20 ms·
I asked GPT-3 for the question to “42”
- simongray 6y agoThis kind of reads like 2020 Daoism. Is GPT-3 just emulating Laozi?
- praptak 6y agoTo me it reads like an articulate slacker student trying to wing it during an oral exam.
- a4444f 6y agoI agree. Or lacanian psychoanalysts, pure structure, no (imaginary) meaning (like maths, or functional programming, no side effects), which I like. Book of Kohelet / Ecclesiastes seems similar to Book of Changes/ I ching.
- larodi 6y agothe response seems as if someone is indeed typing on the other side of the wire... still can't believe it's text produced by a system.
- nullsense 6y agoIt's exactly the kind of thing I'd expect a human to produce in response to being tasked with what they tried to task it with. It's bananas.
- otabdeveloper4 6y agoWhy 'bananas'? The thing is trained on a veritable brazillion of gigabytes of human-generated text. You could probably get the same response with a simple regexp search if you had the same training database. The real wonder is that it manages to stitch everything together without obvious grammar errors or continuity flaws.
- nullsense 6y ago>The real wonder is that it manages to stitch everything together without obvious grammar errors or continuity flaws. Like I said - it's bananas.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fhars 6y agoAnother fine example for the blatant implicit sexism of IT bro culture. We all know that is was a girl sitting in a small café in Rickmansworth that happened on the solution, not the most brilliant man.
- justarandomq 6y agonoun: man; plural noun: men; 1. an adult male human being. 2. a human being of either sex; a person.
- fhars 6y agoAn "his mind", "his study" or "his son" is obviously the second meaning...
- justarandomq 6y agoOh. You'd be right in that. But you're the one that brought up sexism in the first case! Perhaps it's prejudiced in itself to assume implicit evil from the choice of characters in a story? Not to mention it detracts from the central discussion, which may explain downvotes. > Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cyphar 6y agoIt seemed pretty clear to me that it was a light-hearted joke, referencing the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy[1]: > “And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.” [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/79195-and-then-one-thursday-nearly-two-thousand-years-after-one https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/79195-and-then-one-thursday...
- triceratops 6y agoI thought 42 was the number of roads a man must walk down. Is that not right?
- mrunkel 6y agoOnly if you're a mouse.
- cyphar 6y agoNo, the question was never discovered in any of the original series -- Arthur tries to discover the question by pulling scrabble tiles out of a bag, but discovers that the question is "what is six times nine?" (which leads Ford Prefect to quip "I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."). It then dawns on them that this is because the Earth program was disturbed by an alien spaceship (which they were on) filled with advertising executives and telephone sanitisers crashing on Earth and forcing all of the local cavemen into extinction, meaning the program was thrown off course millions of years before he was born. "How many roads must a man walk down?" is just a suggestion for the question that gets thrown out by the pan-galactic mice -- which (depending on the version of the story you read) they decide to use as a fake answer so they can get on the 5-D chat show circuit. It wasn't the actual question.
- triceratops 6y agoIt was a joke. I'm aware it's a reference to the Bob Dylan song "Blowin' in the wind".
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI thought it's what you get if you multiply six by nine.
- inopinatus 6y agoAdams was simply working in base 13.
- 6y ago
- praptak 6y ago"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- (attributed to) Salvador Dali
- st_goliath 6y ago"Human beings may not be perfect, but a computer program with language synthesis is hardly the answer to the world's problems." -- JC Denton
- iExploder 6y agoquoting people who were not born yet is not allowed
- saagarjha 6y agoI wish my computer gave me answers, instead of questions like “why is a core being hogged by the calendar syncing service” and “why am I getting a kernel panic every two hours” or “why do I even bother clicking ‘Always Allow’ on prompts for git to have access to my GitHub credentials when it never remembers my decision”.
- praptak 6y agoThe quip is more about importance of coming up with good questions. If you interpret it like this it may even be applicable to the problems you mention. Asking good questions is after all an important part of troubleshooting tech problems.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoThe answer to all of your questions: because of shitty programmers and/or PMs.
- saagarjha 6y agoNext question: what can I do about this?
