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Humans, in isolation, also tend to be supremely confident at being supremely wrong. Having others around and hearing their criticism of our opinions is a crucia

Humans, in isolation, also tend to be supremely confident at being supremely wrong. Having others around and hearing their criticism of our opinions is a crucial factor of converging towards the truth. Perhaps a system of mutually-criticising LLMs is what is needed to avoid confidently incorrect answers? Give them all a task to find errors in each others' outputs, and only return the output to the user when all of them agree on correctness.

traceroute66 3y ago
> Humans, in isolation, tend to also be supremely confident at being supremely wrong At least most humans will know that most modern programming languages have built-in basic math functionality. When I asked GPT-4 to write me a basic program in Go, it tried to tell me that a basic math function was not available in Go stdlib and proceeded to write some DIY horror-show of code as a substitute. On the same occasion it also took great delight in importing obsolete libraries, and using deprecated functions. And for the icing on the cake, the code it generated did not even compile ! Every time I corrected it, it returned with fresh code and a supremely confident assertion that "this fixes the problems identified". It was wrong, of course. Every, single, time. All basic errors that even a Junior programmer fresh out of school would not make.
- Closi 3y ago
  What was the basic program you asked for? Hard to evaluate if this is a fair test without knowing what you asked of it.
  - traceroute66 3y ago
    > Hard to evaluate if this is a fair test without knowing what you asked of it. Oh, right, the old "can't possibly be the AI, must be the user" claim. The same excuse certain car manufactuers use when their car gets confused by shadows in the sun. Give me a break.
    - Karunamon 3y ago
      I grow skeptical of these angry anti-AI posts when they lack such easily-provided evidence. There is a share button on every chat on ChatGPT. You could just share the conversation here and spare us all a lot of pointless back-and-forth. https://chat.openai.com/share/371863ec-edbd-4454-8b19-3820352e1f0f https://chat.openai.com/share/371863ec-edbd-4454-8b19-382035... Here is an example of the kind of scripting I do regularly with ChatGPT. I cannot speak to its capabilities with Go, but it is quite proficient at Python.
      - sgarland 3y ago
        OK, but (I mean this sincerely and in kindness) this isn’t a particularly challenging task. Useful, yes, and the type of thing Python is marvelous at, but not overly difficult. If you start getting into more esoteric edges of Python, like SharedMemory, ChatGPT quickly falls apart. Or, more relevant to your example, using carriage return to overwrite text for a progress indicator – works great, very simple. Until you try to use it through subprocess. To ChatGPT’s credit, it eventually came up with using pty, which with some massaging, I got to work. I’m not saying it isn’t useful – far from it. It’s just that on anything modestly complicated, you sometimes have to spend more time fiddling with the prompt than if you just sat down and wrote the code. Another example that comes to mind was implementing a B+tree in pure Python. I know how they work, and wanted to see if ChatGPT could figure it out. You’d think so, right? But no, it kept getting stuck on node splits.
        Karunamon 3y ago
        Zero offense taken, and I agree completely, it's just that most tasks a person would want to do with Python are probably simple enough to where usage of a language model will save a significant amount of time. It doesn't mean you can turn your brain off and just mindlessly copy and paste whatever gets output, but for basics and boilerplate it's a massive time save, and I only foresee the capabilities getting better over time. It's just that comments like the one I was replying to come off as childishly throwing one's toys out of the pram because they are imperfect.
        3y ago
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  > most humans will know that most modern programming languages have built-in basic math functionality I doubt that most humans will know what those words even mean. But pedantry aside, what I was trying to say is that people, without being corrected by others or without having self-criticism embedded in their way of thinking, make same mistakes as LLMs do. Think of an isolated programming novice who lives in his mom's basement and whose knowledge of programming comes only from stack overflow, random blogs and documentation he doesn't really understand. He'd probably give the same output as an LLM. Considering the way LLMs work, I find them conceptually most similar to a stream-of-thought kind of thinking - which, in human cognition, is only the first step in reasoning. The other steps are observing what has been thought, detecting mistakes, fixing them, and doing so repeatedly until the thought is deemed to be correct. I'm just saying maybe it's possible to emulate (to some level) that process of reasoning by connecting multiple LLMs together and giving them a task to criticize and correct each other. But then again, you don't seem to be even acknowledging that point of mine. Maybe you're just angry/jaded/<insert negative emotion> at LLMs and feel the need to vent your frustration. And then again, maybe not. If you are, that's understandable, but I think that HN is not an appropriate arena for that - Twitter or 4chan would be more appropriate.

