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Absolutely nailed it. I love articles by people like Tao and Wolfram as they tend cut the B.S. and get down to the real utility of it, rather quickly. I was al
by irthomasthomas 3y ago
Absolutely nailed it. I love articles by people like Tao and Wolfram as they tend cut the B.S. and get down to the real utility of it, rather quickly.
I was also pleased, in a schadenfreude kind of way, that Tao followed the same dead-end paths as me, and I presume most others, when learning GPT-4. Like, starting out by trying to be very precise and descriptive, before throwing caution to the wind and embracing the non-deterministic nature of the thing, and just throwing a ton of keywords and loosely worded requests at it.
The good thing, is that as I know the LLM can provide answers which are totally wrong, I am forced to be more critical of the answer than just reading a book on the subject.
Yep, having to fact-check it's hallucinations has been far less detrimental than I expected. I find, often, if it's a subject I am vaguely familiar with, that the surprises jump out at me, then I can fact-check them and learn something. Actually, many times I was convinced it was hallucinating some cli tool or option flag, and it actually turned out to be correct. And, those times when we are embarrassingly wrong, tend to be the most instructive.
Browsing mode, when used right, was a huge boost for this. I found the optimal use, was to structure a prompt like normal, as if targeting GPT-4 WITHOUT the browser mode, and then tack on to the end a carefully crafted search request, or two. This way, it writes a response first before performing the web searches and augmenting the answer. This acts like chain-of-thought reasoning by expanding the information in the initial prompt. And, as a bonus, it meant you had something to read while waiting for it to finish browsing.