- 6y ago
- asutekku 6y agoI received ” Apologies, but something went wrong on our end.” from Medium. Surprisingly fitting in this case.
- UncleSlacky 6y ago"We apologise for the inconvenience" would have been better.
- anonytrary 6y agoGPT-3 can write chapters of kids' books with complete continuity. This thing has more interesting responses than I do. Wow. The long-range order here is astounding.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoThis is the correct thing to be amazed about.
- anaganisk 6y agoWhen the beta came out I was very surprised to see overnight startups bad on it. Some even hiring devs. I still wonder how they thought it was a good idea to launch because one sparse example worked, without any control or knowledge over internals and pricing.
- wegi 6y agoThere is a case to be made for being fast "online" with a new breakthrough technology. So they just made their bet as any startup bets on a central thesis. And its not like GPT-3 is useless. It is perfect for immitating texts written by other entities.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoCynically, it'll probably end up being used to generate content for websites and online marketing.
- sebmellen 6y agoIt already is, and I regret to admit I've used it. Check out https://copysmith.ai https://copysmith.ai or https://shortlyread.com https://shortlyread.com.
- patrickk 6y agoAre the results any good? Can it really generate quality copy? How is it for research on any given topic?
- danielscrubs 6y agoI wonder if English will be the first to become a low trusted language as most AI research is done on the English language. “Is it in english? Probably written by a bot.” might be a common thought in ten years. Ofc eventually the big languages will catch up in marketing spam.
- 6y ago
- neom 6y agoI don't understand what the references to AI Dungeon are all about?
- yreg 6y agoPerhaps rather fittingly I don't understand your question. The author used AI Dungeon[0] as an environment for this exercise. It is an AI-assisted text adventure game that lets players do whatever they want, merely by typing it. Very lucid-dream-like. [0] https://play.aidungeon.io/main/landing https://play.aidungeon.io/main/landing
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jml7c5 6y agoGPT-3 is still in limited beta, and you have to apply for API access. Fortunately for those who can't get over those hurdles, AI Dungeon's custom mode is very free-form. So people have been using it as a roundabout way of toying with GPT-3.
- snemvalts 6y agoSilicon Valley hype with GPT-3 has gone too far. It's just a probabilistic language model that has sampled a lot of the internet. It cannot think, and is echoing our thoughts back to ourselves.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoIt can think, just kinda badly. It's an animal in the ecosystem of language.
- mewse 6y agoGPT-3 can produce text that's probabilistically similar to text that it's been trained on, and observed as part of sample outputs. If there was no huge corpus of human language to train it on, GPT-3 couldn't even begin to give the illusion of thinking, and certainly couldn't tell you (for example) that 3 is greater than 2, or even know that 3 and 2 were concepts that it perhaps should have opinions about. The really interesting question (at least to me) is to what extent that observation is also true for humans. I mean, we humans presumably built up our big corpus of human language/knowledge all on our own over the lifetime of the species, which GPT-3 currently cannot do, but.. to what extent does human thinking just consist of probabilistic re-mixing of words, phrases, and sentences that we've seen before, that came to us through our continual training on segments we've been exposed to from that big 'dataset' of human knowledge, and the best of which then get contributed back into that dataset? How much more than that is actually going on, for us? If what GPT-3 is doing shouldn't really count as 'thinking' (as seems intuitive to me, personally, though others may certainly disagree), then to what extent can we say that humans do anything qualitatively different?
- wruza 6y agoAnd looking at ourselves as unique wonderful creatures is so embedded in our culture, that approaching to these questions from the other side¹ may count as blasphemy. I hope to see non-niche but instead general training of these ais in my lifetime. And maybe to see new species, free of our evolutional uglinesses. ¹ Like in "it is not true, so let's prove it first and then brag about it"
- trabant00 6y agoIt sounds nice but it's just one non sequitur after another. A very sleek looking plane that is incapable of flight. I expect the exact opposite from what I would qualify as AI: something that doesn't look like any plane a human would design but yet it flies! Continuing on that parallel: it took ~400 years from the flying machines like the one designed by Leonardo da Vinci to transition from a superficial imitation of birds to a design that didn't look like birds but could actually fly.
