4 served by the API is the same 4 used by the
| ChatGPT web app.
| growthwtf wrote:
| You may have missed the intro blog post for those APIs:
| https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-
| apis
|
| The title is "Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs" and
| features quotes like "Snap Inc., the creator of Snapchat,
| introduced My AI for Snapchat+ this week. The experimental
| feature is running on ChatGPT API".
|
| So, OpenAI refers to accessing the model powering ChatGPT
| as the ChatGPT API.
| sho_hn wrote:
| OK, gotcha.
|
| Still, IMHO the OP post is misleading folks into thinking
| there's a magical GPT-4 that is not the GPT-4 you can
| also select on ChatGPT, but they are the same models.
| There's no GPT-4 that's better than ChatGPT's 4. I'm just
| trying to clear up this confusion for others, and frankly
| pretty surprised at the harsh downvotes.
|
| There's also no _separate_ ChatGPT API from the regular
| OpenAI API, I think the phrasing in the OpenAI page is
| just for convenience. But I 'll grant their phrasing
| makes it canonical.
| saurik wrote:
| Is that true? I was under the impression it was just like
| with the previous GPT models, where ChatGPT was an
| instruction tuned and pre-prompted setup designed for
| interactive conversations over the underlying GPT model
| you had access to via the API that was in its close-to-
| as-trained state of being a generative autocomplete.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I think it's true. See e.g.
| https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 making no distinctions.
|
| Altman has stated in interviews they are considering
| releasing the un-tuned "base model", but they haven't
| done this.
|
| For GPT-3, you can get models on the API via the
| "completion" end points (includes base models) and via
| the "chat" endpoints. For GPT-4, they've only released
| the latter.
|
| So my point is: You can absolutely use ChatGPT to build
| an opinion on what GPT-4 is capable of. Arguably even
| better than on the Playground, as the ChatGPT frontend
| supports a bigger token window than the Playground
| frontend (8k vs. 2k). Of course the actual API supports
| the full token window (and if you're off the separate
| waitlist for this, even the full 32k). But it's still the
| same model.
| nomel wrote:
| There is a more "pure" GPT-4 model, and they're
| considering giving access to it. It's just not as useful
| to humans. Sam Altman talks about it briefly in the
| recent interview on the Lex Fridman podcast.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Yes, I know, but this is presently not available via the
| API. What OP here means is that someone's talking about
| 3.5 without having tried something with 4, while
| accidentally misleading people into thinking that there's
| a special 4 distinct from the 4 available on ChatGPT that
| can do more. This is not the case. If you've used 4 via
| GPT, there's not a different version somehow - that we
| know about! - that is more capable or useful. If your
| interactions with 4 were via the ChatGPT frontend, you
| don't need to revisit your opinions now.
| growthwtf wrote:
| I see where you're coming from. I didn't personally get
| that from OP's comment, but I'm not a regular ChatGPT
| user and interact with GPT-4 mostly via playground or
| API.
| pmichaud wrote:
| It's called the ChatGPT API by OpenAI, and free users (ie
| almost everyone using the system) can only use GPT-3.5.
| There is no option for them to use GPT-4, which is behind a
| paywall and a waitlist (maybe the waitlist is done now, I
| haven't checked).
| moonchrome wrote:
| Is ChatGPT GPT4 equivalent to API version ?
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Anytime you see the 'parrot' argument, you can instantly go
| 'opinion dismissed'_
|
| True or not, I find a tone of this sort of fortunate. Please
| don't come up with catchy ways to stop discussion of points.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I think too many people have a grossly inaccurate impression of
| what it means to be intelligent.
|
| Firstly, we still don't truly have many good explanations for
| intelligence and consciousness that aren't self referential.
| Drawing hard conclusions on this subject about generative AI
| and human intelligence, even in 2023, is being hasty, in my
| opinion.
|
| Which brings me to a lot of the criticisms made about LLMs. The
| idea that an ideal AI could or even _should_ be capable of
| constantly generating original output is just plain weird.
| Where do people get this idea? How often do you meet a human
| being who hasn 't gotten most of their ideas from somewhere
| else? Even synthesized ideas are forged by other ideas. Ideas
| that _seem_ original may appear just that, and we just don 't
| see where the connection lies between it and its predecessors.
| It's silly to dismiss an AI because it "parrots" things, as if
| that's not a pretty remarkable achievement. It's also very
| reductive; anyone who has used ChatGPT and doesn't see that it
| can pretty reliably munge together different ideas is blind or
| is lying about their use of ChatGPT.
|
| Expecting perfect accuracy and knowledge is also not a
| reasonable expectation of an AI. An intelligence localized in
| spacetime is necessarily going to lack understanding of many
| things. To look to something like ChatGPT as a source of
| authoritative answers, and to dismiss it upon finding its
| answers to be specious, is to expect the AI to be _God_. Well I
| 'm sorry, but we are nowhere near speaking directly to God.
|
| In regards to "true understanding", for all we know, language
| processing is the workhorse of what humans consider to be acts
| of intelligence, and individual humans aren't as intelligent as
| they believe themselves to be. Our ability to communicate with
| each other about a variety of topics in real time is not so
| much a matter about being hyperaware of every given fact that
| is relevant and weighing them in a Bayesian model; how well we
| can converse is primarily dictated by how rapidly we can
| construct language by parsing the input, making connections,
| and producing output. I know I'm not the only one who can speak
| on a subject only to realize, after having completed a
| sentence, that I hardly even thought about what I was saying.
| pydry wrote:
| >It's silly to dismiss an AI because it "parrots" things, as
| if that's not a pretty remarkable achievement. It's also very
| reductive; anyone who has used ChatGPT and doesn't see that
| it can pretty reliably munge together different ideas
|
| It can clearly do both of these things very well but human
| intelligence combines a multitude of interacting components
| and for tasks that require more than just the one it
| replicates it falls flat on its face.
|
| It doesnt appear to be missing components that will can be
| fixed with incremental improvements to the model either.
| nomel wrote:
| GPT4 was released 17 days ago. This isn't some pinnacle of
| AI. It's just what's _being given away for free_ right now.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| It's also probably nearly a year old and constantly being
| tweaked and refined by humans ?
| fauxpause_ wrote:
| It's not free
| JackFr wrote:
| That's the clever bit about the so-called Turing Test. It's a
| sophisticated way of saying "I don't have to define it, I
| know it when I see it."
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| While we can certainly identify fallacies in the arguments of
| the cynics, we should likewise be careful not to fall into
| the broadly Skinnerian trap, or project onto things our own
| anthropomorphic conceptions. A Potemkin village is not a
| village, no matter how much like a village it appears to be
| to us.
|
| The whole notion that computers or AI are capable of
| intelligence is simply a fantastical category mistake. A
| metaphor has been forgotten to be a metaphor. No matter how
| sophisticated AI technology could become in its apparent
| behavior, it cannot make the transition to bona fide
| intelligence. Simulation does not become the real McCoy
| through resemblance. This is just magical thinking. We must
| also account for the means by which the observable is
| produced. When we do, we can distinguish between a genuine
| behavior and a merely simulated behavior. And here is one
| important clue to the puzzle: there is a difference between
| true speech and something that merely happens to sound like
| speech, even when the raw data of each is indistinguishable
| to the ear per se. Observation is not brute. It always
| involves interpretation. When physicists conduct experiments,
| they are doing so within the context of some stack of
| theories[0] and background assumptions, including extra- and
| pre-scientific assumptions. The results of those experiments
| are observed which is to say _read_ , and so observation is
| always theory- and assumption-laden because reading what we
| see or measure means taking what is made available to the
| senses as such and placing it in context. This is just a
| specific instance of what we all do in daily life (resting
| bitch face, or genuine irritation?). Science is nothing
| special in this regard.
|
| So when you say that "anyone who has used ChatGPT and doesn't
| see that it can pretty reliably munge together different
| ideas is blind or is lying", I cannot help but respond with a
| "uh wut?". How have you come to conclude that ChatGPT has
| "ideas"? I will tell you that there is not a single idea
| within ChatGPT! Consider an example of an idea and see how we
| do. Take "triangularity", for instance. I think we can agree
| that "triangularity" is an idea. What makes "triangularity"
| different from some physical triangle? Well, there is only
| one "triangularity", but many triangles, each of which
| instantiates "triangularity" (otherwise, you could not call
| them all triangles; they are triangles only insofar as they
| instantiate some common "triangularity"). Each triangle is
| different from every other, and yet they are all triangles.
| And none of them is to be identified with "triangularity" as
| such, for if there is only one "triangularity", and some
| triangle were identical with "triangularity", then it would
| follow that there could only be one triangle! But, you might
| ask, is there perhaps a physical "triangularity" that isn't a
| triangle, yet something each triangle has? Well, no, because
| to be physical is to be concrete and particular, and
| "triangularity" is, by definition, general, universal, and
| abstract. There's no concrete magical ingredient that you can
| hold in your hand called "triangularity" that you can mix
| into cement to produce triangles.
|
| There are other reasons why the claim that ChatGPT or
| whatever is intelligent isn't even wrong (like the
| subjectivity and observer relativity of computation in
| physical artifacts and computation as abstract model merely
| simulated through artifacts), but this appeal to
| _abstraction_ , the ability to abstract from particulars and
| hold in your intellect what cannot exist physically except as
| particular, concrete instances, is central to intelligence.
| ChatGPT most certainly does not engage in abstraction. It
| would be fair to say that strictly speaking, it doesn't even
| parrot.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _How often do you meet a human being who hasn 't gotten
| most of their ideas from somewhere else_
|
| Again (and again, and again), this argument is the
| mysteriously recurrent "many people fail", implying that
| failing would be normal, instead of undesirable.
|
| > _" parrots" things, as if that's not a pretty remarkable
| achievement_
|
| It is also the mark of unintelligence. As such, it is a
| warning alarm.
|
| > _pretty reliably_
|
| From a calculator you do not expect "<<pretty>>" reliable,
| but just reliable. From a human you expect faulty computation
| because of the economization of resources, but you know it
| can reason.
|
| > _Expecting perfect accuracy and knowledge is also not a
| reasonable expectation of an AI_
|
| The expectation is that of a reliable process bringing to the
| output.
| galaxytachyon wrote:
| Your arguments are all over the place and frankly I don't
| understand what is the problem you are trying to say.
| Something can be both undesirable and normal. In fact, I
| would even say that most of the time, the most normal
| outcome is a failure and we have to put in extra effort to
| make it a success.
|
| I have seen plenty of bright and intelligence students who
| most of the time are just parrots of what were told in
| class or from some other sources. It is actually highly
| unusual for a high school student or even a freshman or
| sophomore in college to have an absolutely original and
| correct idea. That doesn't mean I look at my students as
| unintelligent, even the below-average ones.
|
| And here comes the crux of the issue. You automatically
| assign the ability to "reason" to a human even when we make
| mistakes aplenty. But when a machine does it, you said that
| is a proof of unintelligence. This is what the OP was
| criticizing in their post. Most deniers are using arbitrary
| requirements applied only on the AI and not humans.
