4 ms·

fwiw I had my dad ask ChatGPT relatively high-level questions about his field of practice in the state he is licensed in. Some were very good answers but that

fwiw I had my dad ask ChatGPT relatively high-level questions about his field of practice in the state he is licensed in. Some were very good answers but that some were wildly off. The ones that seemed to be better were questions about a concept (ie "What is x concept in law") while the incorrect ones were the ones asking for specifics ("What is the statute of limitations for x in y state").

DisjointedHunt 4y ago
Because it doesn't presently have memory or look things up in a table or the internet. You will notice that both are very easy fixes that computers have perfected in retrieval over the past 5 or so decades.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Just stick Google's pre-search tools in front of the current version and it would solve a large chunk of those problems. The right tool for the job, essentially. After all, you wouldn't ask your English professor to solve a math problem either.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
I’m by far a layman in this respect but I feel like it’s the difference between conceptualizing and information retrieval. Further it feels like IR is a well researched area and by allowing the conceptualizing part access to a modern IR system would allow it to form searches, pull the IR results, sift them, and summarize them.
jerf 4y ago
The next frontier for GPT-esque technologies is building one that is capable of saying "I don't know". GPT as it stands now is essentially incapable of it. (The cases of that you see in the current ChatGPT preview are, as near as I can tell, all rules-based overlays run by OpenAI for various reasons. When it declines to comment, and then more-or-less scolds you for even asking, you got caught before even getting to the model itself.)
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Yeah "I don't know" usually means, "I have low confidence in that response I gave you" (in general terms) or you generate only high-confidence answers
- Metus 4y ago
  I'd even settle for a GPT-esque technology that is capable of linking and citing sources.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    That's probably a much harder problem.
    - jerf 4y ago
      Getting it to cite a source is easy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016435 Getting it to cite one that actually exists, ah, now that's a hard problem. Given how slimmed down the tech currently is, even if one can hypothesize some mechanism for having the system keep track of where it got certain ideas (and it is not at all obvious to me how to encode into an otherwise notoriously opaque neural net where ideas came from, given that we can't even point at an "idea" or "concept" or "fact" in a neural net at all), it is hard to imagine it wouldn't take so many additional resources that we'd have to trim the model size down to tiny fractions of what it is now. For all the people going "wow" at the current state of GPT, I wouldn't be surprised that in 20 years it's actually seen as a dead end. I'm also impressed, but at the same time, I'm seeing the limitations it has for practical use. The hypotheses about why pure neural net approaches are going to be too problematic to use are basically coming true. AI models that can't give human-comprehensible reasons for their conclusions, including attestation of sources, are too dangerous to use. They're just black boxes, and for all you know someone's got their finger on the scale of the black boxes. OpenAI is already doing that, quite visibly, and even if you are comfortable with their reasons for doing so today, you should conclude from the fact they basically immediately stuck their fingers on the scale that you aren't getting some super AI to answer your questions, but a manifestation of some particular group of human's answer to your questions. But... I can already get that! I don't need to pay OpenAI to AI-wash their answers.
laci37 4y ago
I got the same feeling asking ChatGPT about some basic logic and maths concepts. IMO GPT can find the relevant training data to regurgitate, but i don't think it connects concepts.
- izacus 4y ago
  I mean, it's a bullshit generator. It'll grab whatever it find in training set that kinda fits the topic and make sure it hits the word count - like a lazy student before deadline. And that's also the result - sometimes it hits something good. Sometimes it spews up utter crock and it doesn't have any notion or understanding of the difference. However, it does look good to the lazy and uninformed and it'll soon render judgemenets about your livelihood in the future. The same type of people who thought putting an AI in control of Teslas and copyright enforcement on YouTube will put this thing in control of your health and punishment very soon as well.
  - Kerbonut 4y ago
    Maybe then we’ll actually have some kind of quality to treatment. I’ve seen numerous doctors over the years for chronic health conditions and vast majority of them don’t really listen and can’t keep your whole history in their head while also trying to hear the new stuff. They are over worked with far too many patients.
  - leobg 4y ago
    Erm. Yeah. Which is precisely what many lawyers and judges do, too, unfortunately. It often has little to do with logic and a lot to do with thinking in boxes and using words as nothing but triggers for other words. Some lawyers are far above that, of course. But what percentage of them works just like your “lazy student”? 80 percent?
imetatroll 4y ago
With new technologies I feel like we humans tend to adopt them anyway. Perhaps we will end up allowing society to shape itself around incorrect answers.