- aaron695 6y agoIt's Blackhat AI. Designed to confuse humans. Compared to chess AI for instance which I think still can't play like humans.
- orwin 6y agoDid you see Alphazero vs stockfish chess matches? I looked into 7 of them, and of those 7, 3 of them could have been played by a human (2 victories one draw). It was impressive.
- ttsda 6y agoChess AI can play like humans, and win consistently (stockfish), and it can also play in completely novel ways, and win even more (alphazero)
- SurfingToad 6y agoStockfish doesn't play like humans. That's how sites like Lichess detect cheating; you can tell Stockfish moves apart from human moves. AlphaZero/Leela Zero, on the other hand, plays like humans.
- m12k 6y agoI mean, it's an amalgam of text written by humans - it's not even trying to make a plane that flies, it's trying to make a plane that looks like all the planes designed by humans - and largely succeeding. I'm sorry that's not a task you consider interesting, but the fact that a machine learning model trained in an unsupervised fashion can succeed that much at anything non-trivial is mind-boggling to me, and makes me hopeful that other tasks will also be within reach relatively soon.
- jml7c5 6y agoI get: >"This is why you are here. This is how things work."The boy's eyes were wide with wonderment, but then he said: "Dad, I don't understand!" His father looked at him with disappointment and annoyance. "You do not understand," he said. "I am sorry, but you will have to wait until tomorrow."The boy smiled, as if he understood everything. He stood up and left the room. Then it wanders into some confused, repetitive nonsense. So I think the author is reading far too much into the responses. It's fun to make these connections and perform a sort of literary analysis as an amusement. But if you believe it is real, you're treading down the same mental path that produced such foolishness as astrology and witch trials. After all, when you intentionally search for hidden meaning in something, you're almost guaranteed to find it.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoI think people here tend to underestimate the mental capability of GPT-3. Keeping that in mind: the author vastly overestimates the mental capability of GPT-3.
- reader_mode 6y agoI spent some time reading GPT-3 reddit replies [1] and I'm impressed with the quality of writing - but the actual content is terrible IMO - it's like reading the most annoying people on forums - grasping at semantics etc. while they have nothing valuable or insightful to say. It just creates noise and writes for the sake of writing something. It can say things, it just doesn't have anything valuable to say. So asking GPT-3 random metaphysical questions gets you semi credible responses because those kinds of questions reduce to semantics and bullshit anyway. I could see this as a layer that bridges some AI reasoning model and human language. [1] https://www.reddit.com/user/thegentlemetre https://www.reddit.com/user/thegentlemetre
- WA 6y agoI think you nailed it. I played around with AI Dungeon as well and couldn't shake the feeling that GPT-3 is just a text completion engine filled with smart-sounding, but empty stuff written by a teen on Reddit. To put it another way: If you read anything from/about GPT-3, imagine who and in which sub would've posted something like this.
- sfshaw 6y agoCould a model be trained to predict the prompt given to GPT3 based on the responses?
- antihero 6y agoWell that's the thing, it isn't coming up with deeper concepts and using language to express them, it is merely expressing the language that would make sense to as a reply to a prompt. The meaning it has is shallow, much like most young posters. It sounds completely devoid of meaning and purpose because it is.
- inglor_cz 6y agoThere are some real gems there, though: "For example, in order for me to be 'born', my parents had to deprive themselves of their greatest happiness by having sex and conceiving me. They could have done something constructive with their time like, I don't know, doing philosophy or playing chess or studying physics."
- Mordisquitos 6y agoFrankly, I'm more disappointed with the writing prompt: >The question he found matched the answer "42" and neatly explained the following questions: The ultimate question of life, the Universe, and Everything—to which the answer is indeed 42—does not "neatly explain" any question. What it does do, however, is explain how the answer 42 neatly explains the answers to those. Just like in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you can't blame the AI for failing to give the answer you were looking for. It was just asked the wrong question.
