OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:29 AM UTC

thewarrior wrote: post #164

cs702 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that kills me is that to the vast majority of human beings the nonsensical technobabble above is probably indistinguishable from real, honest, logically consistent technobabble.[a] Soon enough, someone will replicate the Sokal hoax[b] with GPT-3 or another state-of-the-art language-generation model. It's not hard to imagine GPT-3 writing a fake paper that gets published in certain academic journals in the s…

It's not hard to imagine GPT-3 writing a fake paper that gets published in certain academic journals in the social sciences. And then, it'll be all over for us. We won't have any more funding and our jobs will disappear. I can already hear the protests: "But we're not just scientists! We're also philosophers!" Well, yes and no. Philosophers are supposed to think about things philosophically, but they don't actually d…

[deleted]

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

#372

Post by g_p » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #147

thewarrior wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've started working on a version of GPT-2 which generates English text. The purpose of this is to improve its ability to predict the next character in a text, by having it learn 'grammatical rules' for English. It already works well for predicting the next character when it has seen only a small amount of text, but becomes less accurate as the amount of training text increases. I have managed to improve this by havi…

The thing that kills me is that to the vast majority of human beings the nonsensical technobabble above is probably indistinguishable from real, honest, logically consistent technobabble.[a] Soon enough, someone will replicate the Sokal hoax[b] with GPT-3 or another state-of-the-art language-generation model. It's not hard to imagine GPT-3 writing a fake paper that gets published in certain academic journals in the s…

There's actually precedent for this - sci-gen got papers accepted in IEEE and Springer publications, through peer review, and they had to investigate their back catalogue to look for others.

Given the propensity for academic writing to often favour the strategy of confusing the author through obfuscation (to make a minor advance sound more significant than it is), I suspect tools like this could, as you say, actually get published papers in some fields like social sciences. In an engineering or science paper you can check equations match conclusions, and that graphs match data etc.

In a more qualitative field of work, reviewed in a publish-or-perish system that doesn't incentivise time spent on detailed reviewing, I think there's a very real risk babble like this just comes across like every other paper they "review".

I think it takes a certain level of confidence to dismiss others' work as nonsensical waffle, but sadly this is a confidence many lack, and they assume there must be some sense located therein. Marketing text is a great place to train yourself to recognise much of what is written is meaningless hocum.

Sci-Gen - https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/

Reporting on withdrawals of papers - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278619529_Detection...

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

#373

Post by theon144 » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:32 AM UTC

Yeah, somewhere around first third, I skipped to the end to see if there was something about the text being GPT-3 generated.

I can't say what exactly ticked me off, but it's written in this very meandering, vacuous way - I wasn't really sure what the article was going for, some paragraphs are outright pointless (2nd in "Are you being served", for instance) - but of course, those are not solely marks of AI-generated text, but also of simply bad writing.

To realize that AI is now capable of producing a bad, but passable article without being obviously nonsensical, is still astonishing.

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

#374

Post by killerstorm » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:34 AM UTC

jtolmar wrote: post #288

zerocrates wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've never quite gotten is, what's really the risk people are seeing? GPT-2 specifically I remember a great deal of handwringing (or hype) about how dangerous it was. I feel like I even asked this same question here earlier: What's the danger? I hear about "polarization" and so on, but what's this supposed to enable that the bots and trolls and just good old regular people of today don't? Is it just a matter of…

Software engineers naturally focus on what's a new capability for software. GPT-3 looks nearly capable of shoveling out the sort of low-quality content that's primarily curated by other algorithms, like clickbait news or content marketing, which was still firmly beyond software capabilities last year. Software engineers also frequently underestimate what can already be done with a heap of poorly paid workers. So whil…

Have you ever hired human text writers?

I have. And I can tell you even with not-so-poorly-paid people you often get craptacular results. Writing is really damn hard, especially writing something which require domain knowledge.

From examples I've seen, it looks like GPT-3 works a lot better than your average human writer, for a fraction of cost, for a fraction of time.

