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> It is quite literally copying and pasting from StackOverflow Not necessarily. They've already said that certain emergent properties as the models have scale

> It is quite literally copying and pasting from StackOverflow Not necessarily. They've already said that certain emergent properties as the models have scaled beyond certain thresholds are responsible for some of the abilities. The ability to code as well as some of them can has been included in this. > ChatGPT is very useful reference library. It blows google searching for examples out of the water, but you need to be very careful with the results, and very knowledgeable to use them properly. I agree that you need to know what you're doing to make use of them. I've been a SWE for over two decades, so I certainly know what to feed them (and what not to - such as proprietary information) to get a coherent answer. Yes, they need a lot of context on a given issue, without that the model can only guess at what you are looking for (variable names, UUIDs for primary keys, schemas, interface definitions, 3rd party components, etc). And they will occasionally suggest using deprecated methods or not the latest suggested approach, due to the cutoff date. However, I stand by the opinion that if given the right inputs, they are capable of unique solutions to complex issues. The models are seemingly capable of taking points A and B from one StackOverflow post and combining that with C from the language documentation and D from a third-party vendors site and combining them into a coherent answer.

flimsypremise 3y ago
Yes, the language model is certainly capable of assembling text from different sources and getting an answer that tends to be mostly coherent, but that is exactly what LLMs are designed to do. To the LLM is doesn't actually matter that all of that content is from different sources, all that matters are the statistical relationships it has derived for the various tokens in your prompt. But those are not unique solutions, that are existing solutions that it has cobbled together. It's been demonstrated repeatedly that when prompted for information that ChatGPT has not been trained on, it fails badly. It also fails at a lot of higher order writing analysis prompts, like those found on English literature essay exams. I've been a software engineer for almost two decades, and I actually use ChatGPT daily. It's a very helpful reference, but fails early and often on a lot of tasks. I generally compare it to a tool like create-react-app, except generalized across all languages and frameworks. A very powerful tool, but it's a statistical machine learning algorithm, not an AI. It doesn't understand your prompts and it isn't reasoning about them.

flimsypremise 3y ago

Yes, the language model is certainly capable of assembling text from different sources and getting an answer that tends to be mostly coherent, but that is exactly what LLMs are designed to do. To the LLM is doesn't actually matter that all of that content is from different sources, all that matters are the statistical relationships it has derived for the various tokens in your prompt. But those are not unique solutions, that are existing solutions that it has cobbled together. It's been demonstrated repeatedly that when prompted for information that ChatGPT has not been trained on, it fails badly. It also fails at a lot of higher order writing analysis prompts, like those found on English literature essay exams. I've been a software engineer for almost two decades, and I actually use ChatGPT daily. It's a very helpful reference, but fails early and often on a lot of tasks. I generally compare it to a tool like create-react-app, except generalized across all languages and frameworks. A very powerful tool, but it's a statistical machine learning algorithm, not an AI. It doesn't understand your prompts and it isn't reasoning about them.