- dr_dshiv 6y ago"Fair thee well." This sentence made me doubt the whole thing. That's not a mistake GPT-3 would make -- but a human would. How can one know if GPT-3 really wrote something? Is there a starting seed or something that would allow the same response to follow the initial prompt? Or are we in positronic computing territory, beyond deterministic computing outcomes?
- TeMPOraL 6y agoGPT-3 isn't doing any thinking here. It's a glorified Markov Chain trained on the corpus of Reddit. Its output is pieces of random Reddit comments, mixed and matched to maximize the metric of "how likely are such words to appear after the prompt given".
- Tenoke 6y agoIt's neither anywhere as simple as a Markov Chain nor is the training dataset reddit comments (tho there are some in there).
- dicytea 6y ago>That's not a mistake GPT-3 would make -- but a human would. Where did you think GPT learned it from? ;) https://www.ruralmessenger.com/blogs/fair-thee-well-good-sir/ https://www.ruralmessenger.com/blogs/fair-thee-well-good-sir... https://www.amazon.com/Fair-Thee-Well-Nathan-Jones/dp/069241312X https://www.amazon.com/Fair-Thee-Well-Nathan-Jones/dp/069241... https://www.amazon.com/Symphony-Fair-Thee-Well-Requiem/dp/B006MBV2JE https://www.amazon.com/Symphony-Fair-Thee-Well-Requiem/dp/B0... https://soundcloud.com/ozwaldmusic/fair-thee-well https://soundcloud.com/ozwaldmusic/fair-thee-well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCIRgihMJlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCIRgihMJlg
- dr_dshiv 6y agoNo doubt people make this mistake. But do you see other common spelling errors? I don't. Further, google n-grams show that "fare thee well" is orders of magnitude more common. So I'm skeptical this was machine generated.
- isoprophlex 6y agoUntil GPT shows evidence of qualia, this is useless anthropomorphism applied to an expensive bucket of linear algebra.
- andai 6y agoWhat sort of output would it need to produce to achieve that?
- throwaway4good 6y agoI just typed in: But what is GPT-3 really? And I got: A very big Eliza program with a shit ton of marketing.
- throwaway4good 6y agoOf course ... this was a joke ... no way GPT-3 would give such a concise answer.
- tuyiown 6y agoThis is a very worn quote, but it applies so much to this nonsense: > There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them! — Richard P. Feynman While Feynman talked about performing computation you didn't need just to see if would yield the expected result, here GPT-3 outputs a somewhat expected result, and then we have an entire reflection on what it means or implies, while the whole purpose of something like GPT-3 is to output the most meaningless expected result for any kind of input. There is some kind of fun in it, meaningless fun, the best kind for some, and the best way to waste time, but I can't see that thread without making sure it's said: GPT-3 either outputs for wasted fun or boring but useful expected result, never for meaningful content to be awed at.
- cblconfederate 6y agoWhy do people expect that gpt has evolved to a semantic engine, since nothing of the sort was engineered into it? It's comparable to reflex neural circuits , or to central pattern generators, but not to (yet unknown) cognitive centers
- TheUndead96 6y agoI think this is actually the interesting part. It appears to understand some causality in spite of never being trained this. GPT-3 seems to be able to do arithmetic with small numbers, but begins to fail with larger equations. This seems congruous to how humans may internalise arithmetic. As far as we know, we do not have an ALU in the brain.
- cblconfederate 6y agoWe are also known for seeing patterns where they don't exist. If someone is going to make claims about the neural network's reasoning they should corroborate it with statistical analysis of its performance
- tiborsaas 6y agoThe transformer model is in fact engineered to discover semantics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learning_model) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learning_... Given a large enough training dataset it shows that intelligent behavior arises, which is pretty remarkable. It can also be scaled further. Read the original paper on the architecture: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
- cblconfederate 6y agoI'm familiar. It's engineered to attend , attend , attend and fill in blanks. Nowhere is there any consideration for semantics
- tiborsaas 6y ago
- thinbeige 6y agoOT: How can an ordinary mortal like the most of us play around with GPT-3 and make their own experiences?
- andai 6y agoProbably AI dungeon? Are there any other free generators? I asked for API access months ago and didn't even get so much as a "no".
