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You're ignoring all the times the stackoverflow answers also provide zero information, so this is not a balanced assessment. Prompting LLMs correctly to get hig
by naasking 3y ago
You're ignoring all the times the stackoverflow answers also provide zero information, so this is not a balanced assessment. Prompting LLMs correctly to get high quality answers is a skill.
- chx 3y agoSeeing value in LLM answers is apophenia. It's an understandable human condition but still. There can be value in SO answers, there can not be in LLM as it's just automated plagiarism without understanding anything.
- falcor84 3y agoThere's immense value in ChatGPT's answers, you just need to accept that it's fallible.
- practice9 3y agoI think most of the critique is coming from the people that made their mind up already or used only GPT-3.5 in the past. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: a) "ChatGPT is stupid! Also, plagiarism! No value!" b) " I wrote a carelessly bad prompt and it responded with a seemingly bad answer!" c) " This confirms my biases!" I find that when I provide it with enough context and a set of requirements (as I would with a non-AI engineer), it's very good at problem solving.
- dlkf 3y agoHow does the issue of plagiarism bear on its utility? That’s like saying it’s impossible to get value out of listening to a torrented mp3. I’m not sure understanding is an inherent issue either. When I Google ”weather lisbon,” Google spits out a number. The app doesn’t ”understand” anything, but it still helps me plan my day.
- ben_w 3y ago> automated plagiarism without understanding anything I'm old enough to remember the memes campaigning to rename "software engineering" to "googling StackOverflow", so plagiarism isn't a point against the value of an LLM, and given the case of an LLM made by StackOverflow using StackOverflow data it's also not a legal issue.
- naasking 3y ago> there can not be in LLM as it's just automated plagiarism without understanding anything. Conjecture. We lack a mechanistic understanding of "understanding", so you can't make this claim. Human answers are also fallible, so how do you know that human cognition isn't also statistical pattern matching similar to what's used in LLMs? If it is, then they are understanding, their understanding just has flaws.
- chx 3y ago> Prompting LLMs correctly to get high quality answers is a skill. That's like saying "reading the future from chicken entrails is a skill".
- mrtranscendence 3y agoI don’t know how to square this with the fact that I routinely ask GPT-4 for code and get back answers that are in fact correct. You’re making it sound like it’s purely random, like I’m just getting back a string of zhrueksnbd8373&;! or something.
- chx 3y agoBut that is what you get, it's just dressed up to sound like the answer. But it's not the answer , it can not be. If it accidentally is the answer, that's an accident, nothing more. See my example above about dangling commits...
- naasking 3y ago> If it accidentally is the answer, that's an accident, nothing more. Accuracy rates much, much higher than chance are not accidental. While you're pointing to a valid failure mode of LLMs, you're not using the correct words to describe it which is leading you to say nonsense.
- mthoms 3y agoOr the times Stack Overflow is correct, but the answer is from 12 years ago so you don't trust it and move on.