4 ms·

It's just software. It takes skill and labor to achieve the outputs you want. Is someone who uses photoshop all day not an artist? Or someone who writes text fo

by usea 4y ago

It's just software. It takes skill and labor to achieve the outputs you want. Is someone who uses photoshop all day not an artist? Or someone who writes text for a compiler not a programmer? You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing.

vba616 4y ago
>You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing. It may be a "thing", because generating BS is a viable business model and ChatGPT makes it more efficient. ..but I submit as a working hypothesis, that it is completely impossible to gain knowledge you do not already possess from a language model, no matter how clever your prompting. I'm very interested in counter-examples, but I have seen a few that turn out to be fake already.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  Synthetic knowledge is still novel knowledge if you haven’t put the pieces together before.
  - vba616 4y ago
    Can you unpack "synthetic knowledge", cause I don't know what that really means.
    - eurasiantiger 4y ago
      New knowledge synthesized from existing knowledge. For example, you might know of A and B and maybe think that A -> B or B -> A based on their co-occurrence, but an AI might make you realize that C -> A as well as C -> B.
      - vba616 4y ago
        Ok, that's straightforward, I just don't care for the idea that AI can do it or even help. You might synthesize new knowledge. When ChatGPT produces new output, it's not synthesizing new knowledge. It can't even output the knowledge it was trained with, as long as it lacks the ability to tag it in a trustworthy way. It's not that it's always BS, it's that it's almost always BS and if you don't know the answer in advance or independently, you can't distinguish it from anything within the model.
- thfuran 4y ago
  That's so obviously false that I literally can't imagine how you could believe it. GPT-3 certainly isn't 100% accurate, but neither is it so perfectly unreliable that no one could ever get it to produce a relevant fact not in the prompt. And even if it were, it would probably still be potentially useful for learning languages.
  - vba616 4y ago
    > GPT-3 certainly isn't 100% accurate, but neither is it so perfectly unreliable that no one could ever get it to produce a relevant fact not in the prompt. I think I understand the sense in which you claim it produces relevant facts not in the prompt. It's not that we differ on easily observable behavior of the system. It's that I question if GPT-3 is "producing" these identifiable facts, and if the user is "producing" them instead, whether they can possibly be "relevant".
    - thfuran 4y ago
      >It's that I question if GPT-3 is "producing" these identifiable facts, and if the user is "producing" them instead, whether they can possibly be "relevant". I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That GPT-3 is just vomiting stuff up out of its training set and not producing any new knowledge? But that's totally irrelevant to the issue of whether it can transmit knowledge to a user, who presumably hasn't memorized the entire training set.
      - vba616 4y ago
        >That GPT-3 is just vomiting stuff up out of its training set and not producing any new knowledge? Hmm. Seems obvious to me that it's producing new output, but that output isn't knowledge and it can't be. Sometimes ChatGPT tells me something that turns out to be correct and relevant. And I get excited, and then I Google it and what it told me is the first hit on Stack Overflow. There's a subtle point here, that other people might say "well, ChatGPT is ok, but no better than Google" or something like that. But I differ on that. The key is that I don't know it's Stack Overflow until I check independently. So it's giving it too much credit to say it's as good as Google, and the amount of information it can output is not lower bounded by its training set, but is actually zero due to being adjacent to an infinite amount of BS that by its nature always requires external mechanisms to separate out.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  ChatGPT taught me about vectors and other ways to dynamically create an array.
