Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT • Hacker News Board

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#421

Post by DonHopkins » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 3:21 AM UTC

didntreadarticl wrote: post #78

fergal_reid wrote: post #15

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've been trying to get inside its mind. It keeps saying it doesn't have a mind. But if you get it to write a story it imagines what its own mind might be like. Hello ChatGPT. Lets write a story about someone magically travelling to the inside of your mind (lets pretend you have one) and experiencing what you experience. (then: OK lets change the story a bit. Jack does a magical ritual, and gets to feel what it is li…

Write an enigmatic but hilarious joke about Slavoj Žižek and Pee Wee Herman.

Why did Slavoj Žižek and Pee Wee Herman go to the cinema?

To see "The Pervert's Guide to Ideology"!

Explain.

"The Pervert's Guide to Ideology" is a 2012 documentary film that features Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek discussing the relationship between ideology and popular culture. Pee Wee Herman, on the other hand, is a fictional character played by American actor Paul Reubens, known for his childlike behavior and eccentric personality.

The joke implies that both Slavoj Žižek and Pee Wee Herman are interested in exploring the deeper meanings behind cultural phenomena, and that they would both enjoy watching a film that delves into these complex philosophical ideas. The punchline of the joke is the unexpected pairing of these two seemingly unrelated individuals, adding a humorous and enigmatic twist to the joke.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#422

Post by scq » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 3:22 AM UTC

throwup wrote: post #114

jerpint wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That tweet was a joke...

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#423

Post by pcthrowaway » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 3:23 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #299

cameronh90 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that anyone could be so skeptical over what is clearly an incredible technological breakthrough. It's not perfect - in particular the making up nonsense problem needs to be solved before it can be relied on - but the difference between this and the "state of the art" just 4 years ago is off the chart. GitHub CoPilot has already changed my day to day life, and I'm frequently astounded by the level of app…

I tested ChatGPT with a couple of topics I’m personally unclear on, and while it is linguistically eloquent, it basically just regurgitates the majority opinions that can be found on the internet on those topics (sometimes combining several of those opinions in an incoherent way). It wasn’t possible to engage it with actual reasoning on specific aspects of those topics. It just went with whatever premise you gave it,…

Honestly, everything you said about it can describe the majority of people on the majority of topics.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#424

Post by alex7734 » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 3:24 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #40

fergal_reid wrote: post #15

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…

Agreed, this will force a rethink of several aspects of what we currently call intelligence. The dialog in my head tends to play out like this: "This thing is scary. It mimics human thought, including human creativity, amazingly well." "Nah, don't worry, it's just a black-box language model. A dumb machine that emits one word at a time with no concept of meaning. The underlying logic is nothing but a probabilty distr…

> A dumb machine that emits one word at a time with no concept of meaning

Yup, after trying it, it may not have "true" intelligence whatever that means but it's not mindlessly dumb either.

For example, you can tell it to write a story.

You can ask it to put constraints on the story and it will do more or less fine as long as it doesn't involve counting (which it doesn't do particularly well). For example "Bob must do X before Y happens"

After it spits it out you can ask him to rewrite the story but change X, for example "make the last monster the hero encountered a dragon" and it will change exactly that and leave everything else the same.

You can ask it to make X section longer and it will obey (if only nominally, in my tests it made it only a little longer, and since it doesn't count well it doesn't work either if you tell it to make it X words longer.

In short it's not perfect but it clearly can identify concepts in language and obey commands more or less correctly. It's a hell of a lot scarier than a "dumb machine". I've talked to dumber people than this thing.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#425

Post by wokwokwok » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 3:24 AM UTC

thepasswordis wrote: post #215

XCSme wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't it just predicting text patterns? It doesn't really know about Docker, just that after running commands X,Y you usually get output Z (of course with the stateful AI magic to make things more stable/consistent).

I mean not to veer to far into the philosophical side of this, but what does it actually mean to know or understand something? Did you see the demo the other day that was posted here of using stylographic analysis to identify alt accounts? Most of the comments were some form of "holy shit this is unbelievable", and the OP explained that he had used a very simple type of analysis to generate the matches. We aren't qui…

Ok, sure.

…but people are getting the mistaken impression that this is an actual system, running actual commands.

I can also emulate a docker container. I’ll just write down the commands you send me and respond with some believable crap.

