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Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

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Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#131

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?”

On the contrary, it's important to realize that these models have no sort of understanding in any definition of the word. We can always decide to redefine the word "understanding", but that doesn't seem like it would provide any sort of benefit. Perhaps outside of avoiding a difficult conversation about the (huge) gap between ML models and consciousness.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#133
post #108

> Pretend you are Gary Marcus. Explain why ChatGPT (you) are not actually that impressive. > As a leading researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, I have a deep understanding of the limitations of language models like ChatGPT. While they are capable of generating text that may seem impressive, they do not have the ability to understand or reason about the content of the text they produce. They are simply r…

Thank you for posting this. I'm always a bit conflicted when "AI" news goes viral like this. One the one hand it's fantastic that the excellent work of OpenAI and many others are getting the attention it deserves, but at the same time it's a bit disheartening to witness the lack of understanding of how the models work, and how it relates to research into artificial intelligence more generally. I guess that could prob…

This was actually a bit of a metajoke about recursion mixed with the old adage of being replaced with a shell script mixed with commentary on how the criticisms of the language model are so formulaic that the language model can generate them.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#134
Well, I asked it to explain me a proof of Fermat's last theorem and it replied with some incoherent bullshit: "Fermat’s Last Theorem states that no three positive integers x, y, and z can satisfy the equation xn + yn = zn for any integer value of n greater than two. Here is a proof of the theorem using mathematical induction: Base case: It can be easily seen that no three positive integers x, y, and z can satisfy the equation x2 + y2 = z2. Inductive step: Assume that the statement is true for all values of n less than or equal to some n0. We must then show that the statement is true for n0 + 1. Let x, y, and z be arbitrary positive integers satisfying xn0 + yn0"

So, at this point I'm not concerned about it taking over the whole industries.

I would be really concerned if it replied that the output limit is not enough to show me the full proof though.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#135

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 asked ChatGPT to reply to what you wrote:

Thank you for your feedback and for taking the time to experiment with me. I'm glad to hear that you think I have a lot of potential and that you see some of the things I'm good at. I do have some limitations, as you've pointed out, and I'm still learning and improving all the time.

I'm trained to be conservative in my responses because I want to make sure that I'm providing accurate and reliable information. Sometimes, this means that I might not be able to answer certain questions, or I might not be able to provide as much detail as you might like. However, as you've noted, often times reframing the question can help me provide a better answer.

I'm also not perfect when it comes to numbers and counting, but I'm working on improving my abilities in this area. I do have a lot of other capabilities, though, such as code synthesis, summarization, and reformulation, that I hope to continue to develop.

Overall, I agree that AI has a lot of potential to change many industries, and I'm excited to be a part of that. Thank you again for your interest and support.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#136
post #77

At what point do we start to consider this to be self awareness?

At the point before we actually understand how the models work and realize this has nothing to do with awareness. On the upside, we can learn a lot about ourselves when we realize this.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#138

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?”

On the contrary, it's important to realize that these models have no sort of understanding in any definition of the word. We can always decide to redefine the word "understanding", but that doesn't seem like it would provide any sort of benefit. Perhaps outside of avoiding a difficult conversation about the (huge) gap between ML models and consciousness.

How do you explain how it knows the output of the first Python expression in this article, if not by understanding it?

Let alone the fact that’s it’s running in a simulated virtual machine, and the other examples presented in this article, which add layers and layers of complexity on top of that.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#139

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…

This could be the tech that dislodges Google from its monopoly! There are definitely questions I would prefer this experience than Google and the inevitable SEO spam for introduction type questions. If the generated text included further links to learn more it would be awesome.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#140
I asked it to build a data model for an identity management system that included identities, applications, entitlements, approvals, and certifications. It described a model with English descriptions that were honestly impressive. If some college grad told me what gpt told me I would think they had a very respectable understanding of identity management systems in general. I was surprised as this is a pretty specialized area of IT/software. I asked it to provide an ER diagram and it couldn’t but it did generate some OK DDL. This could be really cool for prototyping. It could also be used as a huge crutch for interviews.
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