- rozab 6y agoI have seen a wide variety of 'massaged' GPT-3 output online. Some is obviously fake. Some is just a bit too... clean. I suspect the author has omitted a lot of attempts and/or done some editing.
- monkpit 6y agoI wondered the same thing - is any of this reproducible? Or do we just have to guess whether the author is telling the truth about the output? Or is this obviously fake and I’m just taking it too seriously? It seems like a fun creative writing prompt for the author themselves, rather than anything to do with GPT-3.
- templain 6y agoHow is 42 still funny, even to boomers?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rosmax_1337 6y agoNow this was a quality post.
- fsiefken 6y agoI think GPT-3 answer ? is pretty good. For me an answer is as good as the question. If you reach the ultimate question the ultimate answers reveals itself. I liken it to maha ati, trungpa and rigdzin shikpo explain: "The ground of samsara and nirvana, the beginning and end of both confusion and realization, the nature of universal shunyata and of all apparent phenomena, more fundamental even than the trikaya because it is free from bias toward enlightenment, is the alaya, some-times called the pure or original mind. Although' prajna sees in it no basis for such concepts as different as-pects, yet three fundamental aspects of complete openness, natural perfection, and absolute spontaneity are distinguished by upaya as useful devices. Complete openess. All aspects of every phenomenon are completely clear and lucid. The whole universe is open and unobstructed, everything mutually interpenetrating. Since all things are naked, clear, and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or to realize. The nature of things naturally appears and is naturally present in time-transcending awareness. The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes onto oneself. This produces a tremendous energy which is usually locked up in the processes of mental evasion and generally running away from life experiences. Clarity of awareness may in its initial stages be unpleasant or fear inspiring. If so, then one should open oneself completely to the pain or the fear and welcome it. In this way the barriers created by one's own habitual emotional reactions and prejudices are broken down. When performing the meditation practice one should get the feeling of opening oneself out completely to the whole universe with absolute simplicity and nakedness of mind, ridding oneself of all "protecting" barriers. Don't mentally split in two when meditating, one part of the mind watching the other like a cat watching a mouse. One should realize that one does not meditate in order to go deeply into oneself and withdraw from the world."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rvieira 6y agoPerhaps an implied "you're too young to understand. wait until you are 42"? ;)
- bergstromm466 6y ago> We can only speculate as to GPT-3's internal states. Perhaps it knows the question perfectly well, but considers humans as too immature and spoiled to tell: In its opinion, we shouldn’t even bother to find questions to answers we can’t possible understand. Or, more likely, it doesn’t know either. Anyway, it comes across as a jerk. What's with the constant anthropomorphizing of Artificial Intelligence in Silicon Valley? Why talk about these systems and models as if they are objective? They are 100% subjective. It just helps to cover up racist algorithms, and doesn't hold the creators accountable. We can do better. Please can ‘OpenAI’ rename themselves to ClosedAI if they are not open sourcing everything from the start? Back in 2015, they wrote: ”As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world.” [1] Now they write: "With GPT-2, one of our key concerns was malicious use of the model (e.g., for disinformation), which is difficult to prevent once a model is open sourced. For the API, we’re able to better prevent misuse by limiting access to approved customers and use cases." [2] Not open sourcing GPT-3 because it can be used to create disinformation has more to do with the slow plundering of the knowledge Commons and the violent Intellectual Property (Monopoly) systems of the Global North elite, than with supposed 'bad actors' creating disinformation. Blaming ‘bad actors’ ignores the systemic roots and the process of years of Capitalist ‘disinheriting’ by the Capitalist classes. [3] Professor Guy Standing, author of the book ‘Plunder of the Commons’ writes: ”Meanwhile, the erosion of the education commons is creating a frightening political erosion. Since the ancient Greeks, education has been an integral part of leisure (schole); it is a public good, and its primary objective historically has been the forging of character and the ability to be a good citizen. Again, Jefferson captured that best, along with John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman. But that perspective is anathema for neo-liberals, for whom schooling is for preparing people for the job market, for developing ‘human capital’. In their framework, all education that does not increase employability, competitiveness and economic advantage is dispensable. Consequently, there has been an erosion of the arts, civics, philosophy, ethics and history. Music teaching in state schools is disappearing. The education commons as the teaching and preservation of vernacular and non-standard thinking has shrunk. This has