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> It is not, it can only give out known answers to known problems based on language statistics. Are you sure you actually tried, or is this an a priori argumen

by hnfong 4y ago

> It is not, it can only give out known answers to known problems based on language statistics. Are you sure you actually tried, or is this an a priori argument?

surgical_fire 4y ago
I use it on a daily basis.
- hnfong 4y ago
  I notice you said you used it, but did you actually intentionally test its reasoning abilities by giving it "known problems" and equivalently difficult (whatever that means) "novel" problems, and observe the difference in the quality of results it gave? (btw, apparently GPT-4 does much better on mathematical reasoning, I've yet to try myself though)
  - surgical_fire 4y ago
    Yes. It fails sometimes on known problems, not even particularly hard ones - i.e.: simple questions about the capabilities of programming libraries for which there is ample documentation available. The thing is, by talking about its shortcomings I may be sounding dismissive. I'm not. I think ChatGPT is an amazing tool. I just recognize it's shortcomings to use it to its best capacity. For things that don't have a known answer (i.e.: I couldn't easily find an answer online) it does generate plausible bullshit. On those cases it shines for things that don't really have any strictness requirements (for example, ask it to generate some fiction, ask it to generate a polite response to an email, etc). I used to suggest character names for a game I was going to play based on some parameters, and I loved the responses it gave me.
sidlls 4y ago
That's literally what the language model is. It might correctly generate a solution to a "novel" question/problem that is sufficiently close to one with an existing, known answer. But then again it might not. And in software development, it's going to take someone who is knowledgeable to tell the difference. I think software engineering is going to look very different in a few years, and likely be a smaller field with lower paying jobs. But it's not going away in the near (5-10 years) future.
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  The dude you replied to you gave out the sort of bad take I come here for. If anyone thinks genuinely that ChatGPT can meaningfully replace a software developer should be starting a tech business right now. You can replace basically your largest cost (staff wages, especially for expensive pesky software developers) with a $20 account that will work overtime, will never get tired, and whose performance will never fluctuate. No excuses for not getting insanely rich. Of course it's not happening, because it's bullshit. I am genuinely impressed and even excited with ChatGPT. It's an amazing tool, that would have been massively helpful when I needed a good NLP in the past. It will certainly be massively useful in the future. Hell, it's being a great assistant right now. But it's not General AI, and I do facepalm at people LARPing as if it were. General AI will in day exist, and knowledge jobs will most likely be a thing of the past at that point. How far in the future it is is anyone's guess (my prediction is in between 12 and 235 years in the future). We're just not there yet.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    Im curious why you pick your bounds of 12 and 235?
    - willismichael 4y ago
      Probably asked ChatGPT
  - hnfong 4y ago
    There's a difference between being able to do logical reasoning, and being able to do everything a competent white collar worker can do. For one, there's a token limit and memory limit, which limits the scale of the problems current iterations of GPT can do (and this limitation is not a limitation of logical reasoning ability). There's also (for GPT) no way for one to fine tune or train the model to work better in a specific domain unless you're in bed with OpenAI/Microsoft. I think as a society we don't really have precise words for describing the different levels of intelligence, except in a "I know it when I see it" way. I don't think I'm LARPing in any way, I'm probably even less excited with it than you are given that you seem to be using it more often than I am. I'm just saying I think GPT does exhibit some logical reasoning abilities and not merely remembering statistical patterns.

by hnfong 4y ago

> It is not, it can only give out known answers to known problems based on language statistics. Are you sure you actually tried, or is this an a priori argument?

surgical_fire 4y ago

I use it on a daily basis.

hnfong 4y ago
I notice you said you used it, but did you actually intentionally test its reasoning abilities by giving it "known problems" and equivalently difficult (whatever that means) "novel" problems, and observe the difference in the quality of results it gave? (btw, apparently GPT-4 does much better on mathematical reasoning, I've yet to try myself though)
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  Yes. It fails sometimes on known problems, not even particularly hard ones - i.e.: simple questions about the capabilities of programming libraries for which there is ample documentation available. The thing is, by talking about its shortcomings I may be sounding dismissive. I'm not. I think ChatGPT is an amazing tool. I just recognize it's shortcomings to use it to its best capacity. For things that don't have a known answer (i.e.: I couldn't easily find an answer online) it does generate plausible bullshit. On those cases it shines for things that don't really have any strictness requirements (for example, ask it to generate some fiction, ask it to generate a polite response to an email, etc). I used to suggest character names for a game I was going to play based on some parameters, and I loved the responses it gave me.

sidlls 4y ago

That's literally what the language model is. It might correctly generate a solution to a "novel" question/problem that is sufficiently close to one with an existing, known answer. But then again it might not. And in software development, it's going to take someone who is knowledgeable to tell the difference. I think software engineering is going to look very different in a few years, and likely be a smaller field with lower paying jobs. But it's not going away in the near (5-10 years) future.

surgical_fire 4y ago
The dude you replied to you gave out the sort of bad take I come here for. If anyone thinks genuinely that ChatGPT can meaningfully replace a software developer should be starting a tech business right now. You can replace basically your largest cost (staff wages, especially for expensive pesky software developers) with a $20 account that will work overtime, will never get tired, and whose performance will never fluctuate. No excuses for not getting insanely rich. Of course it's not happening, because it's bullshit. I am genuinely impressed and even excited with ChatGPT. It's an amazing tool, that would have been massively helpful when I needed a good NLP in the past. It will certainly be massively useful in the future. Hell, it's being a great assistant right now. But it's not General AI, and I do facepalm at people LARPing as if it were. General AI will in day exist, and knowledge jobs will most likely be a thing of the past at that point. How far in the future it is is anyone's guess (my prediction is in between 12 and 235 years in the future). We're just not there yet.
- grugagag 4y ago
  Im curious why you pick your bounds of 12 and 235?
  - willismichael 4y ago
    Probably asked ChatGPT
- hnfong 4y ago
  There's a difference between being able to do logical reasoning, and being able to do everything a competent white collar worker can do. For one, there's a token limit and memory limit, which limits the scale of the problems current iterations of GPT can do (and this limitation is not a limitation of logical reasoning ability). There's also (for GPT) no way for one to fine tune or train the model to work better in a specific domain unless you're in bed with OpenAI/Microsoft. I think as a society we don't really have precise words for describing the different levels of intelligence, except in a "I know it when I see it" way. I don't think I'm LARPing in any way, I'm probably even less excited with it than you are given that you seem to be using it more often than I am. I'm just saying I think GPT does exhibit some logical reasoning abilities and not merely remembering statistical patterns.