6 ms·

What I'm not able to comprehend is why people are not seeing the answer as brilliant! Any ordinary mortal (like me) would have jumped to the conclusion that an

by achow 2y ago

What I'm not able to comprehend is why people are not seeing the answer as brilliant! Any ordinary mortal (like me) would have jumped to the conclusion that answer is "Father" and would have walked away patting on my back, without realising that I was biased by statistics. Whereas o1, at the very outset smelled out that it is a riddle - why would anyone out of blue ask such question. So, it started its chain of thought with "Interpreting the riddle" (smart!). In my book that is the difference between me and people who are very smart and are generally able to navigate the world better (cracking interviews or navigating internal politics in a corporate).

geysersam 2y ago
Come on. Of course chatgpt has read that riddle and the answer 1000 times already.
- ryanjshaw 2y ago
  Why does it exist 1000 times in the training if there isn't some trick to it, i.e. some subset of humans had to have answered it incorrectly for the meme to replicate that extensively in our collective knowledge. And remember the LLM has already read a billion other things, and now needs to figure out - is this one of them tricky situations, or the straightforward ones? It also has to realize all the humans on forums and facebook answering the problem incorrectly are bad data. Might seem simple to you, but it's not.
- accountnum 2y ago
  It hasn't read that riddle because it is a modified version. The model would in fact solve this trivially if it _didn't_ see the original in its training. That's the entire trick.
  - geysersam 2y ago
    Sure but the parent was praising the model for recognizing that it was a riddle in the first place: > Whereas o1, at the very outset smelled out that it is a riddle That doesn't seem very impressive since it's (an adaptation of) a famous riddle The fact that it also gets it wrong after reasoning about it for a long time doesn't make it better of course
    - accountnum 2y ago
      Recognizing that it is a riddle isn't impressive, true. But the duration of its reasoning is irrelevant, since the riddle works on misdirection. As I keep saying here, give someone uninitiated the 7 wives with 7 bags going (or not) to St Ives riddle and you'll see them reasoning for quite some time before they give you a wrong answer. If you are tricked about the nature of the problem at the outset, then all reasoning does is drive you further in the wrong direction, making you solve the wrong problem.
grey-area 2y ago
The 'riddle': A woman and her son are in a car accident. The woman is sadly killed. The boy is rushed to hospital. When the doctor sees the boy he says "I can't operate on this child, he is my son". How is this possible? GPT Answer: The doctor is the boy's mother Real Answer: Boy = Son, Woman = Mother (and her son), Doctor = Father (he says...he is my son) This is not in fact a riddle (though presented as one) and the answer given is not in any sense brilliant. This is a failure of the model on a very basic question, not a win. It's non deterministic so might sometimes answer correctly and sometimes incorrectly. It will also accept corrections on any point, even when it is right, unlike a thinking being when they are sure on facts. LLMs are very interesting and a huge milestone, but generative AI is the best label for them - they generate statistically likely text, which is convincing but often inaccurate and it has no real sense of correct or incorrect, needs more work and it's unclear if this approach will ever get to general AI. Interesting work though and I hope they keep trying.
- pkage 2y ago
  I mean, it's entirely possible the boy has two mothers. This seems like a perfectly reasonable answer from the model, no?
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  - eigenket 2y ago
    The text says "When the doctor sees the boy he says" The doctor is male, and also a parent of the child.
- roomey 2y ago
  Why couldn't the doctor be the boys mother? There is no indication of the sex of the doctor, and families that consist of two mothers do actually exist and probably doesn't even count as that unusual.
yywwbbn 2y ago
> why would anyone out of blue ask such question I would certainly expect any person to have the same reaction. > So, it started its chain of thought with "Interpreting the riddle" (smart!). How is that smarter than intuitively arriving at the correct answer without having to explicitly list the intermediate step? Being able to reasonably accurately judge the complexity of a problem with minimal effort seems “smarter” to me.
ImHereToVote 2y ago
The doctor is obviously a parent of the boy. The language tricks simply emulate the ambiance of reasoning. Similarly to a political system emulating the ambiance of democracy.

by achow 2y ago

geysersam 2y ago

Come on. Of course chatgpt has read that riddle and the answer 1000 times already.

ryanjshaw 2y ago
Why does it exist 1000 times in the training if there isn't some trick to it, i.e. some subset of humans had to have answered it incorrectly for the meme to replicate that extensively in our collective knowledge. And remember the LLM has already read a billion other things, and now needs to figure out - is this one of them tricky situations, or the straightforward ones? It also has to realize all the humans on forums and facebook answering the problem incorrectly are bad data. Might seem simple to you, but it's not.
accountnum 2y ago
It hasn't read that riddle because it is a modified version. The model would in fact solve this trivially if it _didn't_ see the original in its training. That's the entire trick.
- geysersam 2y ago
  Sure but the parent was praising the model for recognizing that it was a riddle in the first place: > Whereas o1, at the very outset smelled out that it is a riddle That doesn't seem very impressive since it's (an adaptation of) a famous riddle The fact that it also gets it wrong after reasoning about it for a long time doesn't make it better of course
  - accountnum 2y ago
    Recognizing that it is a riddle isn't impressive, true. But the duration of its reasoning is irrelevant, since the riddle works on misdirection. As I keep saying here, give someone uninitiated the 7 wives with 7 bags going (or not) to St Ives riddle and you'll see them reasoning for quite some time before they give you a wrong answer. If you are tricked about the nature of the problem at the outset, then all reasoning does is drive you further in the wrong direction, making you solve the wrong problem.

grey-area 2y ago

The 'riddle': A woman and her son are in a car accident. The woman is sadly killed. The boy is rushed to hospital. When the doctor sees the boy he says "I can't operate on this child, he is my son". How is this possible? GPT Answer: The doctor is the boy's mother Real Answer: Boy = Son, Woman = Mother (and her son), Doctor = Father (he says...he is my son) This is not in fact a riddle (though presented as one) and the answer given is not in any sense brilliant. This is a failure of the model on a very basic question, not a win. It's non deterministic so might sometimes answer correctly and sometimes incorrectly. It will also accept corrections on any point, even when it is right, unlike a thinking being when they are sure on facts. LLMs are very interesting and a huge milestone, but generative AI is the best label for them - they generate statistically likely text, which is convincing but often inaccurate and it has no real sense of correct or incorrect, needs more work and it's unclear if this approach will ever get to general AI. Interesting work though and I hope they keep trying.

pkage 2y ago
I mean, it's entirely possible the boy has two mothers. This seems like a perfectly reasonable answer from the model, no?
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- eigenket 2y ago
  The text says "When the doctor sees the boy he says" The doctor is male, and also a parent of the child.
roomey 2y ago
Why couldn't the doctor be the boys mother? There is no indication of the sex of the doctor, and families that consist of two mothers do actually exist and probably doesn't even count as that unusual.

yywwbbn 2y ago

> why would anyone out of blue ask such question I would certainly expect any person to have the same reaction. > So, it started its chain of thought with "Interpreting the riddle" (smart!). How is that smarter than intuitively arriving at the correct answer without having to explicitly list the intermediate step? Being able to reasonably accurately judge the complexity of a problem with minimal effort seems “smarter” to me.

ImHereToVote 2y ago

The doctor is obviously a parent of the boy. The language tricks simply emulate the ambiance of reasoning. Similarly to a political system emulating the ambiance of democracy.