weakened the ability of citizens to participate in and comprehend political discourse, leading to seduction by simplistic platitudes and appeals to emotion, rather than reason and evidence.. Commentators have paid insufficient attention to loss of the education commons as a cause of the growth of populism and thinly-veiled neo-fascism stalking modern politics, epitomised by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.” [4] I think the following cultural myth is the real disinformation: “Silicon Valley is dominant because it's managed to attract the brightest people.” In reality, Silicon Valley/Amerika monopolizes new discoveries through it's ‘Intellectual Property’ system. At same time it has created a revisionist 'free trade' narrative that it uses to exploit so called ‘developing nations’ (instead all 'developed countries' used protectionist policies to grow their industries, as well as copying technologies from enemies) [5]. This allows the Global North elite to gaslighting-ly ‘kick away the ladder’ and dominate by creating contrived scarcity and financial imperialism through the IMF, WB, WTO, WIPO and the TRIPS agreement. The Amerikan elite also props up Neoliberal ‘democracies’ by bribing leaders and using parasitic debt to provide 'aid', which gives the Elite complete power over the technological (under)development of these countries. When Global South countries ultimately default on their loans, they are forced to sell off natural resources and privatize vital institutions. [6] Through the above narrative and strategies, Amerika artificially limits access to humanity's inventions, as well as the further development of these inventions; while at the same time hoarding Capital to be able to suck up new technologies from around the world through acquisitions and acquihires (as well as programs like YC that bring naive young founders to the US, bringing them in contact with the Amerikan Intellectual Property system and Amerikan Venture Capital funding, incorporating it into the Global North elite’s Imperial machinery): In other words: Silicon Valley is the Amerikan Elite’s front for sustaining an imperial fortress that is able to 1) control, or even block, innovation (e.g. ‘Who Killed The Electric Car’ or ‘Phonebloks’,) 2) spy on every internet user by centralizing the internet’s architecture and it’s virtual meeting places, and 3) uses this to extract rent from every single one of these interactions: ”By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, [Silicon Valley Corporations] have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction. Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime.”[6] Professor Jakob Rigi adds: “Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others' properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public.” “Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. […] “Pirate” activists, so-called crackers, illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. […] These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting.” [7] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151222103150/https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151222103150/https://openai.co... [2] https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/ [3] https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... [4] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/plunder-commons-compensate-commoners/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/plunder-commons-... [5] https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb [6] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley [7] “The Political Economy of Intellectual Property and the Struggle for Commons of Knowledge”, Jakob Rigi
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago> and the question is: ?. Ah, the epsilon question. Well played, GPT-3.
- patrickk 6y agoI wonder how many GPT-3 bots are running around already on HN and reddit (perhaps hooked up to PRAW) as experiments. It's very meta, since GPT-3 (GTP-2?) was partially/wholly trained on the reddit corpus of text. Very strange to think about. There are probably armies of sockpuppets already in the wild shoving various political agendas down people's throats.
- Kuraj 6y agoIt has happened on reddit before: https://www.kmeme.com/2020/10/gpt-3-bot-went-undetected-askreddit-for.html https://www.kmeme.com/2020/10/gpt-3-bot-went-undetected-askr... Then there's also https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ which is funny to read sometimes
- cosarara 6y ago> With growing excitement, I typed the prologue into the console: > Why is there something rather than nothing? How is it possible for Universe the exist? It bothers me that the second sentence in the prompt has a mistake in it: "for Universe the exist" instead of "for the Universe to exist".
- augustl 6y agoAm I the only one seeing the religious undertones here? :) > “What is the answer to life, the Universe and everything? What did you mean when you said now I know but I’m too young to understand? How can I understand the answer but not the question?” > The father put on a condescending smirk as he thought to himself, “I came up with the theory of everything. How dare a child doubt it?” This maps well onto the christian idea of God, the father. I guess we can read one of two things into this: AI has discovered that God is real, or humanity has discovered that anyone, even AI, can make up religion.
