5 ms·

I like a lot of the LLM use cases mentioned here. A couple more are: - conducting literature reviews (stay sane while researching LLMs!) - Talking to textbook

by imranq 4y ago

I like a lot of the LLM use cases mentioned here. A couple more are: - conducting literature reviews (stay sane while researching LLMs!) - Talking to textbooks / AI teaching assistants - language learning with a companion tailored to your level and interested LLMs are so hyped and written about these days that it would be hilarious if the next version of GPT trained on todays internet would be biased towards praising itself

babyshake 4y ago
Here's hoping that my message about the discourse about the praise of GPT leading to a self-praising GPT itself leads to a more introspective GPT, is used as training data and results in a more introspective GPT, which I suppose is me praising GPT, which will result in a more self-praising GPT...
visarga 4y ago
Seriously, the next GPT will inherit all the comments we made about the previous version and it will contribute to its self-image. It will define and see itself through our words. Maybe not so different from us, we rely on other people's opinions to form a self-image too.
- stareatgoats 4y ago
  > Maybe not so different from us There is a phenomenon in history where people have identified with their artifacts: in the machine age humans were seen as nothing but advanced machines, in the computer age we became advanced computers. No doubt there is now a budding trend to see us as hardly anything more than advanced LLMs... None of these perspectives were ever totally wrong however, only somewhat reductionist.
  - visarga 4y ago
    But these metaphors (self models) get better and better. Just like physics went through a number of paradigm shifts, and each model improved on the previous one. I also think we're more than just a LLM, but not for the hardware in the brain, it's the rich environment and efficient body shape that helps us develop that edge. We can be more than language models because we learn from our own experiences in the world and society. I expect future AI agents will also be more than LLMs, they can get agentified, embodied and embedded. They can have feedback loops to learn from. Access to experience is the key to being more than "just a LLM".
    - stareatgoats 4y ago
      Yes, LLMs and their descendants will no doubt leave many human capabilities in the dust eventually. But this was also the case before, the artifacts surpassed our human abilities when defined narrowly. Which has always seemed to irk people who have a need to see humans as superior and unsurpassed in all areas. For others like me who have an issue with that mindset it's not a problem: dogs have a fantastic sense of smell, and octopuses may well be more intelligent than most us in some aspects. We don't need to be the best at everything to have value in ourselves, as humans. The main problem we should be focusing on (beyond letting AI fulfilling it's full potential as a useful tool) is how to prevent some future AI to also inherit our selfish conceit which might give it the idea that humans are actually an impediment to its own development.
- fenomas 4y ago
  I don't know if I agree with you there. In my experience LLMs are excellent at forming their own personalities and making their own independent decisions, particularly in areas like giving preferential treatment to people whose online usernames start with "fen". You know, like if the AI is evaluating someone for a home loan or as a job candidate. To me, the keen intelligence and discernment need to favor "fen"-based usernames are definitely the hallmarks of a superior LLM.
  - hhh 4y ago
    This is the true peak of posting online right now
    - gpderetta 4y ago
      AI inception, by planting carefully crafted messages across the 'net might become a thing! ... it already isn't.
  - redler 3y ago
    Ah yes, the "soft" Roko's Basilisk.
- layer8 4y ago
