4 ms·

It's not a 3rd grader. This kind of weird characterisation that people keep bringing up is totally wrong. It's more like a savant, who can generate random stor

It's not a 3rd grader. This kind of weird characterisation that people keep bringing up is totally wrong. It's more like a savant, who can generate random stories that have no bearing on reality. It's just a bit better than GPT-2, which spat out mostly incoherent crap. What's interesting about this is that it seems like the approach still seems to scale, and at some point, it might make something that actually generates useful output... and the ability of the model to handle general NLP tasks is a bit better. So yeah, it's interesting, but no, it's not a massive step forward for AI, in the way having an actual 3rd grader would be.

zozbot234 6y ago
I don't think a third grader would ever be able to write anything like e.g. https://read-the-samples.netlify.app/sample_1986 https://read-the-samples.netlify.app/sample_1986 this. Like it or not, this dreamed-up story is internally coherent in a truly impressive way, and even more impressive is how it stays on-message throughout.
- SonOfLilit 6y ago
  > Please share this article to show Trump’s new racist ad to everyone, because it is disgusting! Ouch, we've all just been burned by an AI!
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    I'm more scared than burned. If I saw this text in the wild I wouldn't be able to tell that it wasn't written by a human.
    - techdragon 6y ago
      For me the giveaway is that the level of hyperbolic content doesn’t match the level of textual content. It reads like subtle spam to me.
- criddell 6y ago
  Grammarly says that text was plagiarized and if that's true, it's not a surprise that it's coherent.
  - fock 6y ago
    and plagiarizing/wrongly paraphrasing texts is something every 3rd grader should be able to do. And yeah, generally a 3rd grader should be able to stay on topic as well ... And additionally he can draw, do image recognition, run circles, climb trees, pick fruits and mine rare minerals. Seems like we already have the business proposition of most AI businesses!
pharke 6y ago
It's also interesting for the fact that it has only been trained on text. There is a big unanswered question as to what would be possible if this were adapted so that it could be cross trained on other data that would provide a basis for its text output.
- fock 6y ago
  how would you propose to train it on multiple kinds of inputs/targets?
jerf 6y ago
"It's more like a savant, who can generate random stories that have no bearing on reality." That's actually just a particular special case of how this model is used, where they use the model to predict "the rest" of a story. It is not the nature of the model itself, and it can be used for other things, such as compression or other NLP tasks.

zozbot234 6y ago

I don't think a third grader would ever be able to write anything like e.g. https://read-the-samples.netlify.app/sample_1986 https://read-the-samples.netlify.app/sample_1986 this. Like it or not, this dreamed-up story is internally coherent in a truly impressive way, and even more impressive is how it stays on-message throughout.

SonOfLilit 6y ago
> Please share this article to show Trump’s new racist ad to everyone, because it is disgusting! Ouch, we've all just been burned by an AI!
- Mirioron 6y ago
  I'm more scared than burned. If I saw this text in the wild I wouldn't be able to tell that it wasn't written by a human.
  - techdragon 6y ago
    For me the giveaway is that the level of hyperbolic content doesn’t match the level of textual content. It reads like subtle spam to me.
criddell 6y ago
Grammarly says that text was plagiarized and if that's true, it's not a surprise that it's coherent.
- fock 6y ago
  and plagiarizing/wrongly paraphrasing texts is something every 3rd grader should be able to do. And yeah, generally a 3rd grader should be able to stay on topic as well ... And additionally he can draw, do image recognition, run circles, climb trees, pick fruits and mine rare minerals. Seems like we already have the business proposition of most AI businesses!

pharke 6y ago

It's also interesting for the fact that it has only been trained on text. There is a big unanswered question as to what would be possible if this were adapted so that it could be cross trained on other data that would provide a basis for its text output.

fock 6y ago
how would you propose to train it on multiple kinds of inputs/targets?

jerf 6y ago

"It's more like a savant, who can generate random stories that have no bearing on reality." That's actually just a particular special case of how this model is used, where they use the model to predict "the rest" of a story. It is not the nature of the model itself, and it can be used for other things, such as compression or other NLP tasks.