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0 points_yb2s3y ago0 comments

Haha, this is near the best explanation I can think of for the "this is not intelligent, it's just completing text strings, nothing to see here" people.

I've been playing with GPT-4 for days, and it is mind blowing how well it can solve diverse problems that are way outside it's training set. It can reason correctly about hard problems with very little information. I've used to to plan detailed trip itineraries, suggest brilliant geometric packing solutions for small spaces/vehicles, etc. It's come up with totally new suggestions for addressing climate change that I can't find any evidence of elsewhere.

This is a non-human/alien intelligence in the realm of human ability, with super-human abilities in many areas. Nothing like this has ever happened, it is fascinating and it's unclear what might happen next. I don't think people are even remotely realizing the magnitude of this. It will change the world in big ways that are impossible to predict.

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TeMPOraL3y ago

I used to be in the camp of "GPT-2 / GPT-3 is a glorified Markov chain". But over the last few months, I flipped 180° - I think we may have accidentally cracked a core part of "generalized intelligence" problem. It's not about the language, as much about associations - it seems to me that, once the latent space gets high-dimensional enough, a lot of problems reduce to adjacency search.

I'm starting to get a (sure, uneducated) feeling that this high-dimensional association encoding and search is fundamental to thinking, in a similar way to how a conditional and a loop is fundamental to (Turing-complete) computing.

Now, the next obvious step is of course to add conditionals and loops (and lots of external memory) to a proto-thinking LLM model, because what could possibly go wrong. In fact, those plugins are one of many attempts to do just that.

_yb2sOP3y ago

I completely agree. I have noticed this over the last few years in trying to understand how my own creative thinking seems to work. It seems to me that human creative problem solving involves embedding or compressing concepts into a spatial representation so we can draw high level analogies. A location search then brings creative new ideas translated from analogous situations. I can directly observe this happening in my own mind. These language models seem to do the same.

krainboltgreene3y ago

> It can reason correctly about hard problems with very little information.

i am so tired of seeing people who should know better think that this program can reason.

(in before the 400th time some programmer tells me "well aren't you just an autocomplete" as if they know anything about the human brain)

sebzim45003y ago

>(in before the 400th time some programmer tells me "well aren't you just an autocomplete" as if they know anything about the human brain)

Do you know any more about ChatGPT internals than those programmers know about the human brain?

Sure, I believe you can write down the equations for what is going on in each layer, but knowing how each activation is calculated from the previous layer tells you very little about what hundreds of billions of connections can achieve.

krainboltgreene3y ago

> Do you know any more about ChatGPT internals than those programmers know about the human brain?

Yes, especially every time I have to explain what an LLM is or anytime I see a comment about how ChatGPT "reasoned" or "knew" or "understood" something when that clearly isn't how it works by OpenAI's own admission.

But even if that wasn't the case especially yes do I understand some random ML project more than programmers know about what constitutes human!

dougmwne3y ago

Honestly, I don’t see how anyone really paying attention can draw this conclusion. Take a look at the kinds of questions on the benchmarks and the AP exams. Independent reasoning is the key thing these tests try to measure. College entrance exams are not about memorization and regurgitation. GTP-4 scores a 1400 on the SAT.

krainboltgreene3y ago

No shit, a good quarter of the internet is SAT prep. Where do you think GPT got it's dataset?

imtringued3y ago

I have a deprecated function and ask ChatGPT what I should use instead, ChatGPT responds by inventing a random non existent function. I tell it that the function doesn't exist, it tries again with another non existent function.

Oddly speaking that sounds like a very simple language level failure, i.e. the tool generates text that matches the shape of the answer but not its details. I am not far enough into this ChatGPT religion to gaslight myself over outright lies like Elon Musk fanboys seem to enjoy doing.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 points_yb2s3y ago0 comments

Haha, this is near the best explanation I can think of for the "this is not intelligent, it's just completing text strings, nothing to see here" people.

0 comments

TeMPOraL3y ago

_yb2sOP3y ago

krainboltgreene3y ago

> It can reason correctly about hard problems with very little information.

i am so tired of seeing people who should know better think that this program can reason.

(in before the 400th time some programmer tells me "well aren't you just an autocomplete" as if they know anything about the human brain)

sebzim45003y ago

>(in before the 400th time some programmer tells me "well aren't you just an autocomplete" as if they know anything about the human brain)

Do you know any more about ChatGPT internals than those programmers know about the human brain?

krainboltgreene3y ago

> Do you know any more about ChatGPT internals than those programmers know about the human brain?

But even if that wasn't the case especially yes do I understand some random ML project more than programmers know about what constitutes human!

dougmwne3y ago

krainboltgreene3y ago

No shit, a good quarter of the internet is SAT prep. Where do you think GPT got it's dataset?

imtringued3y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse