4 ms·

The chat interface + context is the magic. GPT had been out for a while, but it only really exploded in use with ChatGPT. Essentially, a conversational agent

• broast 4y ago
  Personally I find completions as equally useful as the chat interface and I'm waiting for OpenAI to prioritize economizing and adding plug-ins for gpt3/4 for completions like they have for chat and gpt-3.5-turbo. Being able to rely on Wolfram for accurate completions (through the API) rather than just through chat/chat api would be very cool
  • andai 4y ago
    I've seen a paper (I forget which, might respond below later) about GPT-4 and tool use i.e. it reliably knows when it's hit the limit of what it can do on its own, and can successfully emit commands for external APIs to handle those aspects for it (calculator, character manipulation, etc). My hunch is if you read that, you could get "raw GPT-4" to defer to WolframAlpha via a similar mechanism (with a couple dozen lines of glue code).
• jeron 4y ago
  Wolfram had ability to infer context for a while but never felt magical because you often hit limitations where it did not understand, unlike chatGPT
• htss2013 4y ago
  Yes but let's acknowledge the less magical reality - a big part of the magic of chatgpt is its willingness, not ability, to make stuff up and deliver it with confidence. If chatgpt gave errors or some other bad experience instead of smoothly fabricating fake answers, a lot of the magic would wear off. For savvy users this doesn't matter. The utility is off the charts and you can mitigate the risk of being lied to. But let's not pretend this is cost free. There is a huge externality in the form of shadow scrambling reality for millions of people who don't realize it's happening.
  • danielrpa 4y ago
    "Fake it until you make it" - very human behavior indeed. It's unfair to hold the AI to a bar we don't apply to ourselves.
    • brianpan 4y ago
      I expect a calculator to multiply 2 numbers for me very quickly and correctly. Every time. I don't hold any human to that bar and that's perfectly ok.
      • Spivak 4y ago
        Yeah, and you can have GPT do that quickly and accurately. You just have to give it access to a calculator just like you would for a human. Tell it not to compute anything and explain how to format the output that can be ingested by a calculator or interpreter. People have crazy unrealistic expectations of what the raw model can do but undersell what it’s possible to build with a machine that grasps language better than basically every human.
        • withinboredom 4y ago
          I don’t need a calculator to tell me 50 * 12 is 600. But you’re saying an AI does?
          • Spivak 4y ago
            For simple calculations no, for more complicated calculations yes. Trying to determine in advance if a Llm can do the math "in its head" is a task unto itself that pretty much boils down to sampling multiple responses and seeing if it produces different answers. So it's often just easier (and cheaper) to make it use a calculator for everything and not have to worry.
            • withinboredom 4y ago
              It tried to convince me the square root of two was negative one the other week… It was so sure of it and couldn’t be convinced otherwise. I doubt they’ll be able to convince it to use a calculator at all. It’s like arguing with a six year old child to put a coat on in the middle of winter…
• ren_engineer 4y ago
  the magic was that it was free, only OpenAI can afford to do it after selling out to Microsoft for near unlimited compute resources. Google was too afraid of negative PR to do it themselves at first, they should have spun their chat bot out into a startup that wouldn't hurt their core brand. Google had an internal ChatGPT equivalent for over a year
  • nico 4y ago
    Tried Bard yesterday, it sucks in comparison with ChatGPT. Doesn’t even translate. I was expecting a lot more from the company that made Google Translate.