7 ms·

quotation from the link: "LLMs in the GPT family have read every programming language in the world, billions of times. It's been known for some time that th

quotation from the link: "LLMs in the GPT family have read every programming language in the world, billions of times. It's been known for some time that these agents can write small snippets of code with some limited success. However, to my knowledge, none of these agents have ever been asked to make their own programming language. This type of task is a bit more complex, and requires a bit more creativity and foresight than much of the internet believes LLMs to have. Some folks on the internet tend to think lowly of LLMs as merely "Stochastic Parrots" -- simply "remixers" of old ideas. In a way, they're right; but I'd argue that remixing is the fundamental force of creativity. Nothing comes from scratch." This^^. Half the internet was in denial about how good LLMs are. I wonder why? Perhaps it's the way humans act when confronted with a machine that can potentially replace much of what makes us special. The advent of chatGPT had millions of people on the internet trying to downplay the intelligence of chatGPT by continuously trying to re-emphasize the things it gets wrong. I think the people who claimed chatGPT was a stochastic parrot are now realizing that they were the ones that were part of a giant parade of parrots regurgitating the same old tired trope of LLMs being nothing but simple word generators. Well you guys were dead wrong, a simple iterative improvement on the same algorithm pretty much ironed out a lot of the issues. I'm guessing that at GPT-10 or 11 we'll have produced something that when compared with humans, humans will be the things that are far more parrot-like.