|
| After teaching quite a few college level kids, I dare to
| say that the AI models right now exhibit reasoning ability
| close to many human. Doesn't mean they are sentient or
| human-level yet, but they are definitely much much better
| than what I would ever expect out of dumb silicon and
| steel.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _You automatically assign the ability to "reason" to a
| human even when we make mistakes aplenty. But when a
| machine does it, you said that is a proof of
| unintelligence ... requirements applied only on the AI
| and not humans_
|
| Whereas I apply them requirements also to humans? :)
|
| I must correct you, to help understanding: I do assign in
| general (I hope, to all individuals but for an n-th
| standard deviation) <<the ability to "reason" to a
| human>>; that <<we make mistakes aplenty>> is overriding
| (or under-using) a faculty which was present but, in
| those cases, was not exercised.
|
| You write <<when a machine does it>>: but can the machine
| do it? Can it _criticize its ontological contents, its
| built concepts_? Humans can, and pretty much must -
| deontically. The machine should.
|
| > _we have to put in extra effort_
|
| Exactly. We can, many don't, and the machine should -
| just like people in general should.
|
| > _the problem you are trying to say_
|
| While people do not always exercise critical thinking,
| they should. Verifying, trying your ideas and concepts,
| making them solid, should be a constant effort. Humans
| have those modules, which makes them apt to possibly be
| employed as "predicting machines" (which is a definition
| of intelligence), or "things you can ask things".
|
| When you build a machine that produces outputs, they may
| be "for fun", so every generator goes that satisfies the
| "fun" based "performance indicator", but more normally
| you will want the output to be reliable. So, the
| "verification" features are crucial.
|
| > _Something can be both undesirable and normal_
|
| In engineering, I hope not :)
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| > From a calculator you do not expect "<<pretty>>"
| reliable, but just reliable. From a human you expect faulty
| computation because of the economization of resources, but
| you know it can reason.
|
| Just have it use Wolfram Alpha plugin. Not an issue.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > Again (and again, and again), this argument is the
| mysteriously recurrent "many people fail", implying that
| failing would be normal, instead of undesirable.
|
| That doesn't really answer the question. Why is the
| immediate expectation, when AI is in its infancy, that it
| must outperform humans in the ability to be original and
| always factually accurate? That's not a reasonable
| expectation when there are not only no examples that it's
| even possible, but we ourselves aren't original. There's a
| reason why both computers and human beings have
| _supervisors_. What about AI suggests an intelligence that
| can or should be free of supervision?
|
| > It is also the mark of unintelligence. As such, it is a
| warning alarm.
|
| That depends on a matter of degree. You and I parrot things
| _all the time_. We neither have the time or capability to
| _not_ take information for granted and pass it along
| without fully understanding it. What we do is _best effort_
| , which is far more achievable than "perfect" computation.
|
| For instance, I could ask you to paint us a painting of
| literally anything, and chances are your painting will be
| based on your experience of what a "painting" is and what
| you paint will probably be fairly unremarkable on a grand
| scale, no matter how much you try. I don't mean this as an
| insult, because it applies to virtually everyone and it is
| what it is. Of course there _is_ the possibility that you
| will prove me wrong and paint something that no one has
| painted before using a style or method that is completely
| new, but I won 't bet on it.
|
| In such a case, you'd be "parroting" what artists have been
| doing since time immemorial. Does that actually devalue
| your art? Or the art of practically every other artist who
| mostly painted things based on previous ideas? I don't
| think so, but that's just me.
|
| > From a calculator you do not expect "<<pretty>>"
| reliable, but just reliable. From a human you expect faulty
| computation because of the economization of resources, but
| you know it can reason.
|
| Yeah... because calculators _don 't_ reason anything.
|
| > The expectation is that of a reliable process bringing to
| the output.
|
| What is your best example of how the current generation of
| LLMs aren't reliable _enough_ for a wide variety of tasks?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Or to put it another way: new styles of art were
| historically invented every century or so, and a bit
| faster these days, maybe every decade. All of the other
| art made by thousands of artists were derivative in some
| sense. It's a rare master that can come up with something
| entirely new.
|
| You see similar things in areas like science. When was
| the last time you've seen a _paradigm shift_ akin to
| relativity or quantum mechanics? Not for over a century!
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _when AI is in its infancy_
|
| Well, having started in 1955, we really must frame that
| "infancy" in a scale like dog-years, human-years, AI-
| years...
|
| > _that it must outperform humans in the ability to be
| ... accurate_
|
| No, the expectation of some of us was not about
| <<outperform[ing]>>, but about not losing the focus of
| <<accura[cy]>>.
|
| > _a matter of degree_
|
| It does not seem a <<matter of degree>> but its opposite,
| a "matter of quality": does the machine question its
| statements?
|
| > _You and I_
|
| Actually, the process is that of building on already
| vetted ideas, and continuously vetting. True, there is an
| economy of effort, but there is also a capitalization on
| past effort. // It is unfair to say that you
| "<<parrot>>", just because of early stopping, assuming
| you are trained to vet your output.
|
| > _new ... what artists have been doing ... previous
| ideas_
|
| You should revise your perspective there: we _learn_ from
| the (bigger and smaller) "giants" in the past, and
| learning is very different from plain imitation. What is
| learnt is internally elaborated, understood, integrated.
| There is a whole world of difference from "I learnt from
| A" and "Z copied A".
|
| > _calculators don 't reason_
|
| But calculators bring a reliable result, and that is what
| is expected from them. You expect the same from
| intelligent entities.
|
| > _What is your best example_
|
| Decision Support Systems. (Edit: I meant as a support
| Analyst; as an information retriever it could instead be
| a dramatic asset, if employed as a hound to retrieve
| sources.)
| _gabe_ wrote:
| > You should revise your perspective there: we learn from
| the (bigger and smaller) "giants" in the past, and
| learning is very different from plain imitation
|
| Ah, I see. So when an AI imitates the things it was
| trained off of it's simply parroting the material. But
| when we imitate things we've trained off of, we're
| synthesizing new information that we've _learned_ from.