  - vba616 4y ago
    How do you know?
    - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
      Because I tried the code and it worked.
      - mycall 4y ago
        There are lots of people with misconceptions of LLMs. It will take time to adjust. I reached the same conclusion as yourself, but do see a totally different path to take regarding information propagation (how GPT works). For example, cells merge information monotonically. This is how neural networks balance too, but could be applied in new/undiscovered ways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI&list=LL&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI&list=LL&index=4
      - vba616 4y ago
        I meant - how do you know or why did you say ChatGPT taught you? It doesn't know what works.
    - gremlinsinc 4y ago
      for a side project, it not only gave me the migrations, it suggested all the column names/datatypes, so basically I just said create me a laravel migration that's for an organization, this is a multi-tenant SaaS app, where an organization is basically a team, or tenant. You can think of these as companies as well, now make a migration that has columns that might generally be included in a company or organization. It not only spit out the model but also the casts/fillable attributes on the model, as well. It even helped me work through an idea, that I didn't know what it was called, I was thinking it was EAV but instead it's metaform/metafields, to basically create something like how wordpress has the ability to dynamically create content 'types', django/wagtail can do this to, w/ chatgpt I think I've nailed down how to do this using polymorphism with the least amount of headache. I'm wanting to create a CRM/CMS/ERP solution that can be very 'moldable' to different use cases, and this looks to be a good use, either way just being able to discuss with the ai my 'options', was like a major brain dump and increased the power of my flow. YMMV, but if you can't get it to work like this, doesn't mean it doesn't, just means it doesn't for you, and while I can save 2-3 hours for every hour previously worked, that's valuable to me, esp as a freelancer who charges per project, not hourly.
- usea 4y ago
  I don't really understand what you're saying. Clearly the results one produces with the software has value, but you say it's all "BS." Does that just mean you don't like it, or what? If someone asks me to produce some concept art for a project they've just started, and I write some prompts to produce that concept art, what is "BS" about the art I produced? What does gaining knowledge have to do with it? Is Art Director just a "BS" job? I don't get it.
  - wprl 4y ago
    Maybe “generic and meaningless” is a better descriptor.
- mycall 4y ago
  > it is completely impossible to gain knowledge you do not already possess from a language model Not true. Emergent abilities is an active research area in LLMs [0]. They even have pretty graphs on the topic. [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/11/characterizing-emergent-phenomena-in.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/11/characterizing-emergent-ph...
- yunwal 4y ago
  I don’t know how to homebrew. If I ask ChatGPT to help me get started homebrewing, it lists helpful steps to start homebrewing. I can ask it to expand on any of those steps until the breakdown is actionable. Checking some of the facts it gives me against other sites it’s all correct, but better organized and more accessible. There’s your counter-example. This works for basically any well-documented process.

