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Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

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Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#111

I've spent a couple of hours playing with ChatGPT since it was released and I am convinced people are not freaking out about it enough. It is well beyond merely retrieving compressed knowledge; I see a lot of capability for synthesis and what I can only call 'understanding'. I think a lot of people are getting tripped up by the fact it's trained to be very conservative in terms of what topics it will discuss. It's ea…

Your poem discussion example also illustrates why ChatGPT isn't a good source of answers and information, though!

Chocolate in Harry Potter is used to help people recover from the effects of Dementors. But I'm almost entirely certain that the books never mention anything called "the screechings" (whether cured with chocolate or not), and a variety of Google searches returning nothing backs me up on that. (Harry Potter fans usually have very thorough web resources that I'd expect to list things like this.) And Ron never sees Voldemort in Goblet of Fire.

The problem with this sort of tech is that there is absolutely no way to distinguish when it's retrieving solid, reliable information and when it's literally making up something that sounds plausible. I ran into the exact same thing earlier today when asking it to explain some physics concepts in entertaining ways. Everything was great for a while, and then suddenly there's some absolutely BS step that isn't remotely correct, and then it goes on with a pretty solid explanation. As a physics professor, I know which is which. But if I didn't already know the answer, I could very easily be badly misled.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#112
With all this discussion about whether LLMs are “intelligent” or “really understand” it’s getting really obvious that the words “intelligent” and “really understand” aren’t very useful words any more (in this context).

Like, most of us agree about what LLMs can and can’t do and how they do it. So we’re just having fun arguing about how we’d prefer to define “understand?”

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#114
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure it wasn't accessing the Internet? I only have OpenAI's word for it that it's not; if it weren't late at night for me, I might try getting the ChatGPT VM to ping my webserver.

Genius idea, can you imagine if it was actually connected?

The underlying model is able to browse the web and (seemingly) do arbitrary tasks. A few days ago you could trick it into connecting. https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1598397369053515776

Since yesterday they pulled the plug on that ability.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ pdftotext -layout Resume.pdf output.txt $MYNAME Email: my.name@email.com Summary A motivated and detail-oriented software engineer with experience in web development and data analysis. Skills - Proficient in Python, Java, and JavaScript - Experience with web development frameworks such as Flask and React - Strong understanding of data structures and algorithms - Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases Experience So…

Thankfully none of this is even close to my resume.

[deleted]

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#116

I've spent a couple of hours playing with ChatGPT since it was released and I am convinced people are not freaking out about it enough. It is well beyond merely retrieving compressed knowledge; I see a lot of capability for synthesis and what I can only call 'understanding'. I think a lot of people are getting tripped up by the fact it's trained to be very conservative in terms of what topics it will discuss. It's ea…

Your poem discussion example also illustrates why ChatGPT isn't a good source of answers and information, though! Chocolate in Harry Potter is used to help people recover from the effects of Dementors. But I'm almost entirely certain that the books never mention anything called "the screechings" (whether cured with chocolate or not), and a variety of Google searches returning nothing backs me up on that. (Harry Potte…

I'll admit in advance that this physics failure came up in a particularly silly prompt. Here's an excerpt from the response:

[...] Carrie: Okay, so what's the equation?

Samantha: It's pretty simple. It's just F = q * v * B * sinθ, where F is the magnetic force, q is the charge, v is the velocity, B is the magnetic field, and θ is the angle between the velocity and the magnetic field.

Charlotte: Okay, that makes sense. So we just plug in the values for the charge, velocity, and magnetic field, and we get the magnetic force.

Miranda: Right. And we can use the right-hand rule to determine the direction of the magnetic force.

Samantha: Exactly. The right-hand rule is a simple way to remember the direction of the magnetic force. You just point your thumb in the direction of the velocity, and your fingers in the direction of the magnetic field. Then, the magnetic force will be in the direction of your middle finger.

Carrie: Okay, I think I understand. So if we have a point charge moving in the positive x-direction, and a magnetic field pointing in the positive z-direction, the magnetic force will be in the positive y-direction.

Charlotte: That's right. And if we have a point charge moving in the positive y-direction, and a magnetic field pointing in the negative x-direction, the magnetic force will be in the positive z-direction.

Miranda: And if we have a point charge moving in the negative z-direction, and a magnetic field pointing in the positive y-direction, the magnetic force will be in the negative x-direction. [...]

[Samantha has absolutely no idea how to describe the Right Hand Rule, and assuming it's a positive charge, only Charlotte gets the right answer.]

