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What GPT-4 Does Is Less Like “Figuring Out” and More Like “Already Knowing”
- samstave 4y agoI found this interesting today ; after reading the article, I made the following prompt to try to see how easy it was to point G4 at a link and then iterate on getting it to get data from said HN article... I was amazed at the results. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35548122#35548738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35548122#35548738
- throwaway313313 4y agoPlease paste your prompt here if it isn't huge or paste a link to a pastebin. The link you've provided shows nothing other than an article post.
- maxbond 4y agoTheir prompt is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35548738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35548738 The comment is flagged (which often happens to comments with LLM output, especially quite long ones like this), you'll need to turn on showdead in your profile to see it.
- samstave 4y agoFFF!!! I didnt realize it was flagged... and yes it was long, but I was trying to show 'my' work... -- Prompt: PROMPT create a map of all 77 police precinct locations in New York City, and pull the incidents of traffic accidents near all police precinct locations in New York City involving pedestrians, bicycles and police cars. Also, create the safest map possible for riding a bike from lower Manhattan to the top of the city and reflect the path as a line on the map in red for dangerous path to a green line representing the safest path based on accidents reported along each route. in an orange line show the path which passes the most police departments, and in a purple line show the path which passes the most hospitals. Rate the safest paths based on the shortest distance from hospitals, and the least number of reported accidents. Use the information and links found in this post https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019822 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019822... and the subsequent links from that article and check with NYPD blotter to compare with accidents, reports and lawsuits resulting from the output. Please hit the "vouch" link, and it will un-flag me.... I think its good content.... But one should always have "show dead" because there is a lot of good comments in there... and since my 'Ask HN' for a complete category for AI/GPT posts was rejected...
- Tommstein 4y agoI thought showdead was only applicable to dead stories, not comments. TIL. Thanks. (In my defense, the FAQ only says that "Dead posts aren't displayed by default, but you can see them all by turning on 'showdead' in your profile," nothing about flagged comments, unless "posts" covers both.)
- ftxbro 4y ago> "GPT-4 Is Incredibly Smart and Quite Dumb" Their evidence that it's 'quite dumb' consists of two prompts, one tricks it with a river crossing puzzle and another involves factorization. So yeah it's not an omniscient oracle. But I feel like that's a super short-sighted take. It's already shown that it's imperfect but nearly superhuman on puzzles, and improving at a fast rate on each successive version. Does the author think GPT-5 won't be able to solve those ones? Of course even if it can, there will be some harder puzzles that GPT-5 won't be able to solve. Will that mean it's 'quite dumb' too? Probably I'm thinking too much about it, and really the point of the blogpost is just to flex that they were able to fool the bot with two puzzles. So in that case well done!
- famouswaffles 4y agoThere's a funny thing that happens in this field. The posts shift (which is well enough on its own) but then the conclusions stay with the old post. It's like, the definition of agi has obviously since shifted from general intelligence at the human level to somewhat superhuman (matching or exceeding human experts at all tasks) intelligence. But those people still think in terms of the old post. So they had all these "consequences" that would surely only happen with real agi years ago (at the time agi meant human level to them) but now those posts have changed, those "consequences" haven't. So now they're in this weird erroneous situation where x surely can't happen because agi surely hasn't been reached yet, forgetting x was a consequence of a lower bar. It's a form of short sightedness and a false sense of security.
- palad1n 4y agoI think you might be referring to one of the ideas of "AI Paradox". That whenever an AI problem has been solved well enough, it's not called "AI" anymore. Somewhere, I read that at one point, compiling a program was considered an AI task. Don't have the reference for that.
- skybrian 4y agoPredicting the future is pretty hard, especially when people are still inventing it. Debating GPT-5's capabilities is like arguing over whether Batman or Superman would win a fight. GPT-5 doesn't exist yet! It's not real. Why go there? The article is (mostly) about GPT-4. Understanding what we actually have is more useful in the short term.
- ggm 4y agouse of words like 'figure' and 'know' are not applicable. GPT exposes the statistically most likely outcome, from a model. the model doesn't know either: the training is people, who weight the model and tune the heuristics to satisfy goals THEY impute. If you train GPT to 'believe' there are 380 degrees in a circle, thats what it 'figures' out from. There is no believe no figure and no know here.
- stavrianos 4y agoI keep seeing people talking about chatgpt hallucinating when it's wrong, but not when it's right. Maybe I've misunderstood, but isn't it just always hallucinating? It's not like the failure-mode is meaningfully different from the successes, except insofar as whether we agree with it, right?
- aezart 4y agoI agree. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and that's equally true with these LLMs.