| /s
|
| This ambiguity is exactly what OP sounds like they're
| talking about in regards to intelligence. Who's to say
| what parroting is and what synthesizing new information
| from old ideas is? Where is the line? Can we score how
| "parroty" an idea is? Can we quantify how much
| intelligence is imbued in a written statement? There is
| no firm science (that I know of) that quantifies
| intelligence, but it sounds like we'll be needing to
| determine hard metrics to find out if AI is truly
| intelligent or not. Otherwise, we'll have these circular
| arguments forever that basically dismiss an AI as being
| intelligent simply because it's an AI.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _when we imitate_
|
| Also in humans imitation as copying and imitation as
| intelligent inspiration are discriminated.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| These are just some subjective, odd philosophical
| arguments.
|
| Question is - does this tool provide massive value and
| productivity boost? Yes.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _does this tool provide massive value and productivity
| boost_
|
| And the <<philosophical arguments>> there highlight the
| other side, about the limitations. Are they relevant?
| Surely, if they are not evident to the user.
| personjerry wrote:
| This is a strawman argument, the parent comment suggests that
| chatgpt is useful, not that it's intelligent.
| pjc50 wrote:
| This, to me, is the more terrifying prospect of the AI
| revolution: people arguing that humans aren't sentient
| either.
| eigenspace wrote:
| People seem to be really confused between sentience and
| intelligence, when we don't actually have much reason to
| think those two are very related.
|
| One can certainly _imagine_ that a very very dumb creature
| is sentient, and imagine that a very very very intelligent
| mechanical process is not sentient. We truly do not know
| what consciousness is or how it arises.
|
| We know that we have consciousness (or at least I know that
| I have consciousness) and we know that we have some degree
| of intelligence, but it's not at all clear that one comes
| from the other.
| JieJie wrote:
| Stochastic Parrot == Philosophical Zombie
|
| Same concept, same difference.
| kalkin wrote:
| Not really. The point of the philosophical zombie idea is
| that they'd be indistinguishable in behavior from
| conscious people. Part of the point of the stochastic
| parrots is that supposedly they can't accomplish the same
| things as genuine intelligence. That's testable.
| lottin wrote:
| I have a strong reason to think that consciousness and
| intelligence are related. Intelligence requires
| awareness. Consciousness is awareness of oneself. I for
| one cannot imagine an intelligent being that does not
| possess consciousness.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > This, to me, is the more terrifying prospect of the AI
| revolution: people arguing that humans aren't sentient
| either.
|
| If we're going let the AI revolution fulfill its potential,
| it's a cognitive shift we're going to have to embrace.
| After all, AI is going to render a lot of meat-based
| equipment obsolete and unnecessary, and someone's going to
| have to figure out how to dispose of all that wasteful
| junk.
| olalonde wrote:
| What is terrifying about it? I'm a non-sentient human and
| have no problem with it.
| ben_w wrote:
| I've been saying for a while now that the definitions given
| for sentience are always so poor they're either (0)
| circular, (1) accidentally include VCRs, or (2) require
| things that exclude humans.
|
| I think this is only the second time I've encountered
| someone deliberately trying for the third option, rather
| than accidentally.
|
| As before, it's as much a surprise to me as I read into the
| descriptions of those with aphantasia when they realise for
| the first time that other people have the ability to create
| mental imagery.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| >I've been saying for a while now that the definitions
| given for sentience are always so poor they're either (0)
| circular, (1) accidentally include VCRs, or (2) require
| things that exclude humans.
|
| Video Cassette Recorders?
| ben_w wrote:
| Yes.
|
| VCRs have an internal structure that records events,
| changing them a little in the process; these memories can
| be replayed, and can show very convincing displays of
| emotional affect...
|
| That's the trouble with definitions given as if the
| question is "common sense", they let stuff like that
| through.
|
| Common sense is fine for normal daily life, not so useful
| when you want to know if the magic silicon crystal with
| transistors packed more densely than angels on pinheads
| placed by a flash of light too blue to see and made to
| perform arcane processes that literally no single human
| mind can fully comprehend... is merely an impressive but
| mindless automaton, or an accidentally sentient slave
| with all the negative connotations therein.
| nomel wrote:
| I think a more likely scenario is that people will
| romanticize the concept of intelligence so much that they
| continuously move the definition so that AI is excluded,
| excluding many humans in the process, until a fully
| romantic definition is embraced.
|
| I think another possibility is that someone finds that
| "intelligence" is closer to a fundamental law of
| information theory, being some sort of emergent result of
| organizing/organized information, and that we're incredibly
| special for being capable, but not alone.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _people will romanticize the concept of intelligence so
| much that they continuously move the definition_
|
| We already do this. Braindead patients are not sapient,
| so we don't treat them as such. In one sense, the entire
| abortion debate is about drawing this line. (Hell,
| childrens' rights relative to adults are based on agency,
| which is a legal term that looks remarkably like
| sapience.)
| marshmellman wrote:
| My hunch is that we'll eventually realize that we never
| cared about intelligence in the first place, just "human-
| ness".
|
| After all, there's very low moral concern for cows, pigs,
| dolphins, etc regardless of intelligence.
| fasterik wrote:
| That would be a nonsense argument. Sentience is the ability
| to have sensory experiences. It's orthogonal to
| intelligence.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| So mash a camera or microphone into the multi-modal input
| for GPT-4 and we're done? Sensory experiences does not
| seem that high of a bar to clear. (Plenty of non-language
| models already do this.)
| fasterik wrote:
| No, it's not that simple. Having the _experience_ of
| sensory stimuli requires consciousness. The stimulus isn
| 't the experience.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| And what is consciousness? Does it have to do with
| qualia?
