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In the beginning I think some, if not many, people did genuinely think it was "AI". It was the closest we've ever gotten to a natural language interface and tha

In the beginning I think some, if not many, people did genuinely think it was "AI". It was the closest we've ever gotten to a natural language interface and that genuinely felt really different than anything before, even to an extreme cynic. And I also think there's many people that want us to develop AI and so were trying to actively convince themselves that e.g. GPT or whatever was sentient. Maybe that Google engineer who claimed an early version of Bard was "sentient" even believed himself (though I still suspect that was probably just a marketing hoax). It's only now that everybody's used to natural language interfaces that I think we're becoming far less forgiving of things like this nonsense: --- - "How do I do (x)." - "You do (A)." - "No, that's wrong because reasons." - "Oh I'm sorry you're 100% right. Thank you for the correction. I'll keep that in mind in the future. You do (B)." - "No that's also wrong because reasons." - "Oh I'm sorry you're 100% right. Thank you for the correction. I'll keep that in mind in the future. You do (A)." - #$%^#$!!#$! ---

ben_w 2y ago
> In the beginning I think some, if not many, people did genuinely think it was "AI". Most people don't know what the academic discipline of AI involves, I've noticed a bit of that even on this website. LLMs, even the worst of them, are objectively is a member of the set of things which is termed AI by those working in that field. > (though I still suspect that was probably just a marketing hoax). He was fired for saying that it was sentient, and they didn't release the model externally at the time, and they only made Bard available in response to the competition from OpenAI/ChatGPT.
pineaux 2y ago
I love this. I want a t-shirt with this
maigret 2y ago
Yes, it's a language model, not a reasoning model. But people got confused at the start.
- acuozzo 2y ago
  Or they are adherents to the hypothesis of Linguistic Determinism which preexisted LLMs by quite some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism
- lagrange77 2y ago
  Thank you. Few people really seem to acknowledge the name.
stn_za 2y ago
"So, when will you be updating yourself to not provide the same wrong answer in future, or when I ask it later in a new session" "No."
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> It's only now that everybody's used to natural language interfaces that I think we're becoming far less forgiving (...) Sort of, kind of. Those natural language interfaces that Actually Work aren't even 2 years old yet, and in that time there weren't many non-shit integrations released. So at best, some small subset of the population is used to the failure modes of ChatGPT app - but at least the topic is there, so future users will have better aligned expectations.
- lproven 2y ago
  > Those natural language interfaces that Actually Work aren't even 2 years old yet Siri. Introduced 2011. Before that... Q&A Database, the product that Symantec was founded to sell. Released 1985. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_(Symantec) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_(Symantec) Before that... The Infocom adventure game parser. https://www.ifwiki.org/Infocom-type_parser https://www.ifwiki.org/Infocom-type_parser Infocom was founded in 1979. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom Before that... SHRDLU, 1968. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU Before that... ELIZA? (1964) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > Siri. Introduced 2011. Not working well to this day. Siri is mostly a joke and a meme, much like Alexa, Cortana and Google whatever-they-call-it-now. Other stuff: yeah, you can get away with a lot using some formal grammar, a random number generator, and a lot of effort railroading the user so they won't even think to say anything that'll break the illusion. I've had people not realize for weeks that my IRC bot is a bot, even if all it did was apply a bunch of regular exceptions to input (the trick was that the bot would occasionally speak unprompted and react to other people's conversations, and replied to common emoticons and words indicating emotion). No, only in the last two years we can say that there exist Speech-to-Text that works reliably, Text-to-Speech that sounds natural, and a ML model that can parse arbitrary natural language text and reliably infer what you want, even if you never directly stated what you want, and handling for it was never explicitly coded.
another2another 2y ago
>It was the closest we've ever gotten to a natural language interface and that genuinely felt really different Agreed, but I think we'll soon start to discover that interacting with systems as if they were text adventure games of the 80's is also going to get pretty weird and frustrating, not to mention probably inefficient.
- danaris 2y ago
  Even worse, because the text adventure games of the '70s and '80s (at least, the ones that were reasonably successful) had consistent internal state. If you told it to move to the Back of Fountain, you were in the Back of Fountain and would stay there until you told it to move somewhere else. If you told it to wave the black rod with the star at the chasm, a bridge appeared and would stay there. If you tell ChatGPT that your name is Dan, and give it some rules to follow, after enough exchanges, it will simply forget these things. And sometimes it won't accurately follow the rules, even when they're clearly and simply specified, even the first prompt after you give them. (At least, this has been my experience.) I don't think anyone really wants to play "text adventure game with advanced Alzheimer's".
Yizahi 2y ago
There was a great post here about this specific possibility, that NN crowd has effectively convinced themselves in the supernatural abilities of their NNs: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/ https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

