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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

#381

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#382

Post by lmm »

pdimitar wrote: post #285
visarga wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessary to be perfect, just useful.

I agree but I still question whether modern ML is useful at all. I mean OK, obviously it works quite well for China in order for their social credit score system to work (facial recognition almost everywhere you go) -- which is damned impressive, I'll give it that. But does it work in the benefit of the people at large? I've read a study a loooooong time ago, I think the late 90s, that stated that the amount of time…

I suspect that might be down to kitchen social dynamics (and/or carefully defined its terms to avoid counting pre-prepared food which is the real timesaver), because e.g. laundry has famously become something that consumes massively less time due to mechanisation.

Being able to search through your photo library by person is a real improvement that ordinary people notice and use. (Also I think most technical people gave up on voice recognition back when it was overhyped and poor, and have thus missed out on what it can do when it's actually decent).

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#383

Post by lmm »

seibelj wrote: post #363
ShinTakuya wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet train crashes and derailments are something that happens fairly regularly, despite it being a tight closed-loop system with manual controllers and operators. Cars are not even close.

> And yet train crashes and derailments are something that happens fairly regularly

In the UK in any given year it's fairly common for the only fatal passenger train crashes to be collisions with motor vehicles on level crossings.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#384

Post by nooorofe »

pdimitar wrote: post #285
visarga wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessary to be perfect, just useful.

I agree but I still question whether modern ML is useful at all. I mean OK, obviously it works quite well for China in order for their social credit score system to work (facial recognition almost everywhere you go) -- which is damned impressive, I'll give it that. But does it work in the benefit of the people at large? I've read a study a loooooong time ago, I think the late 90s, that stated that the amount of time…

Dishwasher saves a lot of time. Not many machines in my kitchen can be classified as "robot"

* oven - not intend to save time (except the fan option), easy-medium to clean * instant pot - saves time, easy to clean * rice-cooker - saves time, easy to clean * electric kettle - save time, easy to clean

If you ever lived in condition without those, you wouldn't praise "cutting board and the knife". I don't need quotes from books to know it.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#385

Post by mycall »

barthelomew wrote: post #349
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…

Once you start prompt-engineering, the answers, in seclusion look pretty great - and show some understanding of the domain. Yet, if you donot do this - they end up spitting out some randomly associated phrases/answers. This is a problem when you're asking a model, a question who's answer you donot completely know. How do you trust it to give the right answer? If you donot know the answer beforehand - you cannot promp…

I was quite amazed how far Cyc got with their closed system.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#386

Post by jack_pp »

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…

I believe the human brain is just math and tricks, the difference is no one took care of an NN model like someone might take care of a baby and constantly train it over several years until it finally starts to understand the world. To be fair I don't think we even have the NN technology that would work even in these circumstances.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#387

Post by Tepix »

canjobear wrote: post #305
punkspider wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Here's what GPT3 had to say when I set temperature to 0. Q: Is it safe to walk downstairs backwards if I close my eyes? A: No. With temperature 0.7: A: Yes, because there is a banister. This one surprised me. Given that temperature was 0, I usually expect a solid response: Q: Why is there a correlation between the number of times Trump tweets the word great and the high temperature in Pyongyang three days la…

The last response sounds like a reasonable attempt at a joke to me.

Yep. I giggled ;-)

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#388

Post by raihansaputra »

redisman wrote: post #353
avereveard wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We want it to be true Founders and salesman pretend it to be true for that sweet sweet VC money, while underneath devs try to fake it as plausibly as possible. And I'll up it with a prediction: watch closely call centers, and as soon as you see them closing in droves, invest in ai startups as something begun to really move.

I interviewed for a “AI” company and asked them about their tech that could take phone calls and extract orders! Wow really cool and impressive! How do you solve X? Oh we have a call center in Mexico that takes all the calls. So you have no usable AI tech at all? Nope. Ok nice talking to you. They had signed with a major retail company. They were actually making software for the call center. And the “CTO” was “workin…

Here in Indonesia the joke is AI as Admin Intelligence, as Admin is the shorthand for people managing/doing administrative tasks. I admit it's a legit strategy to increase productivity (offshore/multitenant/software optimise service), but doing that and analyzing/training on the data still doesn't help creating an AI for it. Ex: Uber.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#389

Post by avereveard »

dorkwood wrote: post #307
avereveard wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We want it to be true Founders and salesman pretend it to be true for that sweet sweet VC money, while underneath devs try to fake it as plausibly as possible. And I'll up it with a prediction: watch closely call centers, and as soon as you see them closing in droves, invest in ai startups as something begun to really move.

How would you notice an increase in call centers closing? Is there a place to view that data?

Job openings can make for a decent proxy. Large layoff would make the news too.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#390

Post by DocTomoe »

On a related note: Audio virtual assistants, think Alexa, but more so Google Assistant, which are essentially glorified chatbots, are getting dumber in my arguably subjective experience: Phrases that used to work do not work anymore, only to be replaced with more obscure phrases. Simple information that worked earlier (When is sunrise? 7:13am!) now is being moved to third-party websites, which then don't deliver that information at all. Google Assistant only has the full feature set if my cell phone's system language is set to American English. Three out of four times GA answers with a variation of "I don't know, but I constantly learn".

GA was sold to me as "essentially an early version of Star-Trek-TNG-style computers, and we're improving on it's feature set constantly by using ML". What it is is an unreliable alarm clock (won't wake you if the Wifi's gone), a glorified voice-activated light switch and a constant source of frustration.

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