traceroute66 3y ago

> Humans, in isolation, tend to also be supremely confident at being supremely wrong At least most humans will know that most modern programming languages have built-in basic math functionality. When I asked GPT-4 to write me a basic program in Go, it tried to tell me that a basic math function was not available in Go stdlib and proceeded to write some DIY horror-show of code as a substitute. On the same occasion it also took great delight in importing obsolete libraries, and using deprecated functions. And for the icing on the cake, the code it generated did not even compile ! Every time I corrected it, it returned with fresh code and a supremely confident assertion that "this fixes the problems identified". It was wrong, of course. Every, single, time. All basic errors that even a Junior programmer fresh out of school would not make.

Closi 3y ago
What was the basic program you asked for? Hard to evaluate if this is a fair test without knowing what you asked of it.
- traceroute66 3y ago
  > Hard to evaluate if this is a fair test without knowing what you asked of it. Oh, right, the old "can't possibly be the AI, must be the user" claim. The same excuse certain car manufactuers use when their car gets confused by shadows in the sun. Give me a break.
  - Karunamon 3y ago
    I grow skeptical of these angry anti-AI posts when they lack such easily-provided evidence. There is a share button on every chat on ChatGPT. You could just share the conversation here and spare us all a lot of pointless back-and-forth. https://chat.openai.com/share/371863ec-edbd-4454-8b19-3820352e1f0f https://chat.openai.com/share/371863ec-edbd-4454-8b19-382035... Here is an example of the kind of scripting I do regularly with ChatGPT. I cannot speak to its capabilities with Go, but it is quite proficient at Python.
    - sgarland 3y ago
      OK, but (I mean this sincerely and in kindness) this isn’t a particularly challenging task. Useful, yes, and the type of thing Python is marvelous at, but not overly difficult. If you start getting into more esoteric edges of Python, like SharedMemory, ChatGPT quickly falls apart. Or, more relevant to your example, using carriage return to overwrite text for a progress indicator – works great, very simple. Until you try to use it through subprocess. To ChatGPT’s credit, it eventually came up with using pty, which with some massaging, I got to work. I’m not saying it isn’t useful – far from it. It’s just that on anything modestly complicated, you sometimes have to spend more time fiddling with the prompt than if you just sat down and wrote the code. Another example that comes to mind was implementing a B+tree in pure Python. I know how they work, and wanted to see if ChatGPT could figure it out. You’d think so, right? But no, it kept getting stuck on node splits.
      - Karunamon 3y ago
        Zero offense taken, and I agree completely, it's just that most tasks a person would want to do with Python are probably simple enough to where usage of a language model will save a significant amount of time. It doesn't mean you can turn your brain off and just mindlessly copy and paste whatever gets output, but for basics and boilerplate it's a massive time save, and I only foresee the capabilities getting better over time. It's just that comments like the one I was replying to come off as childishly throwing one's toys out of the pram because they are imperfect.
      - 3y ago
bheadmaster 3y ago
> most humans will know that most modern programming languages have built-in basic math functionality I doubt that most humans will know what those words even mean. But pedantry aside, what I was trying to say is that people, without being corrected by others or without having self-criticism embedded in their way of thinking, make same mistakes as LLMs do. Think of an isolated programming novice who lives in his mom's basement and whose knowledge of programming comes only from stack overflow, random blogs and documentation he doesn't really understand. He'd probably give the same output as an LLM. Considering the way LLMs work, I find them conceptually most similar to a stream-of-thought kind of thinking - which, in human cognition, is only the first step in reasoning. The other steps are observing what has been thought, detecting mistakes, fixing them, and doing so repeatedly until the thought is deemed to be correct. I'm just saying maybe it's possible to emulate (to some level) that process of reasoning by connecting multiple LLMs together and giving them a task to criticize and correct each other. But then again, you don't seem to be even acknowledging that point of mine. Maybe you're just angry/jaded/<insert negative emotion> at LLMs and feel the need to vent your frustration. And then again, maybe not. If you are, that's understandable, but I think that HN is not an appropriate arena for that - Twitter or 4chan would be more appropriate.