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AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

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Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#171

Post by telotortium »

meken wrote: post #162
mark_l_watson wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you are correct, we will see AI used as a copilot for artists and content creators. I have had access to the OpenAI APIs for GPT-3 since last summer, and in addition to using this for NLP tasks, I have also experimented with using GPT-3 to help me work on a sci-fi short book that I have been occasionally writing for years. It has been useful for expanding sections that I have been stuck on. I feel that I…

This gives me an idea. You know how you can break writing down into 2 phases: creative and edit? What if you did the creative part, braindumping all your ideas and vision into a word document. Then had an AI edit your incoherent story into engaging prose. I find the creative part easy, but the editing part tedious. Like, a doctor I know asked me to write a review for him. I did the braindump part, but have been procr…

Unfortunately, GPT-3, CoPilot, AlphaCode, etc., also excel more at the creative part (helped out by their enormous training database, which saves you from doing the Google search to match your high-level description to examples), but they're still dogshit at editing, because that is the part that actually requires a detailed understanding of the text. So the princess is still in the next castle.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#172

Post by globalise83 »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #131
globalise83 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the limit you foresee on computation, especially when such computations can optimise themselves without human intervention?

The underlying rule here, in my opinion, is the law of diminishing returns. (log shaped curve) AlphaZero is already capable of optimizing itself in the limited problem space of Chess. Infinitely increasing the computing power of this system won't give it properties it does not already have, there is no singularity point to be found ahead. And I am not sure that there are any singularities lying ahead in any other dom…

But, godlike though the human variants may appear to be, what happens when the system reaches the skill level of an above-average software architect?

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#173

Post by mirceal »

microtherion wrote: post #165
omnicognate wrote: post #18

As someone who is skeptical, but open minded, about the impact these technologies will have on practical programming I think I'm one of the "people" in "people are complaining..." The article makes some assumptions about what such people think that certainly aren't true for me: 1. That we are unimpressed. I'm gobsmacked. 2. That we don't think these are significant advances. They're obviously huge advances. 3. That w…

> have the machine generate code and have the human review it The best characterization of such massive language models I've seen is "world class bullshitters": they are very good at producing output that superficially looks plausible, but neither know nor care whether what they're saying has any relationship to the truth. This is virtually guaranteed to make such code reviews very frustrating, and of course AlphaCod…

now you need an ai that reviews code. problem solved!

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#174

Post by oh_sigh »

whatshisface wrote: post #152
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know the regular expressions are correct, without understanding them?

Who cares if they're correct? If they fail a test, you can fix them. If they turn out to be wrong in production you can isolate the example and add it as a test. Producing regexes that pass all current tests but contain a subtle bug satisfy 100% of what programmers are incentivized to do. Producing them very quickly will get you promoted.

I feel like you only see programmers as cogs, and not programmers as invested in the success of their product with the statement like "satisfy 100% of what programmers are incentivized to do"

Generally the people using regexes care if they're correct. Frequently, all possible input variants are not enumerated in tests. Frequently, companies want to have confidence in their production code. Imagine this regex is deployed on a sign up flow, and its failures invisibly increase your churn rate. Can it happen with a hand crafted regex? Yes, of course. But I'd imagine it will happen even more frequently with an AI produced custom regex plus a person who doesn't actually understand regexes.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#175

Post by 8note »

meken wrote: post #162
mark_l_watson wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you are correct, we will see AI used as a copilot for artists and content creators. I have had access to the OpenAI APIs for GPT-3 since last summer, and in addition to using this for NLP tasks, I have also experimented with using GPT-3 to help me work on a sci-fi short book that I have been occasionally writing for years. It has been useful for expanding sections that I have been stuck on. I feel that I…

This gives me an idea. You know how you can break writing down into 2 phases: creative and edit? What if you did the creative part, braindumping all your ideas and vision into a word document. Then had an AI edit your incoherent story into engaging prose. I find the creative part easy, but the editing part tedious. Like, a doctor I know asked me to write a review for him. I did the braindump part, but have been procr…

I think these tools push in the other direction.