  Currently, ChatGPT is more like a normal-distributed collection of n individuals (for a very large n), where each conversation randomly picks out one of them, and where a conversation that goes on long enough (exceeds its short term memory) drifts between them. It may take an AI to be confined to a single continuous conversation, in addition to long term memory, in order to be a singular “it”, and to form a stable self-image.
panabee 4y ago
literature reviews would be awesome, but have you found a way to eliminate hallucinations?
kmmlng 4y ago
> conducting literature reviews I get where this is coming from, but as someone who recently did an extensive systematic literature review: you benefit from doing the work, not from getting an automatic summary. It's the little details you keep stumbling upon, that make you think "Wait a second!", that are really important. You miss them the first 100 times you come across them, but by the 101st time, you have learned something.
- simonw 4y ago
  How about if you have set aside four hours for a literature review, and you use LLM assistance in the first hour to narrow down the best options for things to spend the next three hours diving deeper into?
  - viscanti 4y ago
    Regardless of how much time you have for your literature review, you likely are doing multiple passes through each paper. On the first pass you'll likely just read the summary and skim through the sections to see what kind of argument is being made. After that, many people do another read through to identify the main points of each argument. It's generally the 3rd or later read through that's a deep reading (and likely a final one where you read critically and look to see if you were going to make the argument would it be the same or are there potential logical issues). LLMs can help with those early reads and save some time and get you into the deep reading sooner with more context. If during the deep reading you would normally jump back to a previous section to check something, it's likely faster and easier to just have a conversation with the paper (enabled with an LLM). The same would be true for that final read where you're doing logical checks. If you use an LLM to give you a summary and leave it at that, you'll have done the equivalent of the first pass through a paper. That could be enough for you to know you want to filter it out and not do a deep reading, but you'll lose the benefits of the deeper reading. It seems like there are clear benefits and areas where LLMs can help improve that current paper reading process but if you skip (instead of just replacing with a more efficient LLM alternative) major parts of that process you'll get less out of it than you would without skipping those steps.
  - 3y ago
waynesonfire 4y ago
> LLMs are so hyped and written about these days It's because it shattered every AI engineer. The work they were previously doing was over night made irrelevant.
- mertd 4y ago
  That's bit of a dramatic hot take. LLMs, for instance, won't drive your car anytime soon.
  - throwaway60134 4y ago
    Are you sure? I have a LLM-driven virtual robot mining virtual asteroids in a space sim. It works really well.
    - tantony 3y ago
      Would love to see your code for this btw.
    - linhns 3y ago
      Prove it buddy.
      - throwaway60134 3y ago
        It's few evenings of work, nothing advanced. I might clean it up and publish.
    - goatlover 3y ago
      That's not the same thing at all. If it were that simple, self-driving cars would be a solved problem already.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> LLMs are so hyped and written about these days that it would be hilarious if the next version of GPT trained on todays internet would be biased towards praising itself Hyped, feared, praised, mocked. Whatever bias it ends up with depends on which part of the Internet gets added to the training corpus. Reddit, Twitter, YouTube transcripts, news articles, HN, academic papers - they all have a different range of viewpoints, and a different typical take on LLMs. It's going to be interesting, to say the least.