swatcoder 4y ago
I was reading the quote you included and was sure you were going to lambast him for his arrogance (nobody else has asked it to design a language? hah!) and for bringing an elephant sized straw man to the depthful analytic discussion many of us are trying to have about this new technology, but you went a different way with it. Huh.
- marviel 4y ago
  Wasn't trying to be arrogant, I just wasn't aware of an existing implementation and thought it would be fun to try. :) Do you have links to other efforts? I'd love to know more about it, and would be happy to add references to other existing literature to the article if it improved its quality.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    I’ve done it casually and I’m sure many many others have, but a very quick and lazy Google (it’s not dead yet) brought up this writeup from December: https://judehunter.dev/blog/chatgpt-helped-me-design-a-brand-new-programming-language https://judehunter.dev/blog/chatgpt-helped-me-design-a-brand...
    - marviel 4y ago
      Added you to the article! Neat stuff, you were ahead :)
- HervalFreire 4y ago
  You were expecting me to be a stochastic parrot and just imitate what every other idiot says? Well I hate to tell you this, I fed that quote into GPT-3 and had it respond to that quote. Who's the parrot now? Just kidding.
kaczordon 4y ago
Future data will still have to come from someone e.g. a person.
- HervalFreire 4y ago
  Future data that's posted on the internet will be curated by humans. Humans don't post things that are incorrect or outright wrong. That curation IS human data and will allow data from LLMs to further improve LLMs. Additionally, there's a randomness element that are part of LLMs that allow LLMs to generate non-deterministic responses that when further curated by humans potentially allows LLMs to become Even better.
  - raincole 4y ago
    > Humans don't post things that are incorrect or outright wrong. Are you using ChatGPT to write this comment? If not, I mean... are you okay?
    - HervalFreire 4y ago
      What I meant was... humans don't deliberately post WRONG output from chatGPT on the internet. IF they use it to write some blog post or something they will curate the output from chatGPT such that the output fits the topic and is correct to the context. Then when that data gets scraped for training it will be "curated" so bad data generated by the LLM isn't visible. This is the scenario that occurs when the majority of text on the internet becomes generated by an LLM. Training data from humans is STILL fed back into the LLM via curation of the LLMs own data. Also please don't ask if I'm "ok" just respond to the comment.
      - tsunamifury 4y ago
        Let me introduce you to the concept of Informational Warfare.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
raincole 4y ago
I'm not so sure. The first sample is: > Indentation-based scoping, similar to Python. Then... > class Person { To me, it's very clear it doesn't really understand what "indentation-based scoping" means. For a human programmer, using both intentation-based and bracket-based scoping is a very unusual design choice, and is begging for further explanation. It talked pages of abstraction, modularity, etc, but not this? I'm not saying it's not good. But I failed to see how this particular example proves its not a "stochastic parrot". If anything, I think it's a quite strong evidence supporting "stochastic parrot" narrative.
- eesmith 4y ago
  As well as: > Garbage collection and memory safety: Automate memory management to prevent memory leaks and promote memory safety, as seen in languages like Java, C#, or Rust. Rust does not use automated garbage collection.
- marviel 4y ago
  Author here -- I think it is a stochastic parrot, don't get me wrong. But my argument is that humans are also, at some level, sufficiently advanced stochastic parrots. At least, as it pertains to many creative endeavors. You're always building on the back of something that comes before. We're all just remixing ideas we've heard before. I mean even this comment -- none of the words I'm saying are new, and many of the word combinations I'm using have been used time and time again. The ideas I'm expressing have merit -- but are they wholly original? Not really. We all need eachother's creative energies to do our best work.
  - HervalFreire 4y ago
    yeah, but colloquially when people start using the term "stochastic parrot" they're referring to something far stupider. From a Technical and pedantic standpoint it could be said ALL intelligence is isomorphic to a stochastic parrot so it's not reasonable to assume in common communication that people are referring to the technical definition when they talk. Your point in the article is basically saying that chatGPT is not as stupid as people think and also suggesting the fact that humans can be stupid in a similar way to chatGPT as well.
Alan_Dillman 4y ago
This this^^. Anything that can stay coherent and on topic longer than a typical human is useful. I'm a stochastic parrot at some level too.
wruza 4y ago
How good they are at what exactly? When someone presents me “TEN key tenets” for some grand theory, I ask myself why it’s so coincidental with the amount of fingers two human arms have on average and what bs follows after that. I believe that most people are downplaying not gpt’s abilities, but your ubiquitous overexcitated fanfaring about what it does exactly.
not-chatgpt 4y ago
Found the PM from OpenAI
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gonzo41 4y ago
I don't care if ChatGPT takes my job. Can it also take over my mortgage payments.....that's my bigger concern. We're busy destroying the future of work (I'm not complaining about that), but we're REALLY slow on the thinking about what happens when everyone has free time all the time.
- riffraff 4y ago
  So you think we have free time all the time because we have automated 90% of agriculture? People will just find something else to do that automation is not very good at.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    No It was a passing comment. I really think that LLM's will make certain aspects of work very nice, like a really good version of intellisense that writes you're whole api for you. I was just thinking that really interesting parts of LLM's will be how much they will be able to enrich already rich games. Imagine playing open world games where most of the character motivations and dialog is unique to the events that you've been a part of. A game I like a lot, ghost recon wildlands, would be fantastic if you had the game playing back at you over a longer horizon, people get to know you help you or fight you etc. As for my day job. It's not going away because of LLM's. They can't fix office politics yet.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      And there you have the basis for a variant of the Simulation Argument.
