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Friend, kindly be assured that I am indeed conversing with you in good faith. :-) I'm curious why you feel that asking you a clarifying question is an essentia

Friend, kindly be assured that I am indeed conversing with you in good faith. :-) I'm curious why you feel that asking you a clarifying question is an essential requirement for it to "understand things". I have not gotten it to issue a question mark '?'. But it did suggest to me an option: If you would like to define M(7) as equal to M(6), you can do so. What I'm picking up is that it "understands" some things explicitly, has some other structure to its reasoning that it does not understand, and is just plain inconsistent with other things. Not all that different from people TBH. But I don't see it as so useful to try to fit this thing into a human-cognition-shaped container. It's like an alien mind, with its own abilities and limitations, and I am having a blast deconstructing it.

roflyear 4y ago
> I'm curious why you feel that asking you a clarifying question is an essential requirement for it to "understand things". It isn't a requirement, it's an example I used. You can come up with others, I'm sure! Like ask it to replace a word with another word. It kind of works! But also does random other things. Why? Because that's how these models function! But I asked GPT why these models often don't ask clarifying questions (try it yourself, new prompt! GPT-4!): > I have found often that GPT models will just reply with answers, rather than ask clarifying questions about the text we're giving them. Why do these models do this? The reason why GPT models may not ask clarifying questions about the text given to them is that they are trained to generate text based on the patterns and relationships they observe in large amounts of data. This means that they do not have a deep understanding of the content they are processing and are unable to determine whether or not they need additional information to better understand a particular text. Additionally, GPT models are trained to optimize for the likelihood of generating coherent and grammatically correct text. In most cases, generating a response that directly answers the question or prompt given to them is a more effective way to achieve this goal than asking clarifying questions that may require additional context or information. However, there are some techniques that can be used to encourage GPT models to ask clarifying questions. One approach is to include explicit cues or markers in the input text that signal to the model that additional information is needed. Another approach is to use training data that includes examples of the model asking clarifying questions, which can help the model learn to do so more consistently. --- It's very convenient for all of us to think that GPT is like a human, but somehow not like a human enough to cause any moral issues! It's like winning, but you don't even have to play!

roflyear 4y ago

> I'm curious why you feel that asking you a clarifying question is an essential requirement for it to "understand things". It isn't a requirement, it's an example I used. You can come up with others, I'm sure! Like ask it to replace a word with another word. It kind of works! But also does random other things. Why? Because that's how these models function! But I asked GPT why these models often don't ask clarifying questions (try it yourself, new prompt! GPT-4!): > I have found often that GPT models will just reply with answers, rather than ask clarifying questions about the text we're giving them. Why do these models do this? The reason why GPT models may not ask clarifying questions about the text given to them is that they are trained to generate text based on the patterns and relationships they observe in large amounts of data. This means that they do not have a deep understanding of the content they are processing and are unable to determine whether or not they need additional information to better understand a particular text. Additionally, GPT models are trained to optimize for the likelihood of generating coherent and grammatically correct text. In most cases, generating a response that directly answers the question or prompt given to them is a more effective way to achieve this goal than asking clarifying questions that may require additional context or information. However, there are some techniques that can be used to encourage GPT models to ask clarifying questions. One approach is to include explicit cues or markers in the input text that signal to the model that additional information is needed. Another approach is to use training data that includes examples of the model asking clarifying questions, which can help the model learn to do so more consistently. --- It's very convenient for all of us to think that GPT is like a human, but somehow not like a human enough to cause any moral issues! It's like winning, but you don't even have to play!