DisjointedHunt 4y ago

Because it doesn't presently have memory or look things up in a table or the internet. You will notice that both are very easy fixes that computers have perfected in retrieval over the past 5 or so decades.

jacquesm 4y ago
Just stick Google's pre-search tools in front of the current version and it would solve a large chunk of those problems. The right tool for the job, essentially. After all, you wouldn't ask your English professor to solve a math problem either.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I’m by far a layman in this respect but I feel like it’s the difference between conceptualizing and information retrieval. Further it feels like IR is a well researched area and by allowing the conceptualizing part access to a modern IR system would allow it to form searches, pull the IR results, sift them, and summarize them.

jerf 4y ago

The next frontier for GPT-esque technologies is building one that is capable of saying "I don't know". GPT as it stands now is essentially incapable of it. (The cases of that you see in the current ChatGPT preview are, as near as I can tell, all rules-based overlays run by OpenAI for various reasons. When it declines to comment, and then more-or-less scolds you for even asking, you got caught before even getting to the model itself.)

raverbashing 4y ago
Yeah "I don't know" usually means, "I have low confidence in that response I gave you" (in general terms) or you generate only high-confidence answers
Metus 4y ago
I'd even settle for a GPT-esque technology that is capable of linking and citing sources.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  That's probably a much harder problem.
  - jerf 4y ago
    Getting it to cite a source is easy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016435 Getting it to cite one that actually exists, ah, now that's a hard problem. Given how slimmed down the tech currently is, even if one can hypothesize some mechanism for having the system keep track of where it got certain ideas (and it is not at all obvious to me how to encode into an otherwise notoriously opaque neural net where ideas came from, given that we can't even point at an "idea" or "concept" or "fact" in a neural net at all), it is hard to imagine it wouldn't take so many additional resources that we'd have to trim the model size down to tiny fractions of what it is now. For all the people going "wow" at the current state of GPT, I wouldn't be surprised that in 20 years it's actually seen as a dead end. I'm also impressed, but at the same time, I'm seeing the limitations it has for practical use. The hypotheses about why pure neural net approaches are going to be too problematic to use are basically coming true. AI models that can't give human-comprehensible reasons for their conclusions, including attestation of sources, are too dangerous to use. They're just black boxes, and for all you know someone's got their finger on the scale of the black boxes. OpenAI is already doing that, quite visibly, and even if you are comfortable with their reasons for doing so today, you should conclude from the fact they basically immediately stuck their fingers on the scale that you aren't getting some super AI to answer your questions, but a manifestation of some particular group of human's answer to your questions. But... I can already get that! I don't need to pay OpenAI to AI-wash their answers.

laci37 4y ago

I got the same feeling asking ChatGPT about some basic logic and maths concepts. IMO GPT can find the relevant training data to regurgitate, but i don't think it connects concepts.

izacus 4y ago
I mean, it's a bullshit generator. It'll grab whatever it find in training set that kinda fits the topic and make sure it hits the word count - like a lazy student before deadline. And that's also the result - sometimes it hits something good. Sometimes it spews up utter crock and it doesn't have any notion or understanding of the difference. However, it does look good to the lazy and uninformed and it'll soon render judgemenets about your livelihood in the future. The same type of people who thought putting an AI in control of Teslas and copyright enforcement on YouTube will put this thing in control of your health and punishment very soon as well.
- Kerbonut 4y ago
  Maybe then we’ll actually have some kind of quality to treatment. I’ve seen numerous doctors over the years for chronic health conditions and vast majority of them don’t really listen and can’t keep your whole history in their head while also trying to hear the new stuff. They are over worked with far too many patients.
- leobg 4y ago
  Erm. Yeah. Which is precisely what many lawyers and judges do, too, unfortunately. It often has little to do with logic and a lot to do with thinking in boxes and using words as nothing but triggers for other words. Some lawyers are far above that, of course. But what percentage of them works just like your “lazy student”? 80 percent?

imetatroll 4y ago

With new technologies I feel like we humans tend to adopt them anyway. Perhaps we will end up allowing society to shape itself around incorrect answers.