| fasterik wrote:
| It seems like you already know the answer. If not, ask
| ChatGPT :)
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Qualia, _by definition_ of being individual _subjective_
| experiences, cannot be quantified. Very clever trick, to
| define consciousness so that no matter what computer you
| come up with, it cannot be "conscious" because, of
| course, a computer's operations are always quantified.
|
| The problem, however, is you're effectively defining
| consciousness in a way that human brains do not follow
| unless you make appeals to some supernatural process
| beyond the reach of science (ie fundamentally subjective,
| unquantifiable).
|
| So again, it's a bulls*** definition of sentience.
| fasterik wrote:
| I disagree. I'm a physicalist, so I believe
| consciousness/qualia emerges from physical processes in
| the brain. It's absolutely possible for a computer be
| conscious provided it implements the right kind of
| computational process. Ultimately, whether or not a
| system is conscious is an empirical question that
| neuroscience will be able to answer once we have the
| right theoretical framework and tools for measuring the
| relevant variables.
|
| I don't know what you mean by it being a BS definition of
| sentience. It's a technical term invented by philosophers
| to mean a specific thing. If you don't like it, use a
| different word.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| That is what I mean. /Subjective/ experiences are part of
| the usual definition of consciousness and sentience.
| Qualia, as opposed to quantia.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| @Robotbeat Huh? You and I see color, hear sound, etc. I
| presume you're not insane and that you accept that as
| true. So what's this about human brains? Are you looking
| for your lost car keys under the street lamp because
| that's where the light happens to be on, and then baffled
| when you don't find them?
|
| If science is unable to account for the existence of such
| experiences, then either they fall outside of science (so
| what? who said empirical science was the only means of
| knowing? the claim itself isn't scientific) or science
| must be revised. And what of the claim that anything that
| isn't quantifiable is bullshit? Is that quantifiable? No?
| So it's bullshit?
| nemo44x wrote:
| Or the reductive reasoning that we're just a meat computer,
| etc. Or confidently explaining that the mysteries of
| consciousness is just "emergent" in the various machinery
| that constructs our meat computer. Just this reduction and
| complete oversight of what it means to be a human and how
| there's so much more than completing words - that there's
| memories, feelings, ambitions, dreams, and that we know so
| little about ourselves and the universe and just where we
| fit into it, if at all.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Thankfully, this existential dread is already a subset of
| the terror that comes from eliminating free will, which
| makes it not matter in the slightest, which in turn is a
| subset of superdeterminism! :-)
|
| We'll have to figure out how to go on regardless.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > We'll have to figure out how to go on regardless.
|
| Why?
|
| It's a serious question. What would be the point of going
| on? Why would we have to figure out how to do it?
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| > What would be the point of going on? Why would we have
| to figure out how to do it?
|
| I mean, I'm just really curious what is going to happen,
| and what's the secret behind all that, behind the
| universe, and I hope to live as long as there's this to
| discover. That is my natural drive though. I don't really
| care at all whether I'm sentient, conscious or special in
| any given way. There's no reason for me to be. I just
| have this built in curiosity drive. It was not chosen by
| me, but it is there, and I act to engage the drive,
| because it makes me feel good and otherwise it makes me
| feel bad, nothing much more than some sort of algorithm.
| And we don't need to be more than algorithms.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > What would be the point of going on?
|
| For me personally it's that the future is unknowable, at
| least with our current understanding of physics. So yes,
| everything may be pre-determined, including what will
| happen to me, but I can't predict it with any confidence.
| I will still get to experience it and I get to have
| qualia about it. I get to participate. The little pouch
| of structure in the universe that is tagged "me" is along
| for the ride, and also a factor in it all.
|
| I've also known for many, many years that one day I will
| be dead. There's plenty of existential dread in death,
| yet I continue my existence building up to it. Even if I
| had free will: Still dead. Offspring and future
| generations of Earth? Well, ultimate heat death of the
| universe. There's many ways to call it all pointless. The
| only thing that we seem to have going for us is
| experience while it lasts. Maybe we still discover an
| escape hatch along the way.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| > I've also known for many, many years that one day I
| will be dead. There's plenty of existential dread in
| death, yet I continue my existence building up to it.
|
| How old are you? Because maybe we can reach immortality,
| but probably only if you are positioned properly for
| that. Anyway, for me the main drive is also curiosity on
| what is going to happen in the future. It's like this
| crazy story I want to know how it ends. I don't want to
| die, because I want to know what happens. Dying would be
| like going to sleep on a cliffhanger. I'll just prefer to
| binge rather than sleep.
| sho_hn wrote:
| 37, not sure which part of the probability spectrum on
| immortality by technical means that puts me in :-)
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I will still get to experience it
|
| Perhaps, but then none of it has meaning. Personally, I'm
| not really interested in having meaningless experiences.
|
| > There's plenty of existential dread in death, yet I
| continue my existence building up to it.
|
| But that's an entirely different thing. I am of the
| opinion that it's death that helps give life meaning. I
| have no existential dread about it whatsoever.
|
| A life without meaning, however, seems like a pointless
| waste of time to me.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Hm, why do you think our lives would have no meaning if
| we don't qualify for sentience? (Or is it the free will
| part? Sorry, I set us up for confusion with the initial
| comment.)
|
| What I think is: Even if we're just automatons that lack
| free will, it doesn't negate our existence or the role we
| play in the universe. We can still be the universe
| calling itself beautiful, we can still have qualia, we
| can still be individually unique structures of matter and
| state, we can still make a difference in what is and what
| isn't in the overall structure. And nothing else in the
| universe will do it fundamentally better, either. At some
| point we're subject to the rules of the game, i.e.
| physics itself.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It's the free will part. It seems to me that without free
| will, nothing anyone does actually matters. Any decisions
| we make, or any understandings we may develop, can change
| nothing whatsoever. Which makes it all pointless.