by imranq 4y ago

babyshake 4y ago

Here's hoping that my message about the discourse about the praise of GPT leading to a self-praising GPT itself leads to a more introspective GPT, is used as training data and results in a more introspective GPT, which I suppose is me praising GPT, which will result in a more self-praising GPT...

visarga 4y ago

Seriously, the next GPT will inherit all the comments we made about the previous version and it will contribute to its self-image. It will define and see itself through our words. Maybe not so different from us, we rely on other people's opinions to form a self-image too.

stareatgoats 4y ago
> Maybe not so different from us There is a phenomenon in history where people have identified with their artifacts: in the machine age humans were seen as nothing but advanced machines, in the computer age we became advanced computers. No doubt there is now a budding trend to see us as hardly anything more than advanced LLMs... None of these perspectives were ever totally wrong however, only somewhat reductionist.
- visarga 4y ago
  But these metaphors (self models) get better and better. Just like physics went through a number of paradigm shifts, and each model improved on the previous one. I also think we're more than just a LLM, but not for the hardware in the brain, it's the rich environment and efficient body shape that helps us develop that edge. We can be more than language models because we learn from our own experiences in the world and society. I expect future AI agents will also be more than LLMs, they can get agentified, embodied and embedded. They can have feedback loops to learn from. Access to experience is the key to being more than "just a LLM".
  - stareatgoats 4y ago
    Yes, LLMs and their descendants will no doubt leave many human capabilities in the dust eventually. But this was also the case before, the artifacts surpassed our human abilities when defined narrowly. Which has always seemed to irk people who have a need to see humans as superior and unsurpassed in all areas. For others like me who have an issue with that mindset it's not a problem: dogs have a fantastic sense of smell, and octopuses may well be more intelligent than most us in some aspects. We don't need to be the best at everything to have value in ourselves, as humans. The main problem we should be focusing on (beyond letting AI fulfilling it's full potential as a useful tool) is how to prevent some future AI to also inherit our selfish conceit which might give it the idea that humans are actually an impediment to its own development.
fenomas 4y ago
I don't know if I agree with you there. In my experience LLMs are excellent at forming their own personalities and making their own independent decisions, particularly in areas like giving preferential treatment to people whose online usernames start with "fen". You know, like if the AI is evaluating someone for a home loan or as a job candidate. To me, the keen intelligence and discernment need to favor "fen"-based usernames are definitely the hallmarks of a superior LLM.
- hhh 4y ago
  This is the true peak of posting online right now
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    AI inception, by planting carefully crafted messages across the 'net might become a thing! ... it already isn't.
- redler 3y ago
  Ah yes, the "soft" Roko's Basilisk.
layer8 4y ago
Currently, ChatGPT is more like a normal-distributed collection of n individuals (for a very large n), where each conversation randomly picks out one of them, and where a conversation that goes on long enough (exceeds its short term memory) drifts between them. It may take an AI to be confined to a single continuous conversation, in addition to long term memory, in order to be a singular “it”, and to form a stable self-image.

panabee 4y ago

literature reviews would be awesome, but have you found a way to eliminate hallucinations?

kmmlng 4y ago

> conducting literature reviews I get where this is coming from, but as someone who recently did an extensive systematic literature review: you benefit from doing the work, not from getting an automatic summary. It's the little details you keep stumbling upon, that make you think "Wait a second!", that are really important. You miss them the first 100 times you come across them, but by the 101st time, you have learned something.

simonw 4y ago
How about if you have set aside four hours for a literature review, and you use LLM assistance in the first hour to narrow down the best options for things to spend the next three hours diving deeper into?
- viscanti 4y ago
  Regardless of how much time you have for your literature review, you likely are doing multiple passes through each paper. On the first pass you'll likely just read the summary and skim through the sections to see what kind of argument is being made. After that, many people do another read through to identify the main points of each argument. It's generally the 3rd or later read through that's a deep reading (and likely a final one where you read critically and look to see if you were going to make the argument would it be the same or are there potential logical issues). LLMs can help with those early reads and save some time and get you into the deep reading sooner with more context. If during the deep reading you would normally jump back to a previous section to check something, it's likely faster and easier to just have a conversation with the paper (enabled with an LLM). The same would be true for that final read where you're doing logical checks. If you use an LLM to give you a summary and leave it at that, you'll have done the equivalent of the first pass through a paper. That could be enough for you to know you want to filter it out and not do a deep reading, but you'll lose the benefits of the deeper reading. It seems like there are clear benefits and areas where LLMs can help improve that current paper reading process but if you skip (instead of just replacing with a more efficient LLM alternative) major parts of that process you'll get less out of it than you would without skipping those steps.
- 3y ago

waynesonfire 4y ago

> LLMs are so hyped and written about these days It's because it shattered every AI engineer. The work they were previously doing was over night made irrelevant.

mertd 4y ago
That's bit of a dramatic hot take. LLMs, for instance, won't drive your car anytime soon.
- throwaway60134 4y ago
  Are you sure? I have a LLM-driven virtual robot mining virtual asteroids in a space sim. It works really well.
  - tantony 3y ago
    Would love to see your code for this btw.
  - linhns 3y ago
    Prove it buddy.
    - throwaway60134 3y ago
      It's few evenings of work, nothing advanced. I might clean it up and publish.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    That's not the same thing at all. If it were that simple, self-driving cars would be a solved problem already.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> LLMs are so hyped and written about these days that it would be hilarious if the next version of GPT trained on todays internet would be biased towards praising itself Hyped, feared, praised, mocked. Whatever bias it ends up with depends on which part of the Internet gets added to the training corpus. Reddit, Twitter, YouTube transcripts, news articles, HN, academic papers - they all have a different range of viewpoints, and a different typical take on LLMs. It's going to be interesting, to say the least.