4 ms·

A very good article on the (early) capabilities by Ethan Mollick: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/it-is-starting-to-get-strange https://www.oneusefulthing.org

by jpdus 3y ago

A very good article on the (early) capabilities by Ethan Mollick: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/it-is-starting-to-get-strange https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/it-is-starting-to-get-stran...

eterps 3y ago
Thanks, that's really helpful
DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
From your linked article: > So the AI shows genuine creativity in problem solving. This is garbage. The AI does not demonstrate "genuine creativity". LLMs generate statistically likely sequences of tokens based on their training data, which in this case is more or less the entire internet. The author asserts with absolutely no citation: > I figured no one had ever made a request like that before. What an idiotic claim. You're talking about the internet, for crying out loud. It's almost guaranteed somebody has written something like what you're writing before when it comes to requests of this nature. Is the technology cool? Yes. Is it cooler than similar technologies from a year ago, or even a few months ago? Sure. But it's not intelligent. It doesn't think; it doesn't know. It generates statistically likely sequences of tokens for any input, and nothing more. People need to stop pretending otherwise.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Baeocystin 3y ago
  >What an idiotic claim. You're talking about the internet, for crying out loud. It's almost guaranteed somebody has written something like what you're writing before when it comes to requests of this nature. I wonder if this is as true as we collectively think? ~15% of Google searches are unique†. Informally, folks I know that work on other search engines see even higher percentages, even after decades+ of history. † https://www.seroundtable.com/15-percent-search-queries-google-new-32936.html https://www.seroundtable.com/15-percent-search-queries-googl...
- climatologist 3y ago
  I get what you're saying but people don't really care. The typical/average person does not know anything about derivatives, backpropagation, or probabilities so to them it all seems like magic and they anthropomorphize what they're seeing as something intelligent. Some folks that know how this stuff works and do a good job of explaining the limitations are Melanie Mitchel and Francois Chollet. Both have extensive experience in the field and have also written books on AI. You can spend your time trying to explain to every random person that computers can't think but they're not gonna understand what you're saying because to them it seems like a large enough Markov chain is actually thinking.
  - selalipop 3y ago
    What about those of us who do understand them and just don't agree? After all you could simplify it to a layperson as: 'the LLM is just doing fancy autocomplete based on how stuff appeared in the training data so that means they're not creative' The first part is not really up for debate, but it's the second part is where some of us disagree. Creativity doesn't mean novel in existence, it means novel within some context: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254301596_The_Standard_Definition_of_Creativity https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254301596_The_Stand... — At some point, the push back against these models being creative starts to feel like it's just as emotion driven as the people who are over-anthropomorphizing the models: "If I accept something I know is just a ball of linear algebra is creative, then it's cheapening the definition of creativity." People bring up the stochastic parrot argument forgetting that the original paper was predicated on the dangers of not considering the power that lies in something that's "just" a stochastic parrot.
    - climatologist 3y ago
      Ask it to solve sudoku and report back. Not generate code but actually solve a puzzle in the prompt.
      - selalipop 3y ago
        This is what I mean when I say "inverse-anthropomorphization" crowd is increasingly emotion over facts. My reply to you was predicated on a compilation of centuries of scientific study on the subject of creativity. Your knee-jerk reply is to proclaim it's bad at sudoku while going out of your way to place artificial constraints on it. Touting its inability to solve sudoku in-context feels like a slightly hamfisted way of saying it's a probability based model operating on tokens but like I said before, there are plenty of us who already understand that. We also realize that you can find arbitrary gaps in any sufficiently complex system. You didn't even need to rely on such a specific example, you could have touted any number of variations on common logic puzzles that they just fall completely on their faces for. Gaps aren't damning until you tie them to what you want out of the system. The LLM can be bad at Sudoku and capable of creativity in some domain. It's more useful to explore unexpected properties of a complex system than it is to parade things that the system is already expected to be bad at.
- ghotli 3y ago
  I ultimately don't really disagree with you but your vitriol really undermines your point. Figured you should be aware of how you come across, at least from my perspective. Plus there's an argument to be made that you and I are also generating likely sequences based on the sum of our experiences just in a more sophisticated (and evolutionarily refined) manner. There's at least no hard evidence to the contrary that I'm aware of. Fake edit: I'm aware that my final statement is somewhat bait for the neuroscientists in the crowd. In this context I'm of the opinion that defining if agi 'thinks' requires a far more rigorous definition of what it is that we (and other problem solving / pass-the-mirror-test animals) are doing. For example, "It's the soul and GPT-4 doesn't have one" doesn't even come close to being rigorous enough, imo.

