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Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

mindmatters.ai

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Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#371

Post by boldpandabear »

aeternum wrote: post #341
Iv wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true but I think we also overestimate how good humans are at reasoning. Throughout the vast majority of human history we simply made up answers that sounded correct. The scientific method and the importance of truth is a relatively recent development.

No post body was provided.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#372

Post by earthboundkid »

thewarrior wrote: post #286
version_five wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a problem is the tighter cycle between academic discoveries and business people trying to monetize them. Large language models were developed, objectively a great achievement, and immediately someone nontechnical wants to apply their own interpretation and imagine that we can build a chatbot that you won't have to pay, and before you know it, people are selling and even deploying them. Anyone who questions or…

GPT-3 needs proper prompting to get the right output. Here's the same question as in the blogpost posed differently Student: Why is it unsafe to walk backwards down a staircase with my eyes closed ? Teacher: You can't see the step behind you! The "teacher" here is GPT-3 and answered the question easily. People are in denial of genuine progress. Student: Do you think I could predict changes in stock prices better if I…

Those answers suck though. I would not consider a human who said them to be intelligent.

For the first one, it’s not that you can’t see, it’s specifically that you will fall and crack your head. An answer that doesn’t mention falling is a bad answer.

Number two, it goes off on temperature and sample sizes which is not germane to the question. The answer should tell a story about causality and instead it goes off on ephemera.

Three is a Wikipedia search, ie Siri can answer this today, and it’s wrong.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#373

Post by throwawayboise »

phkahler wrote: post #322
repomies69 wrote: post #231

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 don't go to McDonalds much anymore, but if I ever detect that I'm talking to a machine I will just drive away. I don't use the order kiosks either, because they take 5x as long as just telling a person that I want a Big Mac, fries, and a medium Coke. I can say that faster than I can even get to step 1 on the kiosk.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#374

Post by somebodythere »

earthboundkid wrote: post #372
thewarrior wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-3 needs proper prompting to get the right output. Here's the same question as in the blogpost posed differently Student: Why is it unsafe to walk backwards down a staircase with my eyes closed ? Teacher: You can't see the step behind you! The "teacher" here is GPT-3 and answered the question easily. People are in denial of genuine progress. Student: Do you think I could predict changes in stock prices better if I…

Those answers suck though. I would not consider a human who said them to be intelligent. For the first one, it’s not that you can’t see, it’s specifically that you will fall and crack your head. An answer that doesn’t mention falling is a bad answer. Number two, it goes off on temperature and sample sizes which is not germane to the question. The answer should tell a story about causality and instead it goes off on e…

All that's missing is a reranking step that rewards incisive and non-obvious answers. Actually, some models are already implementing such a thing: LAmDA will prioritize contentful answers above statistical probability, the same way humans do.

GPT was only trained on "text" with no specific distribution, and specifically to predict a masked word from its surrounding context. As a result, the only questions you can use GPT to answer are of the form "sample from the most likely continuations of this text". It turns out a lot of problems can actually be posed in this form, if you understand the input distribution well. But the future probably looks less like models that operate directly on a distribution of language itself, and more like models that use their language knowledge to predict the volition of the person who gave it input, relate the input to their knowledge of the world (learned from corpus), and then use their language knowledge to convert an internal abstract representation of logical reasoning to something the user can read and understand.

I don't think the tech is extremely far off, it's probably a natural continuation of the current research.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#375

Post by throwawayboise »

ackbar03 wrote: post #366
GrantS wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is both the most misunderstood and the most amazing (and unpredicted?) thing about GPT-3 et al. You have to tell it who it is and what the rules are. And it gains or lacks knowledge depending upon who it thinks it is answering as. You’ll find that Stephen Hawking doesn’t have much to say about the Ninja Turtles while celebrities know nothing about black holes. It does not answer questions or have expertise…

That can't possibly be right though. I'm sure Stephen hawking knows a thing or two about the ninja turtles

He does. It's turtles all the way down.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#376

Post by throwawayboise »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #138
dkarl wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't really a new "problem" with AI. Businesses love hype, they love anything that can punch up a sales pitch, they love shitty cheap automation that replaces expensive human work, they love to identify ways to lower quality and save money without affecting revenue, and AI can be good for all of those things without being good at anything.

No, but most chatbots I've seen are no better than a well-structured FAQ page. We've had those since the mid 90s.

But nobody reads FAQ pages.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#377

Post by throwawayboise »

earthboundkid wrote: post #372
thewarrior wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-3 needs proper prompting to get the right output. Here's the same question as in the blogpost posed differently Student: Why is it unsafe to walk backwards down a staircase with my eyes closed ? Teacher: You can't see the step behind you! The "teacher" here is GPT-3 and answered the question easily. People are in denial of genuine progress. Student: Do you think I could predict changes in stock prices better if I…

Those answers suck though. I would not consider a human who said them to be intelligent. For the first one, it’s not that you can’t see, it’s specifically that you will fall and crack your head. An answer that doesn’t mention falling is a bad answer. Number two, it goes off on temperature and sample sizes which is not germane to the question. The answer should tell a story about causality and instead it goes off on e…

For some reason I am having a very hard time resisting the urge to try walking down a flight of stairs backwards with my eyes closed. How hard can it be?

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#378

Post by throwawayboise »

visarga wrote: post #248
pdimitar wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't have to go for the jugular and do the brutal kill on the first hit, dude! > We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. That's exactly the issue. You summarized it once and for all and we can all go home and stop discussing it now and forever (until we get a general AI that is). 1. Normal people want to have intelligent machines. They watch movies and series and imagine one day a ro…

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

A good number of people will state that Michelle Obama is a male. I had no idea this was started by an AI misclassification (if indeed it was)

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#379

Post by aidenn0 »

Edman274 wrote: post #368
aidenn0 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just please give me a DTMF tree as a fallback for voice recognition. I was trying to make a change to a rental-car reservation from a noisy airport, and I spent 15 minutes trying to get through the voice-recognition chatbot...

It is so fucking frustrating to explain to anyone who works as a manager in a call center that the only real thing you can count on being able to understand in your IVR system are actually just DTMF signals. For whatever reason, it seems to be impossible to explain that B, P and V all sound the same on a noisy connection when it's part of some account number. It's impossible to explain that no one knows what "alphanu…

Heck, when transcribing a number from person-to-person over 2 cell phones, the LPC (or whatever voice compression in use) was reliably rendering one side's pronunciation of a digit (or maybe letter? this was like 10 years ago...) as a different one. We ended up spelling out the digits to communicate it.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#380

Post by [deleted] »

pwinnski wrote: post #13

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…

[deleted]
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