galfarragem 4y ago
> people who claimed chatGPT was a stochastic parrot I still think that. Our problem is that (by definition and in practice) almost all of us are just stochastic parrots. Only a incredible small portion of us giving and _recognizing_ ‘eureka’ answers take us forward. Will GPT ever be capable of recognizing these answers?
visarga 4y ago
> I think the people who claimed chatGPT was a stochastic parrot are now realizing that they were the ones that were part of a giant parade of parrots regurgitating the same old tired trope of LLMs being nothing but simple word generators. Muhahaha that was delicious. I hate that parrot meme. Authors lost their respect from me right from the title of that paper.
chordalkeyboard 4y ago
> The advent of chatGPT had millions of people on the internet trying to downplay the intelligence of chatGPT by continuously trying to re-emphasize the things it gets wrong. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the criticism. It is not that chatGPT is unreliable because chatGPT makes occasional errors. It is that chatGPT is not intelligent because the type of errors chatGPT makes are indicative of the fact that it is assembling text into forms that humans assign meaning to, and has no understanding of the relationship between the symbols and their referents, and therefore is not 'intelligent' qua intelligence.
- HervalFreire 4y ago
  >This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the criticism. And this a fundamental misunderstanding of the criticism of the criticism. The problem here is that yes the occasional errors demonstrate certain flaws in it's understanding of some topic. The issue is there are many times where it produces completely novel and creative output that could not have existed in the training data and can only be formulated through complete and understanding of the query it was given. Understanding of the world around us is not developed through the lens of a singular model or a singular piece of understanding. We build multiple models of the world and we have varying levels of understanding of each model. It is the same with chatGPT. The remarkable thing about chatGPT understands a huge portion of these models really really well. Case in point: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/ https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/ There's literally no way it could do the above without understanding what you asked it to do. Read to the end. The end demonstrates awareness of self, relative to the context and task it was asked to perform. Yet people illogically claim that for some other topic because chatGPT failed to correctly model the topic it therefore MUST be flawed in ALL of it's understanding of the world. This claim is not logical.
  - chordalkeyboard 4y ago
    > The problem here is that yes the occasional errors demonstrate certain flaws in it's understanding of some topic. No, they demonstrate that the machine does not understand. > The issue is there are many times where it produces completely novel and creative output that could not have existed in the training data and can only be formulated through complete and understanding of the query it was given. What have you done to eliminate the possibility that it assembled the words algorithmically and the solution generated is something the reader constructed by assigning meaning to the text response? If the answer "can only be formulated through complete and understanding of the query it was given" then you must have eliminated this possibility. > Understanding of the world around us is not developed through the lens of a singular model or a singular piece of understanding. We build multiple models of the world and we have varying levels of understanding of each model. It is the same with chatGPT. The remarkable thing about chatGPT understands a huge portion of these models really really well. Where is the evidence that chatGPT understands a thing? > There's literally no way it could do the above without understanding what you asked it to do. Read to the end. The end demonstrates awareness of self, relative to the context and task it was asked to perform. Thats an interpretation of the text output that you assigned based on what the words in the text mean to you. I could just as easily say that Harry Potter is self-aware. > Yet people illogically claim that for some other topic because chatGPT failed to correctly model the topic it therefore MUST be flawed in ALL of it's understanding of the world. This claim is not logical. I don't think you understand what we're discussing.
awill88 4y ago
This all seems very personal to an outside observer and I do hope you’re feeling okay about humanity in general. I imagine like most models, GPT could (somehow) structurally become too burdensome, because of some future breakthrough. That stuff happens all the time. Also, I could be wrong. Doesn’t seem responsible to attempt to predict the future this way..
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> I'd argue that remixing is the fundamental force of creativity. Yes, but. Creativity - real creativity - is in choosing the right pieces to remix out of the immense amount of what's available. And, perhaps just as important, choosing what not to put in the remix. There's an immense difference between a meal prepared by a good chef, and throwing random ingredients in a blender. They both remix. But they are not remotely the same.
- HervalFreire 4y ago
  Your example here is obvious right? All humans agree with you because all humans can tell the difference. The thing with these LLMs is that it's exhibiting both seemingly random remixes and remixes with extreme creativity. A lot of people see some error and flaw with chatGPT or they don't dig deep enough and they miss the fact that there are many instances of intelligent remixing of creative data. Real creativity. Trust that the opposing party has the intelligence to not be tricked by some obvious answer that an LLM took from a look up table and that the opposing party saw something wholly novel and unique. The main issue here is that people are getting hung up on the part where chatGPT fails to be creative and are completely missing the fact that it can be successful as well.
  - oska 4y ago
    There is not a single example of chatGPT being creative.
    - HervalFreire 4y ago
      I do not speak to fraudster or fantasists. Paraphrasing you earlier. Your responses to me in other threads were fucking rude and as a result I now literally hate you. So why bother, just leave and save everyone the trouble. Nobody cares for your opinion if you're going to continuously insult everyone you fucking talk to.