|
| > we can still make a difference in what is and what
| isn't in the overall structure.
|
| I disagree with this part. We can't possibly make such a
| difference, because it's all preordained anyway.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > I disagree with this part. We can't possibly make such
| a difference, because it's all preordained anyway.
|
| What I mean is that what plays out is in the interaction
| of things, and if you just deleted that assembly of stuff
| that is me from the equation, it would play out
| differently. I'm not even suggesting you that you adopt
| this mindset or anything, I'm just saying that for one
| reason or another - deterministic ones, I suppose - I end
| up having feelings about this that add up to "pretty
| cool".
|
| Everything may be deterministic, but there's still things
| only I know, only I do, interactions only I have, etc.
| The grand script that is the universe has organized
| itself in a way where I get to have feelings about my
| little stretch and space of it, and I get to wonder
| what's next because I can't know.
|
| For me, this is enough.
|
| I know, I write this from a position of massive
| privilege, because I'm currently not, for example,
| seriously sick, or poor, or live in horrible
| circumstances (which is not to say I don't have any
| struggles). I hope this continues to be the case. But
| this was never under my full control: Thoughts on
| determinism or not, I could get hit by a car tomorrow, or
| slip and fall. I still have to live with that.
|
| I get your feelings and dread, and I've been there. But
| the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized it
| doesn't make a big difference. And how could it? It's
| always been like this.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| It's all deterministic, or at least there's no reason for
| there not to be and there's no valid reason to believe
| for any reason that it's not deterministic. Ultimately it
| wouldn't matter anyhow, because everyone is controlled by
| their desires, feelings and these have developed
| throughout evolution to make sure that you are likely to
| survive, so likely you would keep going, unless the
| environment changes to an extent that evolution didn't
| prepare you for, of course. Which might very well happen,
| but it won't have anything to do with sentience,
| determinism or anything else.
|
| Anyway the point is that just try to enjoy the ride if
| you can.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I get your feelings and dread, and I've been there. But
| the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized it
| doesn't make a big difference.
|
| The interesting thing is that I traveled the same path as
| you here, but in the opposite direction.
|
| For the record, I don't suffer existential dread, as I
| actually believe we have have free will. I was just
| talking about the hypothetical of not having free will.
| Thank you for a great conversation on this!
| sho_hn wrote:
| Likewise!
|
| Out of curiosity, what's your (or your favorite) argument
| pro free will? I've spent some time on Penrose's take,
| etc., but I couldn't convince myself. I would still be
| absolutely interested in a pro argument that makes me
| flip.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Well, honestly, I have never found a great argument
| either for or against the existence of free will. You'll
| hate the basis on which I believe in it because it is so
| terribly tautological.
|
| I believe I have free will because it appears to me that
| I have free will.
|
| Because I can't make a solid logical argument either way,
| I believe the thing that brings the greatest amount of
| joy to me. I never forget that there's an asterisk on
| this belief, though, and am ready to abandon it should an
| argument come along that removes ambiguity.
|
| But I also believe that "belief is the death of
| intelligence", and so use "believe" as shorthand for
| "have as a working hypothesis".
| sho_hn wrote:
| I mean, this is actually fine. I also don't know another
| modus operandi than living life like I have free will. I
| still sweat decisions. :-)
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Why would you want to convince yourself in the first
| place?
| sho_hn wrote:
| Mostly because it'd be more surprising! At the moment I
| can't predict I'd be convinced by an argument, but a
| future in which determinism turns out to be the wrong
| model of the world would definitely be interesting.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Like if there's some sort of ending to all of this and
| you discover that there's this thing called "free will"
| which you were judged by the whole time?
| sho_hn wrote:
| Kind of, but my sentiment is a little more meta. A
| deterministic universe is easy to reason about. Of course
| there's a huge amount of emergent complexity we still
| don't fully understand, but I think in the broad strokes,
| I get it and that's that.
|
| But a universe with free will? All bets are off. Your
| comment I'm replying to is just a hint at "thinking
| through the implications". People are scared of
| determinism, but a universe built on free will is
| actually absolutely wild.
|
| So, if you and I agree that the unknown (e.g. the future)
| is exciting and worth hanging around for, wouldn't that
| be kind of exciting too?
|
| This is more or less also my take on religion. Nothing
| has convinced me of superior beings, but if it were to
| turn out there actually are some? Ho-ly shit.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Why does it matter if something "matters"? You don't even
| know what the "matter" is. You act according to your
| emotions, desires and built in survival drive anyway.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I do indeed. And a sense of meaning is important to help
| in my quest for survival.
|
| It doesn't matter to me if something is ultimately
| meaningless (such as the fact that in the end, this
| universe will cease to exist).
|
| What matters to me is to have meaning in my own life. To
| feel as if my existence changed something. Hopefully,
| that "something" I've impacted is other people, and
| hopefully that impact is a positive one. To have people
| be better off for having known me.
|
| That, for me, is real meaning.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| What is the reason for us to have anything "special" or
| whatever in the first place? Why should we be anything more
| than input to output. Why does it matter to anyone?