ben_w 2y ago

> In the beginning I think some, if not many, people did genuinely think it was "AI". Most people don't know what the academic discipline of AI involves, I've noticed a bit of that even on this website. LLMs, even the worst of them, are objectively is a member of the set of things which is termed AI by those working in that field. > (though I still suspect that was probably just a marketing hoax). He was fired for saying that it was sentient, and they didn't release the model externally at the time, and they only made Bard available in response to the competition from OpenAI/ChatGPT.

pineaux 2y ago

I love this. I want a t-shirt with this

maigret 2y ago

Yes, it's a language model, not a reasoning model. But people got confused at the start.

acuozzo 2y ago
Or they are adherents to the hypothesis of Linguistic Determinism which preexisted LLMs by quite some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism
lagrange77 2y ago
Thank you. Few people really seem to acknowledge the name.

stn_za 2y ago

"So, when will you be updating yourself to not provide the same wrong answer in future, or when I ask it later in a new session" "No."

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> It's only now that everybody's used to natural language interfaces that I think we're becoming far less forgiving (...) Sort of, kind of. Those natural language interfaces that Actually Work aren't even 2 years old yet, and in that time there weren't many non-shit integrations released. So at best, some small subset of the population is used to the failure modes of ChatGPT app - but at least the topic is there, so future users will have better aligned expectations.

lproven 2y ago
> Those natural language interfaces that Actually Work aren't even 2 years old yet Siri. Introduced 2011. Before that... Q&A Database, the product that Symantec was founded to sell. Released 1985. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_(Symantec) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_(Symantec) Before that... The Infocom adventure game parser. https://www.ifwiki.org/Infocom-type_parser https://www.ifwiki.org/Infocom-type_parser Infocom was founded in 1979. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infocom Before that... SHRDLU, 1968. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU Before that... ELIZA? (1964) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > Siri. Introduced 2011. Not working well to this day. Siri is mostly a joke and a meme, much like Alexa, Cortana and Google whatever-they-call-it-now. Other stuff: yeah, you can get away with a lot using some formal grammar, a random number generator, and a lot of effort railroading the user so they won't even think to say anything that'll break the illusion. I've had people not realize for weeks that my IRC bot is a bot, even if all it did was apply a bunch of regular exceptions to input (the trick was that the bot would occasionally speak unprompted and react to other people's conversations, and replied to common emoticons and words indicating emotion). No, only in the last two years we can say that there exist Speech-to-Text that works reliably, Text-to-Speech that sounds natural, and a ML model that can parse arbitrary natural language text and reliably infer what you want, even if you never directly stated what you want, and handling for it was never explicitly coded.

another2another 2y ago

>It was the closest we've ever gotten to a natural language interface and that genuinely felt really different Agreed, but I think we'll soon start to discover that interacting with systems as if they were text adventure games of the 80's is also going to get pretty weird and frustrating, not to mention probably inefficient.

danaris 2y ago
Even worse, because the text adventure games of the '70s and '80s (at least, the ones that were reasonably successful) had consistent internal state. If you told it to move to the Back of Fountain, you were in the Back of Fountain and would stay there until you told it to move somewhere else. If you told it to wave the black rod with the star at the chasm, a bridge appeared and would stay there. If you tell ChatGPT that your name is Dan, and give it some rules to follow, after enough exchanges, it will simply forget these things. And sometimes it won't accurately follow the rules, even when they're clearly and simply specified, even the first prompt after you give them. (At least, this has been my experience.) I don't think anyone really wants to play "text adventure game with advanced Alzheimer's".

Yizahi 2y ago

There was a great post here about this specific possibility, that NN crowd has effectively convinced themselves in the supernatural abilities of their NNs: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/ https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/