- pmoriarty 6y agoWe are on the cusp of new religions forming around AI. As primitive and nonsensical as GPT-3 is, even in this thread on a site full of technologically literate people we already see some suggesting that GPT-3 is a superintelligence. Imagine how the technologically illiterate and credulous, of which there are many, might react to GPT-4. Also consider what would happen if a similar model was trained not indiscriminately on a hodgepodge of every text its creators could get their hands on, but specifically on oracular and sacred texts. A new religion might spontaneously ignite from that alone, but of course the likelihood increases if the tool gets in to the hands of someone with that intent.
- bluehex 6y agoA little HN story. Prompts are italicized > You open your browser to hacker news and find an article at the top of the page with the headline "Raspberry Pi 4 V3DV graphics driver achieves Vulkan 1.0 conformance". You think to yourself: "I can't believe I didn't know this before. This is going to be so much easier now! > You immediately go grab your Raspberry Pi and plug it in... You turn on your PC and get your Raspberry Pi ready. You power on the device and immediately you have a successful boot no issues from there. You navigate to the folder with the vk. > "VK" you remember, was the directory where you were conducting your vulkan 1.0 driver tests, but now that full conformance has been announced you realize: "Now I can start working on a vulkan 1.0 conforming game engine!!!" You copy and paste the contents of the folder you made in step 2 into a new folder called "Boom" > You've been waiting to work on this for a while... You open a file called vk_1.c and begin typing in the code: VK_ DECLARE_STATIC_DNS_FUNCTIONS; VK_DECLARE_FORMAT_SIDES_IN_DEPTH_P3; VK_DECLARE_SERIAL_BITMAP_TYPE; VK_DECLARE_PATCHABLE_BUFFER_PIXELS; VK_DECLARE_PATCHABLE_STENCIL_PIXEL; VK_DECLARE_PATCHABLE_STENCIL_DIMENSIONS; Vulkan is a very powerful graphics API, but it's probably one of the most cryptic, especially since they seem to be fond of using ambiguous names for things. You'll have to look up all these obscure APIs you're declaring at the beginning of the file.
- dkersten 6y agoSo, I decided to try it for myself and I'm personally quite happy with what GPT-3 responded! I wrote: A deity materialises from the ether. The deity says loudly: "The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42." The deity smiles and says "What could the question possibly be; a question so profound as to answer every mystery; with an answer that is 42?" The deity crept closer, smiled again and said: "I will tell you. The ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, whose answer is 42, is..." He paused for a moment, then spoke a final time, revealing the mystery of the question and that question was: And GPT-3 completed the story by writing: "Why am I here?" The deity vanished into the ether. Nothingness took it's place. Not sure how the answer to that is 42, but I find that a pretty great question!
- DanielBMarkham 6y agoFascinating. A while back I set out to write some books on creating technology: how to build the right thing, how to build things right (This is not a plug) As part of that, I had to address the meta issue: how do we learn anything? The answer was "questions", but it wasn't questions like you're probably thinking. It was meta, the universal class of all questions. Turns out, by simply asking questions, questions nobody knows the answer to, questions with bad premises, rhetorical questions, and so forth? We end up creating a shared language about the world around us. That shared language is the basis for any kind of joint creative effort. It's something we've been doing since childhood but never realized it. I guess GPT-3 agrees with me! Woot!
- andreyk 6y ago"An immature and angry child demanding an answer it couldn't possibly understand? It dawned on me that this was how GPT-3 really saw me. Or rather, how GPT-3 thought of humanity. ... We can only speculate as to GPT-3's internal states. Perhaps it knows the question perfectly well, but considers humans as too immature and spoiled to tell: In its opinion, we shouldn’t even bother to find questions to answers we can’t possible understand. Or, more likely, it doesn’t know either. Anyway, it comes across as a jerk." This sort of anthropomorphization, treating GPT-3 as some independent agent with feelings, is pretty silly IMHO. It's fun and all, but with this post it's hard to see if the author understands that thinking of GPT-3 in this way is giving it way too much credit (or if this post is kind of joking).