by usea 4y ago

vba616 4y ago

>You've got a huge blind spot if you think prompt engineer isn't already a thing. It may be a "thing", because generating BS is a viable business model and ChatGPT makes it more efficient. ..but I submit as a working hypothesis, that it is completely impossible to gain knowledge you do not already possess from a language model, no matter how clever your prompting. I'm very interested in counter-examples, but I have seen a few that turn out to be fake already.

eurasiantiger 4y ago
Synthetic knowledge is still novel knowledge if you haven’t put the pieces together before.
- vba616 4y ago
  Can you unpack "synthetic knowledge", cause I don't know what that really means.
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    New knowledge synthesized from existing knowledge. For example, you might know of A and B and maybe think that A -> B or B -> A based on their co-occurrence, but an AI might make you realize that C -> A as well as C -> B.
    - vba616 4y ago
      Ok, that's straightforward, I just don't care for the idea that AI can do it or even help. You might synthesize new knowledge. When ChatGPT produces new output, it's not synthesizing new knowledge. It can't even output the knowledge it was trained with, as long as it lacks the ability to tag it in a trustworthy way. It's not that it's always BS, it's that it's almost always BS and if you don't know the answer in advance or independently, you can't distinguish it from anything within the model.
thfuran 4y ago
That's so obviously false that I literally can't imagine how you could believe it. GPT-3 certainly isn't 100% accurate, but neither is it so perfectly unreliable that no one could ever get it to produce a relevant fact not in the prompt. And even if it were, it would probably still be potentially useful for learning languages.
- vba616 4y ago
  > GPT-3 certainly isn't 100% accurate, but neither is it so perfectly unreliable that no one could ever get it to produce a relevant fact not in the prompt. I think I understand the sense in which you claim it produces relevant facts not in the prompt. It's not that we differ on easily observable behavior of the system. It's that I question if GPT-3 is "producing" these identifiable facts, and if the user is "producing" them instead, whether they can possibly be "relevant".
  - thfuran 4y ago
    >It's that I question if GPT-3 is "producing" these identifiable facts, and if the user is "producing" them instead, whether they can possibly be "relevant". I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That GPT-3 is just vomiting stuff up out of its training set and not producing any new knowledge? But that's totally irrelevant to the issue of whether it can transmit knowledge to a user, who presumably hasn't memorized the entire training set.
    - vba616 4y ago
      >That GPT-3 is just vomiting stuff up out of its training set and not producing any new knowledge? Hmm. Seems obvious to me that it's producing new output, but that output isn't knowledge and it can't be. Sometimes ChatGPT tells me something that turns out to be correct and relevant. And I get excited, and then I Google it and what it told me is the first hit on Stack Overflow. There's a subtle point here, that other people might say "well, ChatGPT is ok, but no better than Google" or something like that. But I differ on that. The key is that I don't know it's Stack Overflow until I check independently. So it's giving it too much credit to say it's as good as Google, and the amount of information it can output is not lower bounded by its training set, but is actually zero due to being adjacent to an infinite amount of BS that by its nature always requires external mechanisms to separate out.
ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
ChatGPT taught me about vectors and other ways to dynamically create an array.
- vba616 4y ago
  How do you know?
  - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
    Because I tried the code and it worked.
    - mycall 4y ago
      There are lots of people with misconceptions of LLMs. It will take time to adjust. I reached the same conclusion as yourself, but do see a totally different path to take regarding information propagation (how GPT works). For example, cells merge information monotonically. This is how neural networks balance too, but could be applied in new/undiscovered ways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI&list=LL&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI&list=LL&index=4
    - vba616 4y ago
      I meant - how do you know or why did you say ChatGPT taught you? It doesn't know what works.
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    for a side project, it not only gave me the migrations, it suggested all the column names/datatypes, so basically I just said create me a laravel migration that's for an organization, this is a multi-tenant SaaS app, where an organization is basically a team, or tenant. You can think of these as companies as well, now make a migration that has columns that might generally be included in a company or organization. It not only spit out the model but also the casts/fillable attributes on the model, as well. It even helped me work through an idea, that I didn't know what it was called, I was thinking it was EAV but instead it's metaform/metafields, to basically create something like how wordpress has the ability to dynamically create content 'types', django/wagtail can do this to, w/ chatgpt I think I've nailed down how to do this using polymorphism with the least amount of headache. I'm wanting to create a CRM/CMS/ERP solution that can be very 'moldable' to different use cases, and this looks to be a good use, either way just being able to discuss with the ai my 'options', was like a major brain dump and increased the power of my flow. YMMV, but if you can't get it to work like this, doesn't mean it doesn't, just means it doesn't for you, and while I can save 2-3 hours for every hour previously worked, that's valuable to me, esp as a freelancer who charges per project, not hourly.
usea 4y ago
I don't really understand what you're saying. Clearly the results one produces with the software has value, but you say it's all "BS." Does that just mean you don't like it, or what? If someone asks me to produce some concept art for a project they've just started, and I write some prompts to produce that concept art, what is "BS" about the art I produced? What does gaining knowledge have to do with it? Is Art Director just a "BS" job? I don't get it.
- wprl 4y ago
  Maybe “generic and meaningless” is a better descriptor.
mycall 4y ago
> it is completely impossible to gain knowledge you do not already possess from a language model Not true. Emergent abilities is an active research area in LLMs [0]. They even have pretty graphs on the topic. [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/11/characterizing-emergent-phenomena-in.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/11/characterizing-emergent-ph...
yunwal 4y ago
I don’t know how to homebrew. If I ask ChatGPT to help me get started homebrewing, it lists helpful steps to start homebrewing. I can ask it to expand on any of those steps until the breakdown is actionable. Checking some of the facts it gives me against other sites it’s all correct, but better organized and more accessible. There’s your counter-example. This works for basically any well-documented process.