3 ms·

If brown-rats-as-a-service is as useful as it is already, then I'm excited by what the future holds. I think to make it to the next step, AI will have to have

If brown-rats-as-a-service is as useful as it is already, then I'm excited by what the future holds. I think to make it to the next step, AI will have to have some way of performing rigorous logic integrated on a low level. Maybe scaling that brown-rat brain will let it emulate an internal logical black box - much like the old adage about a sufficiently large C codebase containing an imperfect Lisp implementation - but I think things will get really cool we figure out how to wire together something like Wolfram Alpha, a programming language, some databases with lots of actual facts (as opposed to encoded/learned ones), and ChatGPT.

cs702 2y ago
It's already better than real rats-as-a-service, certainly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449424
ndesaulniers 2y ago
Does it matter what color the rat is?
- notpushkin 2y ago
  I suppose it refers to the particular species, Rattus norvegicus (although I'd call it common rat personally).
petesergeant 2y ago
ChatGPT can already run code, which allows it to overcome some limitations of tokenization (eg counting the letters in strawberry, sorting words by their second letter). Doesn't seem like adding a Prolog interpreter would be all that hard.
Kim_Bruning 2y ago
ChatGPT does already have access to Bing (would that count as your facts database?) and Jupyter (which is sort of a Wolphram clone except with Python?). It still won't magically use them 100% correctly, but with a bit of smarts you can go a long way!
- staunton 2y ago
  Jupyter is completely different from Wolfram software. It's just an interface to edit and run code (Julia, Python and R) and write/render text or images commenting the code. Which isn't to say that Jupyter isn't a great thing but I don't see how a Chatbot would produce better answers by having access to it in addition to "just Python". Meanwhile, Wolfram software has built-in methods to solve a lot of different math problems for which in Python you would either need large (and sometimes quirky) libraries, if those libraries even exist.
  - Kim_Bruning 2y ago
    Except a typical Jupyter environment -especially the one provided to ChatGPT- includes a lot of libraries; including numpy, scipy, pandas and plotly, which -while perhaps not quite as polished as wolphram (arguments can be made), can still rival it qua flexibility and functionality. That and you need to actually expose python to GPT somehow, and Jupyter is not the worst way I suppose. * The fact that Jupyter holds on to state means GPT doesn't need to write code from scratch for every step of the process. * GPT can easily read back through the workbook to review errors or output from computations. GPT actually tries to correct errors even. Especially if it knows how to identify them. To be sure, this is not magic. Consider it more like a tool with limited intelligence; but which can be controlled using natural language. (Meanwhile, Anthropic allows Claude to run js with react, which is nice but seems less flexible in practice. I'm not sure Claude reads back.)

cs702 2y ago

It's already better than real rats-as-a-service, certainly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449424

ndesaulniers 2y ago

Does it matter what color the rat is?

notpushkin 2y ago
I suppose it refers to the particular species, Rattus norvegicus (although I'd call it common rat personally).

petesergeant 2y ago

ChatGPT can already run code, which allows it to overcome some limitations of tokenization (eg counting the letters in strawberry, sorting words by their second letter). Doesn't seem like adding a Prolog interpreter would be all that hard.

Kim_Bruning 2y ago

ChatGPT does already have access to Bing (would that count as your facts database?) and Jupyter (which is sort of a Wolphram clone except with Python?). It still won't magically use them 100% correctly, but with a bit of smarts you can go a long way!

staunton 2y ago
Jupyter is completely different from Wolfram software. It's just an interface to edit and run code (Julia, Python and R) and write/render text or images commenting the code. Which isn't to say that Jupyter isn't a great thing but I don't see how a Chatbot would produce better answers by having access to it in addition to "just Python". Meanwhile, Wolfram software has built-in methods to solve a lot of different math problems for which in Python you would either need large (and sometimes quirky) libraries, if those libraries even exist.
- Kim_Bruning 2y ago
  Except a typical Jupyter environment -especially the one provided to ChatGPT- includes a lot of libraries; including numpy, scipy, pandas and plotly, which -while perhaps not quite as polished as wolphram (arguments can be made), can still rival it qua flexibility and functionality. That and you need to actually expose python to GPT somehow, and Jupyter is not the worst way I suppose. * The fact that Jupyter holds on to state means GPT doesn't need to write code from scratch for every step of the process. * GPT can easily read back through the workbook to review errors or output from computations. GPT actually tries to correct errors even. Especially if it knows how to identify them. To be sure, this is not magic. Consider it more like a tool with limited intelligence; but which can be controlled using natural language. (Meanwhile, Anthropic allows Claude to run js with react, which is nice but seems less flexible in practice. I'm not sure Claude reads back.)