You get the tool to brain dump for you, then you edit after

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#176

Post by meken »

telotortium wrote: post #171
meken wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gives me an idea. You know how you can break writing down into 2 phases: creative and edit? What if you did the creative part, braindumping all your ideas and vision into a word document. Then had an AI edit your incoherent story into engaging prose. I find the creative part easy, but the editing part tedious. Like, a doctor I know asked me to write a review for him. I did the braindump part, but have been procr…

Unfortunately, GPT-3, CoPilot, AlphaCode, etc., also excel more at the creative part (helped out by their enormous training database, which saves you from doing the Google search to match your high-level description to examples), but they're still dogshit at editing, because that is the part that actually requires a detailed understanding of the text. So the princess is still in the next castle.

Hmm it intuitively seems like the editing part should be the easy part, because the output is basically a template, and you just need to fill it in, and tweak it a little bit…

I get with code it’s a bit less so, but still, there are plenty of design patterns which basically cover a lot of the output space…

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#177

Post by meken »

8note wrote: post #175
meken wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gives me an idea. You know how you can break writing down into 2 phases: creative and edit? What if you did the creative part, braindumping all your ideas and vision into a word document. Then had an AI edit your incoherent story into engaging prose. I find the creative part easy, but the editing part tedious. Like, a doctor I know asked me to write a review for him. I did the braindump part, but have been procr…

I think these tools push in the other direction. You get the tool to brain dump for you, then you edit after

I haven’t used copilot, but don’t you specify what you want first, in comment form, then copilot spits it out?

I get that you have to do subsequent editing, because it’s not perfect.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#178

Post by crummy »

skybrian wrote: post #129
mark_l_watson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I installed the VSCode and PyCharm CoPilot plugins, and signed in with my GitHub account (you first need to request CoPilot access and wait until you get it). As you type in comments or code, CoPilot will sometime autocomplete up to about 10 lines of code, based on the content of the file you are editing (maybe just the code close to the edit point?). My other tools? I use LispWorks Professional, Emacs with Haskell s…

Do you usually find the autocomplete from CoPilot useful enough to keep without editing, or is it wrong often enough to be annoying?

In my opinion it's wrong most of the time but it's so harmless that it's absolutely worth it for the times it's right.

Kind of like regular autocomplete. If it's wrong you just keep typing.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#179

Post by np- »

keewee7 wrote: post #105
Jack000 wrote: post #101

I think this type of model will have a massive impact on the software industry. 99% of programming tasks in the wild don't involve any kind of algorithmic design, but are more like making a CRUD pattern, writing SQL queries etc. This kind of work is easier to automate but more difficult to source the training data. If and when these models are applied to more mundane problems, I'd expect immediately better performanc…

It's interesting that AI is being aggressively applied to areas where AI practitioners are domain experts. Think programming, data analysis etc. We programmers and data scientists might find ourselves among the first half of knowledge workers to be replaced and not among the last as we previously thought.

> We programmers and data scientists

Instead of semantically correct Python, programmer and data scientists’ jobs will be to work in semantically correct English. Fundamentally the job won’t change (you’ll be programming the AI rather than program the machine directly).

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#180

Post by gambiting »

ianbutler wrote: post #140
gambiting wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't see how that's AI , sorry. Machine learning to recognize a background isn't AI.

ML is most certainly AI. I had a visceral feeling you'd respond with this. Sorry but what ever magic you have in your head isn't AI -- this is real AI and you're moving goal posts like alot of people tend to do.

You have single cell organisms which are able to sense their nearby surroundings and make a choice based on the input - they can differentiate food from other materials and know how to move towards it. They are a system which can process complex input and make a decision based on that input. Yet you wouldn't call a basic single cell organism intelligent in any way. The term usually used is that it's simply a biochemical reaction that makes them process the input and make a choice, but you wouldn't call it intelligence and in fact no biologist ever would.

I feel the same principle should apply to software - yes, you've built a mathematical model which can take input and make a decision based on the internal algorithms, if you trained it to detect background in video then that's what it will do.

But it's not intelligence. It's no different than the bacteria deciding what to eat because certain biological receptors were triggered. I think calling it intelligent is one of the biggest lies IT professionals tell themselves and others.

That's not to say the technology isn't impressive - it certainly is. But it's not AI in my opinion.

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