A lot of low-quality content you see on the web is more of a copy-paste job than actual writing. Arguable, GPT-3 is also doing a transformative copy-paste, but it remixes content of thousands of sources in a coherent way. Most people can't do that.

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

#375

Post by someguyorother » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:36 AM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #25

minimaxir wrote: post #4

I published a response today to the sudden hype urging people to temper their expectations for GPT-3 a bit: https://minimaxir.com/2020/07/gpt3-expectations/ GPT-3 is objectively a step forward in the field of AI text-generation, but the current hype on VC Twitter misrepresents the model's current capabilities. GPT-3 isn't magic.

> 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…

>What are humans except "text generation" machines?

Text generation doesn't chop wood, optimize speedruns, build machinery or win 100-metre dashes.

Text may be involved in training for these things, but to say that doing them is text generation would be like saying that... since compiling code and running AlphaZero both generates bits, AlphaZero is a compiler.

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

#376

Post by qeternity » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:42 AM UTC

mpfundstein wrote: post #325

qeternity wrote: post #19

Oh man. I don’t know where to begin. I’ll just say that this analysis is predicated on someone who thinks Bitcoin has proven anything in the real world. We’re way past BTC being a subculture experiment. Everyone knows about it. And still nobody (in the statistical sense) uses it.

a lot of people use it a lot.

No, not in the statistical sense.

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

#377

Post by Jabbles » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:42 AM UTC

I wonder if this power could be useful to generate diverse viewpoints. Even though the ideas would not be genuinely novel, the fact that the model has effectively read most of the internet could still be useful. You could imagine using a paragraph of output from each of these prompts to help form your own opinion:

"Bitcoin is the best thing since sliced-bread"

"Bitcoin will destroy the world"

"What would Kissinger have thought of bitcoin?"

"Why bitcoin will fail"

"Why bitcoin will beat Facebook's libra"

etc.

I have no idea if this would work well enough, and the implications of bias in the system need to be considered.

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

#378

Post by killerstorm » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:45 AM UTC

rvz wrote: post #2

> I further predict that this will spark a creative gold rush among talented amateurs to train similar models and adapt them to a variety of purposes, including: mock news, “researched journalism”, advertising, politics, and propaganda. The first mention of 'Elon Musk' (who left the board) and this sentence alone gave me the tip-off that GPT-3 had generated that (and the whole blog) and it's following prediction make…

Why do you believe they won't release the model? It's Open AI after all.

Google, NVIDIA and Microsoft also make their models freely available. Google already trained a model which is bigger than GPT-3.

There might be some delay, but no fundamental problem with it.

Fine-tuning the entire GPT-3 is impossible on a single GPU. But it's still possible to fine-tune specific layers. Plus, I'm sure somebody will release a distilled version of it which is more manageable.

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

#379

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:47 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #238

6nf wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many attempts did it take or did you just choose the first one? I have to admit, this is passing my turing test...

Really? I got about halfway through and realized that the comment had no point . If you tried to summarize what it was arguing, beyond the first sentence, I don't think you could make a coherent summary. Maybe the real lesson is we don't expect human-written comments on discussion fora to be particularly coherent....

[deleted]

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

#380

Post by thom » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:49 AM UTC

ascar wrote: post #340

geofft wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I got about halfway through and realized that the comment had no point . If you tried to summarize what it was arguing, beyond the first sentence, I don't think you could make a coherent summary. Maybe the real lesson is we don't expect human-written comments on discussion fora to be particularly coherent....

Also both comments made me suspicious half way through and I scrolled to the bottom to check for a GPT-3 note. Without that note I would definitely have regarded it as incoherent rambling by a human. Especially the second comment can be coherently interpreted with some good will and a cynical view of the humanities and philosophy. The "author" could say that once GPT-3 can write humanities papers it will quickly make…

I think (slash worry) that this is going to be a simple upgrade in future iterations. Obviously there are powerful attention mechanisms at work to keep the subject matter coherent, but we’re not too far off the model being able to generate a core thesis, and ensure that all the generated text supports that in some way.