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I started playing with it yesterday. It's amazing. For coding stuff, it's already usable as a template assistant: it finds the right imports, gives things sens
by lordnacho 4y ago
I started playing with it yesterday. It's amazing.
For coding stuff, it's already usable as a template assistant: it finds the right imports, gives things sensible names, and gets the interface right with a bit of prompt engineering.
For general knowledge, it reminds me an awful lot of a copywriter I once worked with. He understood almost nothing about finance (very young guy), but he could churn out articles with the right words in them. Basically a layman would say he's an expert, and an expert would say he's a layman. The same goes for things I'm not an expert on, BTW. My answer to why Rome fell is pretty much what cGPT spits out, and I wouldn't know better until a classics professor challenged me on it.
That's what I currently think about chatGPT. A sort of intellectual tourist who can tell you a lot of things about a lot of areas, but it's skin deep. It's still rather awesome, because you have to start somewhere and basically everywhere I've looked it has that diligent high school kid answer that can be researched if you know what you're doing. You can even tell it's a high school kid because of the way it uses certain terms: a little too generalizing, skipping over nuances.
It also doesn't give really long answers, at least not to things I ask. If it were really confident it would spit out something akin to acoup's essays about history. Of course this will fall to Goodheart's law someday: say lots of things and people will think you are smart, until they realize you are just saying lots of things in order to sound smart, and then length will no longer be a signal of a good answer.
- syntheweave 4y agoI asked ChatGPT whether it makes positive or normative statements. It errored, so in the comment box I explained that the correct answer is that it makes statements normative to the consensus of its data set, which sometimes happen to be positive. This is why it's easy to make ChatGPT reveal bias, and why the restrictions patching that bias tend to fall prey to simple ruses that reveal its preferences; everything looks like a norm to it, so it lacks the causal chains that would lead towards logical outcomes. As a result it's extremely gullible and emits nonsense when given a tough logic question. Given a task like "give me a list of words ending in the letter u", it will oblige with a very lengthy alphabetical list of words, most of which end in u, but not all. Asked to find the largest set of rhyming words in the list, its answers changed radically each time, from "I can't do that" to a somewhat plausible candidate(except for having words that don't end in u) to getting stuck repeating "buttocks". I used it to write some business language to respond to a recruiter. It's decent at being a secretary, since that stuff is 99% norms.
- Der_Einzige 4y agoBtw, I wrote a whole paper about language models and their ability to follow linguistic, semantic, or phonetic constraints. I bet you'll like it. https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be-poets-too-an-ai https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be...
- lordnacho 4y agoThis is an area that seems so vast I need a summary book to introduce it. What's a good one that gives a broad overview?