- jdporter 6y agoWhat if "What is the question?" is the question? (ht Hofstadter)
- jerrre 6y agomeaning "42" is the answer to "what is the question"? curious to hear what would be the answer to "42?"
- rexreed 6y agoGPT-3 is just a natural language generator trained on a LOT of data that finds patterns in text already written to generate a best guess as to what will come next in the word series. Nowhere does any of that pattern matching being trained on a large corpus of Internet data have anything to do with comprehension, understanding, wisdom, or intellect of any kind. To expect anything but a probabilistic string of word responses is to seek meaning from noise.
- dylan604 6y agoKilljoy, is that you? People do weird things all of the time "just because" or "for science". Nobody is really expecting "truth". Using GPT-3 is kind of like the modern day Mad Libs for computer nerds.
- rexreed 6y agoGPT-3 is one big, very expensive, Microsoft-exclusively licensed, Billion-dollar Killjoy. I totally agree with you on that. If only GPT-3 was for sh*ts and giggles I'd be with you. But hey Microsoft dumped a load of money into this and wow these amazing AI researchers are banking big buck on GPT-3 being the answer to life, the universe, and everything (pun intended). AI researchers are staking major claim on all these amazing things GPT-3 can and will do. So pardon me if I'm non-plussed about all these wacky and crazy things we can do with the largest neural network ever trained. Maybe after all it's a billion-dollar Madlib. Let's see what the big computer can do by generating probabilistic strings of text. There must be a business in there somewhere.
- deeeeplearning 6y ago>AI researchers are staking major claim on all these amazing things GPT-3 can and will do. I don't think they are, at all. Certainly outside of OpenAI there is a huge amount of skepticism...
- rexreed 6y agoI'm referring to the world-class AI researchers working at OpenAI itself and their own claims. Including those from Ilya Sutskever and others being paid prime salary to participate in OpenAI.
- sagebird 6y agoI think if a bit a bulwark were added around gpt-3 it might be a good philosopher's assistant. A wall to throw questions against and steer around your own mind. It could also be a diversion from a book report -- IE - have n argument with gpt-3 about Moby Dick.
- arpa 6y agoAttribition much?
- jjd33 6y agoThe guy in the article thinks too much into it. GPT is not a human that "metaphorically" answers.
- kvutza 6y ago"Do your best and forget the rest." That's what Greta says she does. Greta is my question, and I still do not know her answer. BTW I need resting to do my best.
- adamrezich 6y agogetting pretty bored with the anthropomorphization of machine learning
- vanusa 6y agoActually, I do like this answer. In that it showcases exactly how truly brilliant -- and yet, fundamentally vacuous -- the technology behind GPT-3 really is.
- peter_d_sherman 6y agoYou know what would be interesting? Step 1: Make a list of all of the wars that the U.S. has historically been involved in (WWI, WWII, Vietnam, etc.), and their dates... Step 2: Give GPT-3 a corpus of all foreign policy documents of all the years leading up to the year that the U.S. made war with a given foreign country... ...but do not give GPT-3 documents which would explicitly inform it that the historical war actually occurred... Step 3: Now, ask GPT-3 if it thinks that the U.S. going to war with the country that it historically had the war with is a good idea or not... And see what it says... (Keep in mind, we'd be resetting the clock on our computer for this experiment; GPT-3 would have to think it was August 31st, 1939 (One day before the start of WWII, according to Wikipedia), that is, before WWII actually happened, to get its opinion on WWII...) Maybe this experiment could determine if wars are simply the result of groupthink (GPT-3 representing a statistically neutral party), or if there is some other factor or factors at play... Think of it this way, the decision "go to war with country X" abstractly speaking from an AI perspective, might not be all that different from a "buy this stock/do not buy this stock" decision, although in one case the background data corpus might be foreign policy documents, and in the other, the corpus might be the historical financial news about the stock... Wouldn't it be interesting to see what GPT-3 has to say about historical foreign policy decisions, based on the historical precursor foreign policy documents? And not just for the U.S. -- for every country?