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OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

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Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#121

Post by roenxi »

Alex3917 wrote: post #114
dannyw wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s the only thing that separates this from human writing; I’m sure it can be influenced easily.

> I'm sure it can be influenced easily. Maybe. Right now this reads like a glorified shopping list. It's coherent, but actually sounding human also requires a theory of mind. E.g. I explain here why it's possible for written statements to be objectively insightful, informative, interesting, or funny, but objectively in a way that's relational to other information or beliefs. The implication being that statements are…

> Maybe. Right now this reads like a glorified shopping list. It's coherent, but actually sounding human also requires a theory of mind.

I'm going to call this goalpost shifting. This article is better writing than some % of humans, theory of mind or otherwise. The AI has comfortably surpassed Timecube-level writing and is entering the pool of passes-for-a-human.

'Sounds human' is a spectrum that starts with the mentally ill and goes up to the best writers in human history.

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#122

Post by canjobear »

abernard1 wrote: post #96

When I read comments like this--and yes I read the article and understand it was generated by an algorithm--I can't help but think the next AI winter is around the corner. This does not impress me in the slightest. Taking billions and billions of input corpora and making some of them _sound like_ something a human would say is not impressive. Even if it's at a high school vocabulary level. It may have underlying corr…

I think you are underestimating what an advance these models are over previous NLP models in terms of quality. Before GPT-2 we didn't even have models that could reliably generate grammatical sentences. Now we have things that generate coherent (if not beautiful) paragraphs. It seems easy in retrospect, but some of the smartest people around have been working on this for decades.

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#123

Post by mnm1 »

GPT-3 is a better writer, grammatically, than the author, but my first reaction to the article was that it's nonsense. Glad to see that it is indeed nonsense. Grammatically pleasing nonsense but nonsense nevertheless. Mildly interesting at best that AI can generate nonsensical bullshit. The question is, can it generate bullshit that makes some sense, politician style? That would be impressive.

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#124

Post by ypcx »

jcahill wrote: post #53
meredydd wrote: post #28

I am deeply enjoying this comment thread - it's a bit of a Barium Meal [0] for determining how many people read (a) the headline, (b) the first paragraph, or (c) the whole thing before jumping straight into the compose box. Having read to the bottom, the quality of text generation there absolutely blew me away. GPT-2 texts have a somewhat disconnected quality - "it only makes sense if you're not really paying attenti…

GPT-3 is a neat party trick. But the things that'll be done with web archives* in the next 20y will make it look like the PDP-8. ~love, a web archivist * GPT-3 is trained on one

The transformer model as presented in GPT-3 may be a few tweaks away from a human-acceptable reasoning, at which point we may realize that human brain is just a neat party trick as well. This may come difficult for some people to internalize, especially those who understand the technology in depth. Because it means that the medium of our reality is the consciousness.

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#125

Post by JBiserkov »

zamadatix wrote: post #54
meredydd wrote: post #28

I am deeply enjoying this comment thread - it's a bit of a Barium Meal [0] for determining how many people read (a) the headline, (b) the first paragraph, or (c) the whole thing before jumping straight into the compose box. Having read to the bottom, the quality of text generation there absolutely blew me away. GPT-2 texts have a somewhat disconnected quality - "it only makes sense if you're not really paying attenti…

Or maybe we're all bots too and you're the only real HN user! I agree, responses are almost as interesting as GPT-3. And this place has always felt like one of the better when it comes to people reading past the titles!

"Every account on reddit is a bot except you."

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/348vlx/what_bot_...

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#126

Post by sooheon »

maxander wrote: post #58
quotemstr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI text-generation "Text generation" undersells it a little bit. What are humans except "text generation" machines? Language is the stuff of reason. GPT-3 has demonstrated capabilities that we believed were exclusive to humanity --- humor, logic, sarcasm, cultural references --- in an automatic and generalizable way. It's far more than a "text generation" system. I look forward to seeing what GPT-4 and GPT-5 can do…

I don't think any modern cognitive scientist believes that the statement "language is the stuff of reason," even allowing for poetic flair, is meaningfully true (and I'll leave aside that humans are, obviously, much more than text generation machines.) GPT-3 can generate text but the only context it has is its prompt; when humans generate text they have their complex situation in the world (and perhaps even non-world…

I agree with you, but also the following is "just" an implementation detail:

> only context it has is its prompt

The only real context is its latent representation of the prompt, there's nothing fundamentally limiting visual, auditory, symbolic, and mixed prompts as long as they map to a common latent space and the generator is trained on it.

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#128

Post by hejja »

my $0.02: it DOES seem similar to bitcoin in that

- the technology is intrinsically interesting - there is a ton of hype - but it seems ultimately commercial viability of projects is questionable

Why do I say this?

Well, the "solution" here is instantaneous text generation.

even if it is 99% believable, that 1% error is probably a dealbreaker most use cases

example a: generating code

sure you can generate some simple react components, but snippets already do that.

for anything more complex / production ready, you still need to fine tune it manually

That said, I hope I'm wrong and some cool AND useful applications come out of this

In fact my initial reaction was pure hype but now I'm going the other way

Re: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin

#130

Post by javajosh »

gomoboo wrote: post #111
Alex3917 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even on re-reading more closely, it doesn't feel like the world's best writing, but I don't notice major loss of coherence until the last couple of paragraphs. I guessed it was fake before getting to the end, not from the content, but from the fact that all the sentences are roughly the same length and follow the same basic grammatical patterns. Real people purposely mix up their sentence structure in order to keep…

I did not guess that it was fake but skipped to the bottom because the article did not seem to be worth reading. It felt like the author was not moving anywhere with their words. I laughed out loud at the reveal that it was written programmatically.

There are a few concrete things the (fake) article says, primarily about what software to try (OpenAI's GPT-3), and where to try it (bitcointalk forum). Personally, I actually resent being mislead like this, at least on that second point, even with the full disclosure. The output is very high quality, but it is making at least one falsifiable assertion (no test was ever done in that forum).
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