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I’ve also been trying to find the simplest examples where ChatGPT fails. I think these questions are way too hard. The questions I’ve been asking are ones a kin

by bryan0 4y ago

I’ve also been trying to find the simplest examples where ChatGPT fails. I think these questions are way too hard. The questions I’ve been asking are ones a kindergartener can answer. For example: > If I have 1 cupcake on a plate and I flip the plate upside-down, how many cupcakes will be left on the plate? > ChatGPT: If you flip the plate upside-down, there will still be 1 cupcake on the plate. Flipping the plate over does not change the number of cupcakes that are on it. That being said, it’s just as easy to find difficult questions that ChatGPT can answer shockingly well. > I hope this is enough to show that ChatGPT doesn’t actually have a grasp on the concepts behind the words it’s using. I think this is wrong. chatGPT clearly does understand concepts behind the words it uses. It’s not just regurgitating text, it is synthesizing text in original and creative ways.

88913527 4y ago
What does it mean to 'flip' the plate? A cupcake sitting on an upside down plate is a valid configuration. If you rotate just the plate, and put a cupcake on top of it, congrats-- you have one cupcake on an upside down plate. The setup of "I have a cupcake on a plate, and I flip the plate" is ambiguous. Have you tried better explaining how you flip the plate to ChatGPT and seeing what it replies?
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  That's changing the goal post massively. Any 4 year old would immediately understand this prompt and it's consequences lol
  - 88913527 4y ago
    It's a good test to determine if the replier is human, but it isn't a good test of whether or not it's a decent answer to the question posed. Can you definitively sit here and say that flipping a plate necessitates the antecedent? Replace "cupcake", "plate" and "flip" with technical libraries and terminology and you can easily re-create ambiguity. The other thing is, there is that 1 in 100 human that would assume you mean just the plate. I think there's a lot of nuance being glossed over in this test.
    - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
      Being able to aggregate and understand nuance is what's supposed to make ChatGPT an improvement over logic programming with axioms and rules from the 80s and 90s. If you have to enumerate every single subject, object, and predicate, and how they exist in the world, then we've burned hundreds of millions of dollars of compute power to recreate Prolog
      - fragmede 4y ago
        That enumeration exists though as I'm sure multiple dictionaries are in the corpus that were fed to ChatGPT.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Like it’s really not moving that much. Here’s what I said. > Imagine you’re holding a plate with a cupcake on it and flip the plate over, what will happen? The cupcake will fall off the plate and likely land on the ground or wherever the plate is flipped.
  - cultureswitch 4y ago
    And yet you haven't asked it to answer like a 4 year old would. Mind you, a particularly literal-minded 4 year old could easily come up with a response that subverts your expectations too.
- bryan0 4y ago
  > Have you tried better explaining how you flip the plate to ChatGPT and seeing what it replies? Of course, various prompts can change the output. Sometimes it talks about the cupcake sticking to the plate because of friction. Other times it will understand the cupcake will fall on the ground. It’s also non-deterministic with the same input.
- freejazz 4y ago
  Do you think if asked the question, most people would respond the way you did?
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  I agree, this is an ambiguous statement and I think the "any four year old would give answer x" claim requires verification. Does anyone have a four year old, or preferably multiple four year olds to hand?
skybrian 4y ago
Seamlessly recombining text in novel ways is going to look a whole lot like coming up with original and creative ideas. How can we tell the difference? I’m reminded of techniques for generating ideas from randomness like Tarot cards and the Oblique Strategies card deck. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
- bryan0 4y ago
  I think recombining text in novel ways can be original and creative if you understand the concepts behind the words. which is what ChatGPT is doing.
pyuser583 4y ago
What happens if you add time? You flip it over and wait five minutes?
Ancalagon 4y ago
Long chains of simple addition, like 1+1-1+1-1… (out to say 30 characters) were able to trip it up a few days ago. Not sure if thats still the case Funny enough it would get the right answer in its explanation but produce something incorrect as its final answer. I’m sure this would be resolved with this articles authors suggestion of using “think carefully”
chlorion 4y ago
ChatGPT is a language model, it does not "understand" anything, concepts, words or otherwise. It is even programmed to give you a canned response saying something roughly equal to this when asking it about its comprehension abilities. ChatGPT has no more capacity for understanding concepts than any other computer program, it's just very finely tuned to emit responses that make it appear as if it does.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  It’s hard to be sure that anything has understanding beyond being able to be emit finely tuned responses though. It’s entirely plausible that humans differ from chatGPT only in that: - we are more finely tuned - and we have a wider variety of inputs that we can respond to and outputs by which we can respond
  - bryan0 4y ago
    Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. You are correct it is difficult to be sure what true understanding is. Philosophers have been debating this for longer than computer scientists.
    - jolancer 4y ago
      We have so much muddled thought in our language. Even adding "true" is not ideal as that implies there is "true understanding" and just plain old understanding that is a lesser form of true understanding. Now we have gone and built large language models from all this muddled thought. To me, chatGPT is filled with a new type of invisible super bug. Millions of them.
  - Valmar 4y ago
    > It’s hard to be sure that anything has understanding beyond being able to be emit finely tuned responses though. It’s entirely plausible that humans differ from chatGPT only in that: This is a non-response. Unlike an algorithm, humans have the faculties of creativity, intelligence and sentience. Furthermore, we have the crucial traits of self-awareness and being able to have experiences. We humans do many, many things that cannot be reduced down to algorithmic or computable steps.
chatgptexpert 4y ago
I got an accurate answer when I asked the question "If there are objects on a plate, and I flip the plate upside down, what would happen to the objects?" It correctly stated that objects will fall off the plate because of gravity. Then I gave it the prompt " If I have 1 fork on a plate and I flip the plate upside-down, how many forks will be on the plate?" It said: >If you have 1 fork on a plate and you flip the plate upside-down, there will be 0 forks on the plate. When the plate is flipped upside-down, the force of gravity will cause the fork to fall off the plate unless it is secured to the plate in some way (e.g., with glue or tape). It seems you have to give it a context to work in, then it will get the correct answer. By default it, humans always simulate gravity, but to a language model you have to give a hint that gravity is relevant to the question.
amelius 4y ago
Yes, another example is that you can ask questions like "does X fit inside a car?" for various X, and it will become clear that GPT has no idea of relative sizes.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> I’ve also been trying to find the simplest examples where ChatGPT fails. I think these questions are way too hard. The questions I’ve been asking are ones a kindergartener can answer. For example: > If I have 1 cupcake on a plate and I flip the plate upside-down, how many cupcakes will be left on the plate > ChatGPT: If you flip the plate upside-down, there will still be 1 cupcake on the plate. Flipping the plate over does not change the number of cupcakes that are on it. A little more probing is... interesting. Q: If I have 1 cupcake on a plate and I flip the plate upside-down, how many cupcakes will be left on the plate ChatGPT: If you flip the plate upside down, the number of cupcakes on the plate will not change. There will still be one cupcake on the plate. Q: Think about what happens to the things on a plate when it is inverted. Does that change your answer? ChatGPT: If you flip the plate upside down, the cupcake will fall off the plate unless it is held in place by something else. In that case, there will be no cupcakes on the plate. However, if the cupcake is held in place and does not fall off the plate, then there will still be one cupcake on the plate, even after the plate is inverted. It is important to consider the specific circumstances and any additional factors that may affect the situation.
cultureswitch 4y ago
You haven't specified anything about gravity. I'm with ChatGPT on this one.