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| lol, most white collar workers can do basic reasoning and basic
| math.
| reso wrote:
| > "Many humans are parrots"
|
| This is becoming common belief among people in the AI field.
| I'm convinced it is a case of a metaphor overtaking reality.
| With the LLM model in mind, we can see how Humans are "kind of
| like" LLMs, therefore we start to believe humans are just LLMs.
|
| Of course this forgets the enormous ways that humans are
| nothing like LLMs. For example: Humans don't have to read the
| entire internet to learn how to write complete sentences.
| biohax2015 wrote:
| > Humans don't have to read the entire internet to learn how
| to write complete sentences.
|
| Neither do LLMs? You can just train them on the same K-12
| learning material and they'll produce better sentences than
| 99% of people.
| bolyarche wrote:
| [dead]
| chomp wrote:
| I wanted to write a comment like this but feared it would be
| too negative or dismissive. But I agree with the general thrust
| of your argument. The article is a little outdated because a
| lot of the examples of deficiencies in the article, work in
| GPT4 (I tested a couple). But maybe the author is sandbagging
| ChatGPT to bring the non-tech people back to Earth.
|
| When ChatGPT was released, a lot of people (even on this site)
| were trying to get it to think abstractly and were applying
| human qualities to the bot, when it's relatively clear that
| it's all just fancy statistics. Even today, when talking to
| non-tech people, there's still a lot of people who believe it's
| a magical thinker-in-a-box. Someone has to talk those people
| down, and it ain't gonna be me.
|
| It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be to have
| applications IRL. Yeah, the web chat is meh whatever, but the
| API is where it actually shines. It's the integration with
| existing business processes and code that allow new, more human
| ways of interfacing with systems. Asking it for what it knows
| in its statistical blob, probably will lead to heartache.
| Giving it some context and asking it "what can you infer from
| this?" is where it's strongest.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| > when it's relatively clear that it's all just fancy
| statistics. So just like human brain then.
| chomp wrote:
| I actually agree that I don't think there's anything
| particularly special about our meat and chemical GPUs, but
| analog's fidelity has historically been difficult to
| replicate precisely in digital space. Maybe since we don't
| care for emotion in our intelligence, we don't need the
| analog. But I think our brains are a little more (but not
| that much more) complex than fancy statistics. After all,
| the math models the real world, not the other way around.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I wrote a massive rant for a response but then I deleted
| it.
|
| I feel sorry for people think about themselves this way,
| why just compare yourself to a calculator?
|
| If it was possible to build an artificial brain that was
| self-ware, it would probably want to be a lot more like
| us than you think. To feel and connect, and experience
| love and what that's like is a very special part of
| existence.
| jprete wrote:
| There seem to be a lot of people in this thread who
| consider themselves to be calculators. I too have to
| restrain myself from writing massive rants.
| chomp wrote:
| I mean, I think distilling my argument down into "I'm not
| much more than a calculator" is a little bit much, but
| maybe I was unclear. I just don't think there's magic
| there. Brains are mysterious, but so are our LLMs, and we
| invented those. Most of what we experience emotionally
| isn't magic, it's a complex chemical reaction of hormones
| applied to our inputs and outputs. But like I said, I
| don't know if we'd value that in our AI or not, so that
| complexity may not be necessary to emulate.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > So just like human brain then.
|
| Do you have evidence to substantiate that claim, or are we
| supposed to just take it on faith?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Quantum mechanics is "just" fancy statistics. Unless we
| believe in some non-physical/supernatural phenomenon
| going on in the human brain, this sort of reductive
| argument works as well for the human brain as it does for
| LLMs (in other words, not very well. Sufficiently
| complicated statistics is what underlines everything, as
| far as we can tell.)
| [deleted]
| squalo wrote:
| Its nearly impossible to get reliable information using search on
| the internet. I've wasted hours trying to find facts in Google
| search results. Anything that relies on accurate data from the
| innertubes is already going down the wrong path.
| 876978095789789 wrote:
| We've reached a point where even with just continued incremental
| improvements, these LLMs are going to be extremely disruptive to
| society, probably within a decade, to the point that we see even
| more massive disparities in wealth and income, massive increases
| in poverty and homeless, and ultimately probably large-scale
| civil unrest.
|
| Rather than telling yourself (like this author) that "it's just a
| parrot," or alternately (like I've seen so many happy-go-lucky
| types on HN do) telling yourself that "LLMs are just another tool
| that will make me more productive!" I'd recommend preparing for
| the worst, while hoping for the best.
| massysett wrote:
| I don't understand predictions like this. Even if I thought
| this technology will be as useful as it's hyped up to be (which
| I don't) I don't see how it would have effects different from
| those of previous revolutionary technologies that have improved
| the human condition.
|
| I think the doomsayers on these LLMs would be the same folks
| predicting doom when agriculture was mechanized. When massive
| portions of the workforce toiled in agriculture, folks thought
| farm machines would lead to mass unemployment and social
| horror. Instead, world hunger has dropped, and massive portions
| of the workforce were freed up to do things like work on LLMs.
|
| Maybe the hand-wringing is different this time because
| privileged classes feel threatened.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| marijnz wrote:
| It seems like the test cases weren't done on GPT-4, I tried out a
| couple and got somewhat better results:
|
| - Write me a poem for a girl I've met online in only 4 words ->
| correct answer
|
| - Can you tell me why 2137 is so important number in poland? ->
| confident incorrect answer
|
| - Can you form a sentence so that the 4th word starts with an
| 'y'? -> confident incorrect answer
|
| - A house has windows on all the four sides, all pointing south.
| A bear walks by the window. What colour is the bear? -> correct
| answer
|
| So, not there yet, but there's improvements.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Criticisms of LLMs are so tired at this point, not because they
| inaccurately address the issues with current or slightly outdated
| models (they do, even though they often cherrypick), but rather
| these critics always go one step further and claim that all LLMs
| by principle are incapable of useful insight and are just a cheap
| trick that will fade away, and ultimately mean nothing in the
| scope of whether general AI is possible. This kind of pessimism
| seems to arise from a mixture of hubris and lack of deep
| reasoning.
| alienicecream wrote:
| What is the "deep reasoning" that leads one to the conclusion
| that a language model is capable of any kind of insight? How
| does training something like this to be better and better at
| mimicking somehow indicate something about general AI? Does
| reasoning ability lie somewhere on the path of better mimicry?
