3 ms·

Have you seen the GPT4 demo? A few interesting things that make it seem much more than an occasional text editor replacement. One was having it write an entire

by mgfist 4y ago

Have you seen the GPT4 demo? A few interesting things that make it seem much more than an occasional text editor replacement. One was having it write an entire program. It needed a few prompts to fix some bugs it had, but it worked. The program was then used for the rest of the demo. The program even had an obscure bug that it solved by having the demo-er paste the error + the entire docs page. The second demo was having it write a html page based on a picture drawing on a napkin of a website, and then running the html. It's honestly pretty impressive. I already use chatgpt a lot (doing a lot of google sheets scripting/formula stuff and the docs + syntax are horrendous) and chatgpt helps me find the correct syntax much faster than I'd otherwise be able to

thomastjeffery 4y ago
There is a huge difference between writing a program, and writing the program you want right now. It's tricky to conceptualize because the entire narrative we are familiar with has personified GPT. It may be impressive, but GPT is completely different from humans. If a human is capable of writing a program, that is because they understand conceptually how and why. GPT doesn't. GPT's ability to write a program is entirely dependent on the content of its training corpus: no how, no why, only what. I'll put it another way: If a human is not able to write a program, it is because they don't understand conceptually how. If GPT is not able to write a program, it is because either the desired parts, or the necessary pattern that puts them together, does not exist in the training corpus; or because the prompt didn't yield a continuation that followed that arbitrary pattern. The results are impressive because humans are impressive. GPT doesn't interact with the domain of all possible written text. It deals with the domain of all possible patterns of tokens from the text it was given. It's only given text that was intentionally written by humans. It exists in a world of signal: no noise. It can still only guess, but the guess will always be constructed out of the category of text humans choose to write. Inference models are a completely different approach to language, and confusing them with human behavior is an easy way to make impossible predictions about what they can and cannot accomplish.

by mgfist 4y ago

thomastjeffery 4y ago

There is a huge difference between writing a program, and writing the program you want right now. It's tricky to conceptualize because the entire narrative we are familiar with has personified GPT. It may be impressive, but GPT is completely different from humans. If a human is capable of writing a program, that is because they understand conceptually how and why. GPT doesn't. GPT's ability to write a program is entirely dependent on the content of its training corpus: no how, no why, only what. I'll put it another way: If a human is not able to write a program, it is because they don't understand conceptually how. If GPT is not able to write a program, it is because either the desired parts, or the necessary pattern that puts them together, does not exist in the training corpus; or because the prompt didn't yield a continuation that followed that arbitrary pattern. The results are impressive because humans are impressive. GPT doesn't interact with the domain of all possible written text. It deals with the domain of all possible patterns of tokens from the text it was given. It's only given text that was intentionally written by humans. It exists in a world of signal: no noise. It can still only guess, but the guess will always be constructed out of the category of text humans choose to write. Inference models are a completely different approach to language, and confusing them with human behavior is an easy way to make impossible predictions about what they can and cannot accomplish.