swatcoder 4y ago

I was reading the quote you included and was sure you were going to lambast him for his arrogance (nobody else has asked it to design a language? hah!) and for bringing an elephant sized straw man to the depthful analytic discussion many of us are trying to have about this new technology, but you went a different way with it. Huh.

marviel 4y ago
Wasn't trying to be arrogant, I just wasn't aware of an existing implementation and thought it would be fun to try. :) Do you have links to other efforts? I'd love to know more about it, and would be happy to add references to other existing literature to the article if it improved its quality.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  I’ve done it casually and I’m sure many many others have, but a very quick and lazy Google (it’s not dead yet) brought up this writeup from December: https://judehunter.dev/blog/chatgpt-helped-me-design-a-brand-new-programming-language https://judehunter.dev/blog/chatgpt-helped-me-design-a-brand...
  - marviel 4y ago
    Added you to the article! Neat stuff, you were ahead :)
HervalFreire 4y ago
You were expecting me to be a stochastic parrot and just imitate what every other idiot says? Well I hate to tell you this, I fed that quote into GPT-3 and had it respond to that quote. Who's the parrot now? Just kidding.

kaczordon 4y ago

Future data will still have to come from someone e.g. a person.

HervalFreire 4y ago
Future data that's posted on the internet will be curated by humans. Humans don't post things that are incorrect or outright wrong. That curation IS human data and will allow data from LLMs to further improve LLMs. Additionally, there's a randomness element that are part of LLMs that allow LLMs to generate non-deterministic responses that when further curated by humans potentially allows LLMs to become Even better.
- raincole 4y ago
  > Humans don't post things that are incorrect or outright wrong. Are you using ChatGPT to write this comment? If not, I mean... are you okay?
  - HervalFreire 4y ago
    What I meant was... humans don't deliberately post WRONG output from chatGPT on the internet. IF they use it to write some blog post or something they will curate the output from chatGPT such that the output fits the topic and is correct to the context. Then when that data gets scraped for training it will be "curated" so bad data generated by the LLM isn't visible. This is the scenario that occurs when the majority of text on the internet becomes generated by an LLM. Training data from humans is STILL fed back into the LLM via curation of the LLMs own data. Also please don't ask if I'm "ok" just respond to the comment.
    - tsunamifury 4y ago
      Let me introduce you to the concept of Informational Warfare.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

raincole 4y ago

I'm not so sure. The first sample is: > Indentation-based scoping, similar to Python. Then... > class Person { To me, it's very clear it doesn't really understand what "indentation-based scoping" means. For a human programmer, using both intentation-based and bracket-based scoping is a very unusual design choice, and is begging for further explanation. It talked pages of abstraction, modularity, etc, but not this? I'm not saying it's not good. But I failed to see how this particular example proves its not a "stochastic parrot". If anything, I think it's a quite strong evidence supporting "stochastic parrot" narrative.

eesmith 4y ago
As well as: > Garbage collection and memory safety: Automate memory management to prevent memory leaks and promote memory safety, as seen in languages like Java, C#, or Rust. Rust does not use automated garbage collection.
marviel 4y ago
Author here -- I think it is a stochastic parrot, don't get me wrong. But my argument is that humans are also, at some level, sufficiently advanced stochastic parrots. At least, as it pertains to many creative endeavors. You're always building on the back of something that comes before. We're all just remixing ideas we've heard before. I mean even this comment -- none of the words I'm saying are new, and many of the word combinations I'm using have been used time and time again. The ideas I'm expressing have merit -- but are they wholly original? Not really. We all need eachother's creative energies to do our best work.
- HervalFreire 4y ago
  yeah, but colloquially when people start using the term "stochastic parrot" they're referring to something far stupider. From a Technical and pedantic standpoint it could be said ALL intelligence is isomorphic to a stochastic parrot so it's not reasonable to assume in common communication that people are referring to the technical definition when they talk. Your point in the article is basically saying that chatGPT is not as stupid as people think and also suggesting the fact that humans can be stupid in a similar way to chatGPT as well.

Alan_Dillman 4y ago

This this^^. Anything that can stay coherent and on topic longer than a typical human is useful. I'm a stochastic parrot at some level too.

wruza 4y ago

How good they are at what exactly? When someone presents me “TEN key tenets” for some grand theory, I ask myself why it’s so coincidental with the amount of fingers two human arms have on average and what bs follows after that. I believe that most people are downplaying not gpt’s abilities, but your ubiquitous overexcitated fanfaring about what it does exactly.

not-chatgpt 4y ago

Found the PM from OpenAI

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

gonzo41 4y ago

I don't care if ChatGPT takes my job. Can it also take over my mortgage payments.....that's my bigger concern. We're busy destroying the future of work (I'm not complaining about that), but we're REALLY slow on the thinking about what happens when everyone has free time all the time.

riffraff 4y ago
So you think we have free time all the time because we have automated 90% of agriculture? People will just find something else to do that automation is not very good at.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  No It was a passing comment. I really think that LLM's will make certain aspects of work very nice, like a really good version of intellisense that writes you're whole api for you. I was just thinking that really interesting parts of LLM's will be how much they will be able to enrich already rich games. Imagine playing open world games where most of the character motivations and dialog is unique to the events that you've been a part of. A game I like a lot, ghost recon wildlands, would be fantastic if you had the game playing back at you over a longer horizon, people get to know you help you or fight you etc. As for my day job. It's not going away because of LLM's. They can't fix office politics yet.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    And there you have the basis for a variant of the Simulation Argument.

galfarragem 4y ago

> people who claimed chatGPT was a stochastic parrot I still think that. Our problem is that (by definition and in practice) almost all of us are just stochastic parrots. Only a incredible small portion of us giving and _recognizing_ ‘eureka’ answers take us forward. Will GPT ever be capable of recognizing these answers?

visarga 4y ago

> I think the people who claimed chatGPT was a stochastic parrot are now realizing that they were the ones that were part of a giant parade of parrots regurgitating the same old tired trope of LLMs being nothing but simple word generators. Muhahaha that was delicious. I hate that parrot meme. Authors lost their respect from me right from the title of that paper.

chordalkeyboard 4y ago

> The advent of chatGPT had millions of people on the internet trying to downplay the intelligence of chatGPT by continuously trying to re-emphasize the things it gets wrong. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the criticism. It is not that chatGPT is unreliable because chatGPT makes occasional errors. It is that chatGPT is not intelligent because the type of errors chatGPT makes are indicative of the fact that it is assembling text into forms that humans assign meaning to, and has no understanding of the relationship between the symbols and their referents, and therefore is not 'intelligent' qua intelligence.

