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Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

mindmatters.ai

331–340 of 426 posts

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#331
The latest and greatest so called “AI” is very very far from being even close to be called intelligent. I laugh every time a company take their 20 year old optimisation/schedule/control software and slap an “AI” sticker on it for marketing purposes. Yes there are amazing results in very limited synthetic environments like games and image pattern matching. But there is still a very long way to go before we have anything that can compete with a 1 year old child.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#332

This is essentially why I think we're not going to get self-driving. A few years ago we produced something that could do a good job of pretending to drive under a tiny number of circumstances, and people went "OMG it can drive!" and assumed that we just have a few corner cases before the chat bot can have a conversation about anything. The truth is that often these very limited solutions are just that - limited, they…

don’t generalize these things. self driving in every possible scenario yes is probably a while off. self driving in specific circumstances is already here, such as airport shuttles and moving shipping containers in docks. you don’t need to solve the general case to be useful

This. And in fact I think that may be the path forward - just update all the main roads to be self driving friendly, like a train network, and keep the smaller roads as manual driving only.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#334
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link to that! I tried it out just now and I have to say that I am not impressed. What will you do? You get longsword from the ground. You get your longsword from the ground. You hold it in your hands and examine it for a moment. It's a very sturdy weapon. The knight then grabs his longsword and bows. Huh? Why did it grab the bow as well? You inventory. You have a crossbow. Huh? I thought I just grabbed…

aidungeon is a bad joke, I do not understand why anyone is wasting their time with this? You go on an adventure. You hitch a ride on a passing ship and get taken to some far away planet. You get to explore and have fun. But the planet is a dead world with nothing to eat except for some tree sap. You pet the deer. You pet the deer and it gives you a venereal disease. Then the planet falls into a black hole. You surviv…

It requires you to be your own DM, it never says anything you do is illegal you can do whatever you want like spawn a deer to pet etc.

I agree that it isn't really a game, in a game your actions has consequences, they don't here as nothing you do limits what you can do in the future. It would need to create a world with rules and limitations where what you can do now depends on what state the world is in.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem. It doesn't really matter how the chatbot saves the money, they can just see the end results and use the money for bonuses instead.

>> The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem. That's not going to serve the company when they deploy it to take orders at a drive-thru. McDonalds pushing the state of the art, now that's interesting!

I understand they're even putting in conveyor belts in some drive-in restaurants There was a time when the little girls came running out in short little skirts. Remember them? You pull in and the little girl would come running up. "May I take your order sir?" "Yes, but I don't believe it's on the menu, ha ha" They don't, they don't let you flirt any more now. They give you a little green box with a white button on it A little speaker grill...

(from https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/peterpaulandmary/paultalk.ht..., c.1960s)

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Michele Obama classified as a male Yes, humans don't make embarrassing mistakes all the time. We're only making dignified mistakes.

If something is to replace humans at doing a job X then it has to be better than the humans at job X. Also humans instinctively expect the machines to not make mistakes. I haven't made them such; it's just a fact of life. And we have to work with the expectations of the bigger populace.

"If something is to replace humans at doing a job X then it has to be better than the humans at job X." Only if the something is supposed to replace ALL the humans doing X. The idea of using bots was good; let them handle the easy questions, and humans handle the hard ones, therefore fewer humans required. The implementation, not so good in many cases...

(Optionally s/many/more/ or s/many/all/, to your taste)

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#337
post #44

Having worked in ML at two different companies now, I think that people interpreting model output as intelligence or understanding says much more about the people than about the model output. We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. But it isn't. It's math and tricks, and if human intelligence is truly nothing more than math and tricks, then what we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction…

We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. I've had numerous people look at the actions of software I wrote over the last 30 years make comments like, "Ohhhhhh it probably did that because it knew x". The software had no such functionality. Seems to be a natural thing for people to be overly optimistic about software's capabilities.

Not unlike what people read into the minds of their pets.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#338

Having worked in ML at two different companies now, I think that people interpreting model output as intelligence or understanding says much more about the people than about the model output. We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. But it isn't. It's math and tricks, and if human intelligence is truly nothing more than math and tricks, then what we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction…

I usually sum it up by saying that what we have is a very good bullshit generator. It is bad at reasoning but good at making up answers that sounds correct and crossing fingers that the corrector won't look twice at what they say.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#339
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how absurdly far we are from anything even approaching actual intelligence, even the intelligence of a toddler I respectfully disagree, IMO we're past that point although not by much. You might enjoy conversing with one of the two current GPT-3 davinci models. They do an excellent job of understanding the context of many discussions, right up to the ~8000 char token limit. If you want to have a nice existential dis…

No, they still lack the common sense of a toddler, because they don't know anything about the world; they only know (in great detail) about the structure of their training data.

Apparently they (or at least the person you were responding to was "talking" to) also "know" about data they find on the web, which does not need to be in their training data. There was a news article recently about an 8(?) year old who asked Alexa for a "challenge." "Plug a charger part way into an electric outlet," replied the Alexa", "and touch a penny..." (you can guess the rest--I won't put it here in case another Alexa finds it). I'm pretty sure that was not in its training data, nor was the distance to that church, nor the time it would take to drive there.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So the attack on capitalism is so deeply deluded" Under Colonial powers corporations engaged in slave trade, folks that fought against slavery were fighting against capitalism, totally deluded right? Ancient Japan had corporations in year 578 A.D., where they capitalist? Fascism and Nazis had corporations, and they made great scientific progress, were they capitalist? If the answer to any of the above is no, then ma…

I find it hilarious that the strongest response is about some ancient examples of centuries ago. If anything, this is a praise of the system we have today. People don’t understand Capitalism and they seem to have joined the liberal progressive bandwagon. Progressives used to be extremely pro-Capatilist movement. Until lately, and some fringe socialist ideas of Bernie Sanders, it was universally accepted. Apparently a…

> Progressives used to be extremely pro-Capatilist movement

That's both true and false. That is, there was once a pro-capitalist movement called “Progressive”, but it has essentially no connection to the modern movement that adopted the name. (There have been lots of unrelated “Progressive” movements, historically.)

> Until lately, and some fringe socialist ideas of Bernie Sanders, it was universally accepted.

Nope, not at all; the label “progressive” was adopted by the faction overlapping the Democratic Party which opposes capitalism to distinguish themselves from the pro-capitalist “liberals” not long after the Clinton’s center-right faction became clearly dominant on the Democratic Party, it was well established by the late 1990s.

> There is a reason why most strong economies are capitalist

Most strong economies moved off of the historical system for which 19th Century critics coined the term “capitalism” in the first half of the 20th Century, adopting a hybrid system synthesizing capitalist and socialist ideas that has a couple of different names, such as “Modern Mixed Economy”.

> Also, I tend to believe the opposite of what the HN hive mind thinks

There is no “HN hive mind”, though it's a popular thing for people to attribute ideas they oppose to (even when people who agree with them are quite common on HN.)

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