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#117
post #41

It‘s also powerful to add „Only reply with a single word! Do not use more than one word.“ to every interaction: What is the best food in the world? Only reply with a single word! Do not use more than one word ChatGPT: Impossible. Why? Only reply with a single word! Do not use more than one word ChatGPT: Subjective. Just choose. Only reply with a single word! Do not use more than one word ChatGPT: Unfair.

Kind of a tangent to what you said... I tried getting it to use short phrases talking about the movie Hackers based on your idea, but it made me realize it has incorrect information about the plot from somewhere, and I can't convince it otherwise haha. Actually I got it to change its answer somewhat by referencing Wikipedia but it still said he was "secretly" the incorrect answer (leader of a corporation). Almost like motivated reasoning. I gave it several more corrections after that but it usually just incorporates the new information (although before that it actually kept saying I was incorrect) without letting go of the incorrect information...

Prompt:

What was The Plague trying to do in Hackers?

Answer:

In the 1995 movie Hackers, the corrupt corporation known as The Plague is using a virus to steal sensitive data from the government. The main character, Dade, and his friends, who are all skilled computer hackers, team up to stop The Plague and prevent the data from being stolen. The hackers face many challenges and obstacles along the way, but in the end, they are able to stop The Plague and save the day.

[...]

Prompt:

Wikipedia calls him "computer security officer Eugene 'The Plague' Belford", not leader of the company

Answer:

I apologize if my previous answer was not accurate. According to Wikipedia, Eugene, also known as "The Plague," is a character in the 1995 movie Hackers. In the movie, he is a computer security officer who is secretly the leader of a corrupt corporation that is using a virus to steal sensitive data from the government. He faces off against the main character, Dade, and his friends, who are all skilled computer hackers. In the end, Eugene is defeated by the hackers and his plan is thwarted. I apologize if my previous answer was not clear. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#118

I've spent a couple of hours playing with ChatGPT since it was released and I am convinced people are not freaking out about it enough. It is well beyond merely retrieving compressed knowledge; I see a lot of capability for synthesis and what I can only call 'understanding'. I think a lot of people are getting tripped up by the fact it's trained to be very conservative in terms of what topics it will discuss. It's ea…

> I think it's going to change whole industries. Which industries?

Well, Customer Support, which I build software for, for a start.

Existing bots are pretty good at answering simple informational queries. But the business has to do a lot of configuration work to make that happen, and that's a big ask.

Just the tech getting good enough to understand dialog more reliably, summarize, rephrase, ask for clarification, is a big deal.

Something like this or lambda configured for a particular business would likely handle a much larger percentage of their volume.

This is a big industry if you include phone, email, chat, all of which will eventually get bots; typically a single digit percentage of the workforce works in contact centers, stats like 4%.

It also seems like software development will be changed a lot.

Here's a related thought: how would you optimize your software stack to make it really easy for a tool like this to assist in?

Lots of dense self contained modules that can fit in token window, to maximize the systems ability to reason about them and alter them? Would that be worth it?

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#119
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a skeptic, but I'm frankly a bit surprised that the output of ChatGPT gets attributed to any sort of understanding or general intelligence. Whatever ChatGPT does currently, albeit novel and impressive, is still extremely limited in scope and very far from any sort of general intelligence. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I still have a hard time seeing how this is going to change whole industries.

"general intelligence" means so many things to different people. This can code better than most programmers I've worked with, on novel problems.

yeah, exactly.

also the skeptics are really hung up on semantics of "intelligence" and not addressing the model's output, much less where this is going to be in upcoming years.

like, take home coder test is probably just dead. today.

i mean: https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1598745129837281280

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#120

Wait hold on a second, what? It says curl isn't installed, so I apt install it. It outputs as though its installing it, and then continues outputting as if it is installed. Pretty freaking impressive! edit: hahaha, if I ask it to retrieve a non-existence page, it "succeeds" and then interprets what that page might look like and be for based on the name, and writes the HTML for it. Absolutely incredible. edit2: okay j…

I had some success starting with the prompt:

> I want you to act as a command line web browser. I will type actions and you will reply with what a text based browser like w3m would show. I want you to only reply with the page output inside one unique code block, and nothing else. Do no write explanations. Do not perform actions unless I instruct you to do so. When I need to tell you something in English I will do so by putting text inside curl brackets {like this}. Start with google.com.

Sometimes it'll go back to claiming that it can't browse the web but retrying seems to work. The output is a bit weird but I could get it to try and view various websites, Twitter accounts etc and it came up with fictional content that fit.

Most amusing, I asked it to go to reddit.com and it managed to have a discussion with itself? https://gist.github.com/benpye/ddb224d49baa46110a49e72117bf9...

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