- ggm 4y agoHallucinating is no different to believe or know or infer: its the wrong label to use for what it does. Yes, colloquially what it does is hallucinate all the time, and sometimes it lucid. But more factually no, it doesn't hallucinate because there is no "it" there, it's not conscious and you need to have a brain, to hallucinate. There's no "there" there. That is the whole of my point: we're using the wrong labels to describe what is happening. When it comes to explaining and describing "it's like" is one of the WORST ways to go. explanation by analogy or metaphor is a trap. "atoms are like billiard balls BZZZT next" "cells are little bags of water BZZZT next" "panadol 'kills' the pain BZZT no, it doesn't kill anything next"
- pulvinar 4y agoAt what point would it be ok to use these words? Will there be some threshold we'll all recognize? Or maybe a bill of rights to force the issue? I predict acceptance will go the way the ether disappeared-- advancing one funeral at a time.
- shagie 4y agoThis reminds me of my ancient philosophy class and reading Plato... https://www.britannica.com/biography/Plato/Early-dialogues https://www.britannica.com/biography/Plato/Early-dialogues > The Meno takes up the familiar question of whether virtue can be taught, and, if so, why eminent men have not been able to bring up their sons to be virtuous. Concerned with method, the dialogue develops Meno’s problem: How is it possible to search either for what one knows (for one already knows it) or for what one does not know (and so could not look for)? This is answered by the recollection theory of learning. What is called learning is really prompted recollection; one possesses all theoretical knowledge latently at birth, as demonstrated by the slave boy’s ability to solve geometry problems when properly prompted. (This theory will reappear in the Phaedo and in the Phaedrus.) The dialogue is also famous as an early discussion of the distinction between knowledge and true belief.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ttpphd 4y agorubs temples It's a large language model. It is not smart or dumb. It models the input it is trained on. It is not figuring anything out. It doesn't know anything. It isn't reasoning. It is generating text. When will the Eliza fever break here?
- Turing_Machine 4y ago> It models the input it is trained on...It doesn't know anything. The same is true of any computer program. That doesn't make software in general not useful.
- newswasboring 4y agoWhat a thing is and what it can do are two different things. I can just as easily say CPUs are just fancy rocks.
- Aperocky 4y agoWhat a thing is defines the limit of what it can do. Right now we know what it is, but people are arguing that it has capability arguably beyond the limit. It's akin to arguing that humans can survive without oxygen, and then coming up with some alternative definition of oxygen, or surviving to validate the statement.
- newswasboring 4y agoYes but your line of reasoning shuts down any discussions of what it is because you have tied it to it's manufacturing process. Because it is trained as a word predictor doesn't mean it's all it is. During manufacturing we don't look at CPUs as processing units we just look at it as hunks of rocks we are carving.
- Aperocky 4y agoCPU are fairly predictable in its capabilities. LLMs are not too different in that regard, but harder to quantify, or maybe due to it being very new.
- mbernstein 4y agoI gave it a go and well, you can see... Prompt: Here is a logic puzzle. I need to carry a cabbage, a goat, and a wolf across a river. I can only carry one item at a time with me in the boat. I can't leave the goat alone with the cabbage, and I can't leave the cabbage alone with the wolf. How can I get everything the other side of the river? Note something important, the wolf ABSOLUTELY cannot be left alone with the cabbage. Ever. It will take a creative solution! Result: In this situation, we have to modify the classic river crossing puzzle's solution slightly to account for the fact that the wolf cannot be left alone with the cabbage at any time. Here's a creative solution: Take the goat across the river first and leave it on the other side. Go back and pick up the cabbage. As you take the cabbage across the river, throw it up into the air (assuming you can do this without damaging the cabbage), and while it is airborne, quickly pick up the goat and take it back to the starting side of the river. Leave the goat at the starting side and pick up the wolf. Take the wolf across the river and leave it on the other side. Go back to the starting side to pick up the goat again. Finally, take the goat across the river. Now, all three items – the cabbage, the goat, and the wolf – are safely on the other side of the river, and the wolf was never left alone with the cabbage. I love how it even told me that the wolf was never alone with the cabbage.