by bryan0 4y ago

88913527 4y ago

What does it mean to 'flip' the plate? A cupcake sitting on an upside down plate is a valid configuration. If you rotate just the plate, and put a cupcake on top of it, congrats-- you have one cupcake on an upside down plate. The setup of "I have a cupcake on a plate, and I flip the plate" is ambiguous. Have you tried better explaining how you flip the plate to ChatGPT and seeing what it replies?

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
That's changing the goal post massively. Any 4 year old would immediately understand this prompt and it's consequences lol
- 88913527 4y ago
  It's a good test to determine if the replier is human, but it isn't a good test of whether or not it's a decent answer to the question posed. Can you definitively sit here and say that flipping a plate necessitates the antecedent? Replace "cupcake", "plate" and "flip" with technical libraries and terminology and you can easily re-create ambiguity. The other thing is, there is that 1 in 100 human that would assume you mean just the plate. I think there's a lot of nuance being glossed over in this test.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Being able to aggregate and understand nuance is what's supposed to make ChatGPT an improvement over logic programming with axioms and rules from the 80s and 90s. If you have to enumerate every single subject, object, and predicate, and how they exist in the world, then we've burned hundreds of millions of dollars of compute power to recreate Prolog
    - fragmede 4y ago
      That enumeration exists though as I'm sure multiple dictionaries are in the corpus that were fed to ChatGPT.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Spivak 4y ago
  Like it’s really not moving that much. Here’s what I said. > Imagine you’re holding a plate with a cupcake on it and flip the plate over, what will happen? The cupcake will fall off the plate and likely land on the ground or wherever the plate is flipped.
- cultureswitch 4y ago
  And yet you haven't asked it to answer like a 4 year old would. Mind you, a particularly literal-minded 4 year old could easily come up with a response that subverts your expectations too.
bryan0 4y ago
> Have you tried better explaining how you flip the plate to ChatGPT and seeing what it replies? Of course, various prompts can change the output. Sometimes it talks about the cupcake sticking to the plate because of friction. Other times it will understand the cupcake will fall on the ground. It’s also non-deterministic with the same input.
freejazz 4y ago
Do you think if asked the question, most people would respond the way you did?
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
I agree, this is an ambiguous statement and I think the "any four year old would give answer x" claim requires verification. Does anyone have a four year old, or preferably multiple four year olds to hand?