by jpdus 3y ago

A very good article on the (early) capabilities by Ethan Mollick: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/it-is-starting-to-get-strange https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/it-is-starting-to-get-stran...

eterps 3y ago

Thanks, that's really helpful

DonaldPShimoda 3y ago

From your linked article: > So the AI shows genuine creativity in problem solving. This is garbage. The AI does not demonstrate "genuine creativity". LLMs generate statistically likely sequences of tokens based on their training data, which in this case is more or less the entire internet. The author asserts with absolutely no citation: > I figured no one had ever made a request like that before. What an idiotic claim. You're talking about the internet, for crying out loud. It's almost guaranteed somebody has written something like what you're writing before when it comes to requests of this nature. Is the technology cool? Yes. Is it cooler than similar technologies from a year ago, or even a few months ago? Sure. But it's not intelligent. It doesn't think; it doesn't know. It generates statistically likely sequences of tokens for any input, and nothing more. People need to stop pretending otherwise.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Baeocystin 3y ago
>What an idiotic claim. You're talking about the internet, for crying out loud. It's almost guaranteed somebody has written something like what you're writing before when it comes to requests of this nature. I wonder if this is as true as we collectively think? ~15% of Google searches are unique†. Informally, folks I know that work on other search engines see even higher percentages, even after decades+ of history. † https://www.seroundtable.com/15-percent-search-queries-google-new-32936.html https://www.seroundtable.com/15-percent-search-queries-googl...
climatologist 3y ago
I get what you're saying but people don't really care. The typical/average person does not know anything about derivatives, backpropagation, or probabilities so to them it all seems like magic and they anthropomorphize what they're seeing as something intelligent. Some folks that know how this stuff works and do a good job of explaining the limitations are Melanie Mitchel and Francois Chollet. Both have extensive experience in the field and have also written books on AI. You can spend your time trying to explain to every random person that computers can't think but they're not gonna understand what you're saying because to them it seems like a large enough Markov chain is actually thinking.
- selalipop 3y ago
  What about those of us who do understand them and just don't agree? After all you could simplify it to a layperson as: 'the LLM is just doing fancy autocomplete based on how stuff appeared in the training data so that means they're not creative' The first part is not really up for debate, but it's the second part is where some of us disagree. Creativity doesn't mean novel in existence, it means novel within some context: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254301596_The_Standard_Definition_of_Creativity https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254301596_The_Stand... — At some point, the push back against these models being creative starts to feel like it's just as emotion driven as the people who are over-anthropomorphizing the models: "If I accept something I know is just a ball of linear algebra is creative, then it's cheapening the definition of creativity." People bring up the stochastic parrot argument forgetting that the original paper was predicated on the dangers of not considering the power that lies in something that's "just" a stochastic parrot.
  - climatologist 3y ago
    Ask it to solve sudoku and report back. Not generate code but actually solve a puzzle in the prompt.
    - selalipop 3y ago
      This is what I mean when I say "inverse-anthropomorphization" crowd is increasingly emotion over facts. My reply to you was predicated on a compilation of centuries of scientific study on the subject of creativity. Your knee-jerk reply is to proclaim it's bad at sudoku while going out of your way to place artificial constraints on it. Touting its inability to solve sudoku in-context feels like a slightly hamfisted way of saying it's a probability based model operating on tokens but like I said before, there are plenty of us who already understand that. We also realize that you can find arbitrary gaps in any sufficiently complex system. You didn't even need to rely on such a specific example, you could have touted any number of variations on common logic puzzles that they just fall completely on their faces for. Gaps aren't damning until you tie them to what you want out of the system. The LLM can be bad at Sudoku and capable of creativity in some domain. It's more useful to explore unexpected properties of a complex system than it is to parade things that the system is already expected to be bad at.
ghotli 3y ago
I ultimately don't really disagree with you but your vitriol really undermines your point. Figured you should be aware of how you come across, at least from my perspective. Plus there's an argument to be made that you and I are also generating likely sequences based on the sum of our experiences just in a more sophisticated (and evolutionarily refined) manner. There's at least no hard evidence to the contrary that I'm aware of. Fake edit: I'm aware that my final statement is somewhat bait for the neuroscientists in the crowd. In this context I'm of the opinion that defining if agi 'thinks' requires a far more rigorous definition of what it is that we (and other problem solving / pass-the-mirror-test animals) are doing. For example, "It's the soul and GPT-4 doesn't have one" doesn't even come close to being rigorous enough, imo.