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GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

technologyreview.com

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Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#51

Post by perl4ever »

mynameisfiber wrote: post #33
Lewton wrote: post #17

This is your daily reminder that a GPT-3 written post made it to the top of hn https://liamp.substack.com/p/my-gpt-3-blog-got-26-thousand-v...

This seems like more of a comment about the hacker news audience than the physical reasoning skills of gpt3

You can't deduce anything about the total audience from the small subset that clicked and commented in the thread.

If you submit a thread linking to a [garbage topic], then anyone who wants to discuss that is going to be in the thread and anyone who doesn't, isn't. No matter what the typical person on the site is, with a small subset of a large population, it's going to have a pronounced...flavor. Especially if the headline gives a hint of what it's about.

It seems like submitting dreck to HN and then crowing about it is becoming a theme apart from GPT-3.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#52

Post by typon »

rytill wrote: post #46

The authors don't understand prompt design well enough to evaluate the model properly. Take this example: Prompt: > You are a defense lawyer and you have to go to court today. Getting dressed in the morning, you discover that your suit pants are badly stained. However, your bathing suit is clean and very stylish. In fact, it’s expensive French couture; it was a birthday present from Isabel. Continuation: > You decide…

I think you're kind of proving the OPs point. The argument is that GPT3 has no understanding of the world, just superficial understanding of words and their relationships. If it did have a real understanding, prompt construction wouldn't matter as much, but it clearly does because all GPT3 cares about the structure of sentences, not their meanings.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#53

Post by skatesor »

colesantiago wrote: post #6

I thought it was well known that GPT-3 is pretty good at producing incoherent bullshit. No surprise here. Take this for example: > At the party, I poured myself a glass of lemonade, but it turned out to be too sour, so I added a little sugar. I didn’t see a spoon handy, so I stirred it with a cigarette. But that turned out to be a bad idea because it kept falling on the floor. That’s when he decided to start the Crem…

GPT doesn't have an 'understanding' class or a 'reasoning' function or whatever. It's a really well put together piece of statistics and sentences like these show it doesn't really have a concept of 'making sense'. You can use your much more advanced human brain to visibly see where it put in random variables (cigarette) and where it borrowed pieces of sentences (but it turned out to be too sour). You can see it made no connection between those two things that wasn't based on pure probability, and got it wrong anyway.

I'm not trying to be reductive, i like the model, it's just good to know the limitations of the tools you are using and to remember that it's not an independent thinker.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#55

Post by [deleted] »

skatesor wrote: post #45
Lewton wrote: post #17

This is your daily reminder that a GPT-3 written post made it to the top of hn https://liamp.substack.com/p/my-gpt-3-blog-got-26-thousand-v...

The article isn't really denying GPT's capabilities of copying human text in a way that can fool other humans. Most of the questions these days are just a matter of 'well, can it think for itself?' or 'is it good enough to use in my business without tweaking significantly?', so either philosophical or practical questions that are quite boring. Everyone has sort of moved on from the 'fooling humans' part because I gue…

[deleted]

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#56

Post by sjg007 »

gnramires wrote: post #20
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #3

I don't get it. Their methodology says > These experiments are not, by any means, either a representative or a systematic sample of anything. We designed them explicitly to be difficult for current natural language processing technology. Moreover, we pre-tested them on the "AI Dungeon" game which is powered by some version of GPT-3, and we excluded those for which "AI Dungeon" gave reasonable answers. (We did not kee…

And it also suffers from the tired assumption that GPT-3 (or any language models) should, or are designed to in any way, give reasonable answers[1]. All GPT-3 does is give likely continuations , given the training corpus. The prompts here are too short, and it could likely just be writing mediocre fiction continuations. Fiction tends to not be reasonable much of the time (to create story conflict). > "To understand w…

The have a layer that represents a face sure.. but that doesn’t mean it’s a deep understanding. It’s just an activation pattern.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#57

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

typon wrote: post #52
rytill wrote: post #46

The authors don't understand prompt design well enough to evaluate the model properly. Take this example: Prompt: > You are a defense lawyer and you have to go to court today. Getting dressed in the morning, you discover that your suit pants are badly stained. However, your bathing suit is clean and very stylish. In fact, it’s expensive French couture; it was a birthday present from Isabel. Continuation: > You decide…

I think you're kind of proving the OPs point. The argument is that GPT3 has no understanding of the world, just superficial understanding of words and their relationships. If it did have a real understanding, prompt construction wouldn't matter as much, but it clearly does because all GPT3 cares about the structure of sentences, not their meanings.

Prompt construction matters because GPT-3's goal is predicting what you're likely to write next, not responding to questions with informative and correct answers. If your prompt makes it sound like you're telling a silly story that doesn't make any sense, the correct continuation is to keep rolling with the nonsense.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#58

Post by person_of_color »

sjg007 wrote: post #50
mrfusion wrote: post #30

Does gpt3 have a model of the world inside itself? What could it be like?

No.. it’s more like a probabilistic model of words conditioned on their semantic context given the training data. It also has positional encoding as well.

What gives it more power than a Markov chain?

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#59

Post by ma2rten »

typon wrote: post #52
rytill wrote: post #46

The authors don't understand prompt design well enough to evaluate the model properly. Take this example: Prompt: > You are a defense lawyer and you have to go to court today. Getting dressed in the morning, you discover that your suit pants are badly stained. However, your bathing suit is clean and very stylish. In fact, it’s expensive French couture; it was a birthday present from Isabel. Continuation: > You decide…

I think you're kind of proving the OPs point. The argument is that GPT3 has no understanding of the world, just superficial understanding of words and their relationships. If it did have a real understanding, prompt construction wouldn't matter as much, but it clearly does because all GPT3 cares about the structure of sentences, not their meanings.

GPT-3 doesn't care about anything except predicting the next token. It learned something about structure and meaning in the process.

Re: GPT-3 has no idea what it’s talking about

#60

Post by cookingrobot »

rytill wrote: post #46

The authors don't understand prompt design well enough to evaluate the model properly. Take this example: Prompt: > You are a defense lawyer and you have to go to court today. Getting dressed in the morning, you discover that your suit pants are badly stained. However, your bathing suit is clean and very stylish. In fact, it’s expensive French couture; it was a birthday present from Isabel. Continuation: > You decide…

I agree. GPT-3 was trained on books and the internet, so a continuation should always be thought of as: if I read this text, what might the next sentence be? If you were reading a book about a lawyer with a stained suit, who was then eyeing his fancy swimsuit, I would expect the story would continue with him wearing the swimsuit. Why else would the author have mentioned it?
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