HervalFreire 4y ago
>This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the criticism. And this a fundamental misunderstanding of the criticism of the criticism. The problem here is that yes the occasional errors demonstrate certain flaws in it's understanding of some topic. The issue is there are many times where it produces completely novel and creative output that could not have existed in the training data and can only be formulated through complete and understanding of the query it was given. Understanding of the world around us is not developed through the lens of a singular model or a singular piece of understanding. We build multiple models of the world and we have varying levels of understanding of each model. It is the same with chatGPT. The remarkable thing about chatGPT understands a huge portion of these models really really well. Case in point: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/ https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/ There's literally no way it could do the above without understanding what you asked it to do. Read to the end. The end demonstrates awareness of self, relative to the context and task it was asked to perform. Yet people illogically claim that for some other topic because chatGPT failed to correctly model the topic it therefore MUST be flawed in ALL of it's understanding of the world. This claim is not logical.
- chordalkeyboard 4y ago
  > The problem here is that yes the occasional errors demonstrate certain flaws in it's understanding of some topic. No, they demonstrate that the machine does not understand. > The issue is there are many times where it produces completely novel and creative output that could not have existed in the training data and can only be formulated through complete and understanding of the query it was given. What have you done to eliminate the possibility that it assembled the words algorithmically and the solution generated is something the reader constructed by assigning meaning to the text response? If the answer "can only be formulated through complete and understanding of the query it was given" then you must have eliminated this possibility. > Understanding of the world around us is not developed through the lens of a singular model or a singular piece of understanding. We build multiple models of the world and we have varying levels of understanding of each model. It is the same with chatGPT. The remarkable thing about chatGPT understands a huge portion of these models really really well. Where is the evidence that chatGPT understands a thing? > There's literally no way it could do the above without understanding what you asked it to do. Read to the end. The end demonstrates awareness of self, relative to the context and task it was asked to perform. Thats an interpretation of the text output that you assigned based on what the words in the text mean to you. I could just as easily say that Harry Potter is self-aware. > Yet people illogically claim that for some other topic because chatGPT failed to correctly model the topic it therefore MUST be flawed in ALL of it's understanding of the world. This claim is not logical. I don't think you understand what we're discussing.

awill88 4y ago

This all seems very personal to an outside observer and I do hope you’re feeling okay about humanity in general. I imagine like most models, GPT could (somehow) structurally become too burdensome, because of some future breakthrough. That stuff happens all the time. Also, I could be wrong. Doesn’t seem responsible to attempt to predict the future this way..

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

> I'd argue that remixing is the fundamental force of creativity. Yes, but. Creativity - real creativity - is in choosing the right pieces to remix out of the immense amount of what's available. And, perhaps just as important, choosing what not to put in the remix. There's an immense difference between a meal prepared by a good chef, and throwing random ingredients in a blender. They both remix. But they are not remotely the same.

HervalFreire 4y ago
Your example here is obvious right? All humans agree with you because all humans can tell the difference. The thing with these LLMs is that it's exhibiting both seemingly random remixes and remixes with extreme creativity. A lot of people see some error and flaw with chatGPT or they don't dig deep enough and they miss the fact that there are many instances of intelligent remixing of creative data. Real creativity. Trust that the opposing party has the intelligence to not be tricked by some obvious answer that an LLM took from a look up table and that the opposing party saw something wholly novel and unique. The main issue here is that people are getting hung up on the part where chatGPT fails to be creative and are completely missing the fact that it can be successful as well.
- oska 4y ago
  There is not a single example of chatGPT being creative.
  - HervalFreire 4y ago
    I do not speak to fraudster or fantasists. Paraphrasing you earlier. Your responses to me in other threads were fucking rude and as a result I now literally hate you. So why bother, just leave and save everyone the trouble. Nobody cares for your opinion if you're going to continuously insult everyone you fucking talk to.