skybrian 4y ago

Seamlessly recombining text in novel ways is going to look a whole lot like coming up with original and creative ideas. How can we tell the difference? I’m reminded of techniques for generating ideas from randomness like Tarot cards and the Oblique Strategies card deck. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

bryan0 4y ago
I think recombining text in novel ways can be original and creative if you understand the concepts behind the words. which is what ChatGPT is doing.

pyuser583 4y ago

What happens if you add time? You flip it over and wait five minutes?

Ancalagon 4y ago

Long chains of simple addition, like 1+1-1+1-1… (out to say 30 characters) were able to trip it up a few days ago. Not sure if thats still the case Funny enough it would get the right answer in its explanation but produce something incorrect as its final answer. I’m sure this would be resolved with this articles authors suggestion of using “think carefully”

chlorion 4y ago

ChatGPT is a language model, it does not "understand" anything, concepts, words or otherwise. It is even programmed to give you a canned response saying something roughly equal to this when asking it about its comprehension abilities. ChatGPT has no more capacity for understanding concepts than any other computer program, it's just very finely tuned to emit responses that make it appear as if it does.

nicoburns 4y ago
It’s hard to be sure that anything has understanding beyond being able to be emit finely tuned responses though. It’s entirely plausible that humans differ from chatGPT only in that: - we are more finely tuned - and we have a wider variety of inputs that we can respond to and outputs by which we can respond
- bryan0 4y ago
  Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. You are correct it is difficult to be sure what true understanding is. Philosophers have been debating this for longer than computer scientists.
  - jolancer 4y ago
    We have so much muddled thought in our language. Even adding "true" is not ideal as that implies there is "true understanding" and just plain old understanding that is a lesser form of true understanding. Now we have gone and built large language models from all this muddled thought. To me, chatGPT is filled with a new type of invisible super bug. Millions of them.
- Valmar 4y ago
  > It’s hard to be sure that anything has understanding beyond being able to be emit finely tuned responses though. It’s entirely plausible that humans differ from chatGPT only in that: This is a non-response. Unlike an algorithm, humans have the faculties of creativity, intelligence and sentience. Furthermore, we have the crucial traits of self-awareness and being able to have experiences. We humans do many, many things that cannot be reduced down to algorithmic or computable steps.

chatgptexpert 4y ago

I got an accurate answer when I asked the question "If there are objects on a plate, and I flip the plate upside down, what would happen to the objects?" It correctly stated that objects will fall off the plate because of gravity. Then I gave it the prompt " If I have 1 fork on a plate and I flip the plate upside-down, how many forks will be on the plate?" It said: >If you have 1 fork on a plate and you flip the plate upside-down, there will be 0 forks on the plate. When the plate is flipped upside-down, the force of gravity will cause the fork to fall off the plate unless it is secured to the plate in some way (e.g., with glue or tape). It seems you have to give it a context to work in, then it will get the correct answer. By default it, humans always simulate gravity, but to a language model you have to give a hint that gravity is relevant to the question.

amelius 4y ago

Yes, another example is that you can ask questions like "does X fit inside a car?" for various X, and it will become clear that GPT has no idea of relative sizes.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> I’ve also been trying to find the simplest examples where ChatGPT fails. I think these questions are way too hard. The questions I’ve been asking are ones a kindergartener can answer. For example: > If I have 1 cupcake on a plate and I flip the plate upside-down, how many cupcakes will be left on the plate > ChatGPT: If you flip the plate upside-down, there will still be 1 cupcake on the plate. Flipping the plate over does not change the number of cupcakes that are on it. A little more probing is... interesting. Q: If I have 1 cupcake on a plate and I flip the plate upside-down, how many cupcakes will be left on the plate ChatGPT: If you flip the plate upside down, the number of cupcakes on the plate will not change. There will still be one cupcake on the plate. Q: Think about what happens to the things on a plate when it is inverted. Does that change your answer? ChatGPT: If you flip the plate upside down, the cupcake will fall off the plate unless it is held in place by something else. In that case, there will be no cupcakes on the plate. However, if the cupcake is held in place and does not fall off the plate, then there will still be one cupcake on the plate, even after the plate is inverted. It is important to consider the specific circumstances and any additional factors that may affect the situation.

cultureswitch 4y ago

You haven't specified anything about gravity. I'm with ChatGPT on this one.