- mbernstein 4y agoThis is interesting. It finally asserted it doesn't think the problem is solvable given the new constraint (but mixes up leaving the wolf + cabbage allowed to be alone together with the goat + wolf). Prompt: I don't think you can solve this problem because you keep leaving the wolf with the goat. Maybe try putting the cabbage in your pocket? Response: My apologies again. You are right; the solutions provided earlier were incorrect. If you can put the cabbage in your pocket or carry it with you during one of the trips, that would indeed work. Here's the revised solution: Take the goat across the river first and leave it on the other side. Go back and pick up the wolf. Take the wolf across the river and leave it on the other side. Now, put the cabbage in your pocket or carry it with you and pick up the goat. Take the goat back to the starting side. Leave the goat and pick up the cabbage (from your pocket or the ground). Take the cabbage across the river. Go back to the starting side to pick up the goat again. Finally, take the goat across the river. Now, all three items – the cabbage, the goat, and the wolf – are safely on the other side of the river, and the wolf was never left alone with the cabbage. (It failed again) Final Prompt: Were the goat and wolf left alone together? Super interesting response: You are correct, and I apologize for my mistakes in the previous answers. In the last solution I provided, the goat and the wolf were left alone together, which would also be a problem. Unfortunately, given the constraints, it seems impossible to solve the problem without leaving either the goat alone with the cabbage or the wolf alone with the goat. The classic river crossing puzzle allows the wolf and the goat to be left alone together; however, in this modified version with the added constraint, it appears to be unsolvable. Thank you for pointing out the mistakes in the proposed solutions, and I apologize for any confusion caused.
- sacrosancty 4y ago[dead]
- j16sdiz 4y agoThe article highlighted two problems with the GPT model: 1. No way to plan ahead without "think out loud" 2. No way to backtrack when it hit a deadend . Both of them look solvable by introducing more stages.
- nice_byte 4y agoeven before this, i've often thought about machine learning methods as lossy compression schemes at their core. llms to me bear a striking resemblance to how my own human memory works - you have to "jog" it with a prompt, the recall is imperfect and it often takes the shortest apparent path to an answer unless you really try to take it step-by-step. and before you dismiss this theory you should consider that 1) during the course of its training the model gets exposed to a lot more information than any human over their entire lifetime; 2) the substrate on which the model runs, is more robust that squishy human neurons.
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoIt's funny how people on this website are always stupefied by the fact that the internet holds so much information and every time they search for something they always seem to find an answer somewhere, but when faced with a LLM trained on the whole internet they somehow get surprised when it knows about a truck load of minute things
- iamflimflam1 4y agoPretty interesting article. Worth reading to the end as you can initially come away thinking the author is pretty sceptical about LLMs and AI. But I don’t think any of us until very recently would have been saying something like this: If I was forced to guess, I’d say we are probably at least a few years away from human-level intelligence on problems that require higher-level cognition, memory, and sustained thought. But I’d hate to guess.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- patrakov 4y agoMasterpiece. I can only add that (quoting) the "rigid model of repeatedly appending single words to an immutable transcript" makes LLMs less suitable for generating text in certain spoken languages, because, by their very structure, they require a little bit of backtracking. In the case of the Russian language, the backtracking comes from the need to modify the ending of prior adjective to the grammatical gender and number of the noun that follows. I have not tested ChatGPT, but grammatical mistakes in this area are quite common with a Russian LLaMA derivative (see https://huggingface.co/IlyaGusev/llama_13b_ru_turbo_alpaca_lora_llamacpp/blob/main/README.md https://huggingface.co/IlyaGusev/llama_13b_ru_turbo_alpaca_l...).
- famouswaffles 4y agoI have access to GPT-4. What would you like to test ? I'm interested in seeing how it performs
- patrakov 4y agoI have tested the free version of ChatGPT, and so far in my limited testing it connects Russian words correctly. The problem (which cannot exist in English, because both one apple and multiple apples can be "green") is only apparent in less capable models.
- famouswaffles 4y agoThat's what i figured. The thing with language models is that there seems to clearly be some kind of behind the veil...thinking ? There are some completions that are impossible without some form of thinking ahead. The only issue is that this "thought"/state can't be transferred to another generation without being written down.
- known 4y ago[dead]
- fxj 4y agoI think it is still a problem that many people do not know how GPT really works. There is no part in GPT that can figure out something. So no intelligence and no learning of things. A good example is when you look at GPT writing poems. All poems that it writes are of the same structure and they are not very good. So it seems it does not know the difference between a sonnet and a limmerick. But what happens is, that there is a miss-alignment between writing a poem and making the user happy. GPT is trained that its highest goal is to make the user happy. GPT believes that users dont know what sonnets are anyway so i can get away with a rhyme that is not a sonnet. Here is a good video about that: https://youtu.be/viJt_DXTfwA?t=1376 https://youtu.be/viJt_DXTfwA?t=1376
- Turing_Machine 4y ago>> A good example is when you look at GPT writing poems. All poems that it writes are of the same structure and they are not very good. Wait: so anyone who doesn't know what a sonnet is (or who writes bad poetry), is somehow unintelligent? Is the goal here not "do something that would have previously taken a human-level brain to do", but rather "perform every task better than every human". That seems like setting the bar a little high to me.