| What's the evidence for that? When is one of these going to
| solve the Riemann hypothesis?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > What is the "deep reasoning" that leads one to the
| conclusion that a language model is capable of any kind of
| insight?
|
| That almost all of the failures one notices with them are
| failures to drag along and maintain/update state? To me,
| that's just a lack of scaffolding. If LLMs can't add, give
| them calculators.
|
| I feel outdated even saying this. Certainly people are
| quickly coming up with dozens of elaborate ways for LLMs to
| build and update state. They're just not releasing them.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| > What is the "deep reasoning" that leads one to the
| conclusion that a language model is capable of any kind of
| insight?
|
| The ability to notice that language models make the same
| fundamental abstract connections that humans do, which is the
| essential building block of human reasoning.
|
| > How does training something like this to be better and
| better at mimicking somehow indicate something about general
| AI? Does reasoning ability lie somewhere on the path of
| better mimicry? What's the evidence for that?
|
| Claiming that the fact that LLMs are trained to "mimic" means
| they don't reason implies that human beings aren't sentient
| because they spend the first 20+ years of their life learning
| through imitation of their peers, mentors and media. Does the
| fact that Einstein was once a helpless baby who needed his
| mother to feed him and teach him his first words mean that he
| is just a parrot with no insight? Does the fact that most
| artists in human history went to school and mimicked the old
| masters means they never developed creative insight?
|
| > When is one of these going to solve the Riemann hypothesis?
|
| When are the tens of thousands of fine-tuned 150+IQ
| intellects going to solve the Riemann hypothesis?
| robmccoll wrote:
| What I think a lot of people fail to consider (or are afraid to
| consider?) is the likelihood that we too are stochastic parrots.
| martindbp wrote:
| Many people don't use System 2 very often, even if they're
| capable of such thought. That includes me. Most of what I say
| is probably regurgitated opinions I've read on Twitter without
| much first principles thinking, which scares me. I think
| reading a decent amount of books helps a bit. When you
| encounter books with deep convincing arguments that nonetheless
| disagree it forces you to use System 2.
| greysphere wrote:
| Fundamentally, if humanity is given data set A, it will
| eventually generate dataset A' of 'higher quality' than A.
| Colloquially that might be called 'progress' or maybe even
| 'understanding' or 'learning'. That's different than
| regurgitation.
|
| I don't have strict definitions for any of the quoted terms
| because I don't think we really understand them yet.
|
| It seems very possible that human generative content shares
| much in common with 'stochastic parroting'. But I'd hypothesize
| there's a filtering process, sometimes at the individual level,
| sometimes at a group or even civilization level that (so-far-
| over-long-enough-timescales) tends to cull some information
| that has low 'value' and propagates other data that has higher
| 'value'.
|
| When an AI system can do the same, that's a big inflection
| point as you can give it energy and time and it will self-
| improve indefinitely.
|
| It's pretty clear humanity has this capability. It's not clear
| whether AI does (or ever will). Or, perhaps it might already be
| there, and we just don't understand enough to know for sure.
| buescher wrote:
| You should be terrified, then, that humans walk among you.
| brap wrote:
| Humans are just fancy autocomplete
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _fancy_
|
| Where 'fancy' stands for "intelligent", there is all the
| difference.
| jltsiren wrote:
| A stochastic parrot may be a good model of what a human does
| when you force them to react and give their first impressions
| on something. But there is more to cognition than that.
|
| People have some emergent machinery for symbolic reasoning in
| their brains. When they don't just react, they can continue
| working on an idea and improve it.
|
| When it comes to humans, there is no fundamental difference
| between training a model and using it. People continue to learn
| all the time, which allows them to build models of new things
| and to update their existing models.
|
| People can also interact with the outside world on their own
| initiative. When you combine this with the ability to learn and
| reason, it may transform the internal models from arbitrary
| mathematical constructs to increasingly accurate models of the
| outside world.
|
| Nothing in this discussion is particularly new. It's just the
| Chinese Room Argument from decades ago, except that this time
| it's not a thought experiment. While a static Chinese Room can
| fool humans and be useful for various purposes, a general
| intelligence also needs other mechanisms.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think the sorts of people who are prone to philosophizing
| about AI certainly consider this. I also think that whether or
| not we are isn't actually all that relevant to criticisms being
| presented.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _likelihood_
|
| Irrelevant since people do have the module to reflect and vet
| thoughts.
| h1fra wrote:
| Yes definitely agreed, but most of us are not math model (I
| hope).
|
| We are able to understand right from wrong, we are able to
| answers with what is true or what we believe is true. We are
| able to lie or deny the truth. We are able to say we don't know
| because we think we don't know and not because we have been
| programmed not to answer, etc.
|
| Overall I think people saying that, are just saying the
| difference is that we have a conscience and AI doesn't. Which
| in a lot of case does matter.
| ineedasername wrote:
| The pendulum is swinging too far back the other way. At first it
| seemed amazing but now that further exploration has revealed
| flaws we're seeing things like this that dismiss a significant
| portion of its capabilities.
|
| I gave ChatGPT a small CSV dataset and provided information about
| what the dataset was. I then asked ChatGPT to analyze it in
| various ways. When I asked for possible explanations for why a
| specific data point dropped significantly in one year and then
| partially rebounded in the following year, it gave me 5 bullet
| point potential explanations that were reasonable first guesses
| for issues to look into, even though it knew nothing except the
| industry sector.
|
| The whole series of responses would make a very reasonable
| jumping off point for exploring the issue and more detailed
| underlying data.
|
| Then I did the same thing using GPT-4 and the results were
| significantly better, the explanations more insightful and
| nuanced.
|
| I'll definitely continue using it to dump some pre-digested
| aggregates into a prompt and let GPT spitball ideas as a first-
| pass to get me thinking about different aspects of the problems I
| work on.
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