Earlier quoted context omitted.
All text generated by current language models is defective. For reasons that are not fully understood, text language models emit is less interesting than text emitted by humans. Unlike humans, they can not score well on both coherence, as in grammatically correct sentences, and interest, as in "having something to say". They are however good at "coherent rambling". Since most language models work by using its outputs…
The solution proposed in that paper, nucleolus sampling, effectively solves this problem though...
GPT-3 vs. 3M free-text trivia responses
41–45 of 45 posts
Re: GPT-3 vs. 3M free-text trivia responses
#42> 2. Clues confuse GPT-3. They should probably have been removed. This gives me the overall impression that the testers treat GPT-3 a bit too much as something like an artificial human, and not enough like an algorithm (which will work better with sanitized input). This is not a major criticism, the experiment is still interesting. Could it be that the marketing from OpenAI it to blame? From the OpenAI front page: >…
OpenAI's marketing has been fair, and it's not misleading (GPT-3 can be applied to any language tasks but your mileage will vary as this submission demonstrates). However, OpenAI's endorsement of the demos amplifying and anthropomorphizing GPT-3 as a sentient mind don't help, and it's been disappointing that OpenAI doesn't really push back on that. (the hype is what prompted my rebuttal on GPT-3 expectations, which s…
Re: GPT-3 vs. 3M free-text trivia responses
#43> The more important takeaway: dozens of technologists at IBM spent more than three years and untold millions of dollars building the program specifically trained for Jeopardy! prowess. Less than 10 years later, a general-purpose open-sourced technology without the massive mainframe or cooling fans can compete on the same level. This statement from the article confused me. GPT-3 is general-purpose, but not open sourc…
(Not sure if one could argue 'the millions of dollars' part, but that GB R&D wasn't spent for the purpose of trivia playing like the Watson Jeopardy system was aimed at doing, so seems reasonably fair to me - the trivia playing is merely the byproduct of the target capabilities of translation, knowledge graph construction etc).
Re: GPT-3 vs. 3M free-text trivia responses
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
All text generated by current language models is defective. For reasons that are not fully understood, text language models emit is less interesting than text emitted by humans. Unlike humans, they can not score well on both coherence, as in grammatically correct sentences, and interest, as in "having something to say". They are however good at "coherent rambling". Since most language models work by using its outputs…
> For reasons that are not fully understood, text language models emit is less interesting than text emitted by humans. What's not understood? As you describe, every standard language model is statistically predicting the next word given the previous words, ad infinitum. GPT3 has more parameters to build a more precise "thought" vector, but the goal is still only to produce the next word.
In that case, for any property of a text, such as "the text gets ramble-y and basically doesn't have any real point", the probability that a randomly selected text produced by a person has the property, and the probability that a text sampled from that distribution, would be equal.
Could text be sampled from such a distribution on a word by word (or token by token) basis? Yes. Let's see why:
For any event (or property), there are countably many texts which satisfy the property. So, it can be expressed as a countable disjoint union of sets which each have as their only element one of the texts which have the property. So, the probability of a text sampled from the distribution having the property, is equal to the sum of the probabilities of each of the texts which have the property. The probability of each text is equal to the probability of "the next token is [the last word of the text]" given [all the tokens before the last one], multiplied by the probability of the text [all of the tokens before the last one]. And then recurse on that, in order to break the probability of each text down into products of conditional probabilities of (next token | previous tokens) .
Hm, actually, I think there's an issue with what I said. It would work if all texts people wrote had the same length, or if all of them continued indefinitely, but that's not the case. Maybe that can be patched by including a conditional probability for an "end of text" token. Actually, yes, that seems likely. Say that the probability of the text is the probability of (that is all of the text | [the text] is some initial segment of the text), multiplied by the probability of ([the text] is some initial segment of the text). and then the probability of ([an initial segment] is some initial segment of the text) is the probability of ([the last token of the initial segment] is the next token in an initial segment of the text | [the tokens before the last one of the segment] is an initial segment of the text ) times the probability of ([the tokens before the last one of the segment] is an initial segment of the text).
Ok, yeah.
So, in theory, if you allow arbitrary conditional probabilities for the next token (or an end-of-text token) conditioned on all the previous tokens, you can produce any probability distribution over texts.
Therefore, "predicting the next word given the prior words" isn't any limitation on what probability distributions over text can be produced. (though perhaps it could drastically increase the cost of producing certain probability distributions, and perhaps in such a way that makes it practically infeasible to produce in such a way.)
Re: GPT-3 vs. 3M free-text trivia responses
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your ascribing way too much intelligence to a very simplistic text prediction algorithm. Neither GPT-3 nor GPT-4 (assuming it will just be a bigger GPT-3) have any concept of identity that could influence their predictions in the way you seem to assume. If GPT-4 would be trained on text produced by GPT-3 and on text that analyzes that, what GPT-4 would learn is how to sound like GPT-3 and like detractors or admirers…
I mostly agree with you, but I wonder what's the distance between what you described and our actual intelligence.
It's very clear though that human intelligence has a model of the world being made up of agents which interact with objects. Words and sentences refer to entities in this model in our head, and our use of language essentially consists of describing instances of this model, with various purposes.
Text prediction works exclusively on text, no model of the world, and it has a single purpose: to produce the text that would be most likely to follow the prompt based on its training.
This isn't just a theoretical difference. GPT-3 couldn't be used to, for example, be presented with a situation and asked to respond to it in such a way that it achieves some goal.