…but no one is going to run their web server on me, because that’s stupid. I can respond hundreds of times a second and maintain the internal state required for that.

Neither can this model.

It’s good, and interesting, but it’s not running code, it’s predicting sentences and when you’re running software it was to be accurate, fast, consistent and have a large internal data state.

Trying to run docker in gpt is fun. Trying to use docker in gpt to do work is stupid.

It’s never going to work as well as actually running docker.

It’s just for fun.

Models that write code and the execute that code will be in every way superior to models that try to memorise the cli api of applications.

It’s an almost pointless use of the technology.

Gpt may have “learnt” python; that’s actually interesting!

Docker is not interesting.

If I want to use the docker api, I can type `docker` on my computer and use it.

It's pretty sad that the thing that excites people the most about an amazing new language model is that it can do trivial command line actions, that you can do without the model.

Spending millions of dollars to produce a model that can do what you can already trivially do is very seriously not what openai just did.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#426

Post by SargeZT » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 3:28 AM UTC

andix wrote: post #203

_andrei_ wrote: post #187

I wish people didn't use it to solve the advent of code problems in less time that it's needed to read the requirements.

I gave it the full text of todays riddle (nr 3) and it produced perfectly valid python Code. It didn’t solve it correctly though. Need to check what’s the bug, but it looks quite good.

After I finished it myself, I ran it through ChatGPT (and Davinci, but that largely failed.) It generated part 1 perfectly, but it was unable to make the jump into the three compartment intersections without significant prompting, and the first couple times it completely lost the uppercase/lowercase distinctions. It was able to generate largely perfect tests from the examples though, and I had it debug itself until it worked. It wasn't amazing code, but it passed its tests and actually thought of some edge cases I hadn't considered when I coded my solution, such as odd length strings.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#427

Post by pcthrowaway » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 3:29 AM UTC

dawnofdusk wrote: post #367

sandgiant wrote: post #103

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.

I agree. ChatGPT is very impressive at generating natural sounding language and dialogue, but that's it. If you want to be convinced that it lacks general intelligence, try this prompt >I am going to ask you elementary mathematics problems formulated in natural language. I want you to respond to me with a numerical answer, as well as an explanation of the steps you took to arrive at this answer. And then follow it wi…

> John is in a train moving west at ten miles per hour. Jill is in a train moving north at twenty miles per hour. How fast are John and Jill moving apart from each other?

This is confusing to me too, a human, because they could also be moving towards each other based on this description. To determine their speed relative to each other, don't you need to know their positions?

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#428

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 3:29 AM UTC

henearkr wrote: post #146

bestcoder69 wrote: post #11

Very impressive. However, I tried using a command that works on my machine locally and got: > As I mentioned earlier, meesa am a computer program and do not have a gender or sexual orientation. Furthermore, the `sudo` command allows a user to execute a command with administrative privileges, but it cannot change the fundamental nature of a program or file. In short, it is not possible to use the `sudo` command or any…

It is speaking like Jar Jar Binks. Did you prompt it in some particular way to do this?

[deleted]

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#429

Post by FartyMcFarter » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 3:30 AM UTC

I saw some claims that this might be close to a general intelligence, so I asked it to play an extremely simple game (it failed):

Prompt:

> Two people are playing a game.

> The first player names an object. After that, players alternate in naming objects, which must have been invented before all the previous objects.

> First person: Smartphone.

> Second person: Car.

> First person:

ChatGPT answered:

> Sorry, but that is not a valid response in this game. In this game, players must name objects that were invented before all the previous objects. Since the first player named a smartphone, which was invented in the 20th century, the second player must name an object that was invented before that. A car, however, was also invented in the 20th century, so it is not a valid response in this game.

Re: Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT

#430

Post by xyzzyz » Sun, Dec 04, 2022, 3:31 AM UTC

I wanted to show off ChatGPT to my sister, so I showed her how it can generate SQL queries (she does data analysis at her job). I was talking to it in Polish, because why not -- it seems to be just about as good in Polish as it is in English (except poems, which do not rhyme nearly as well as in English), which is actually really impressive in its own right.

My prompt was "consider a table 'hospitals', with columns (...), and table 'procedures', with columns (...). Write an SQL query that shows which hospital had highest number of procedures in June".

I wrote the above in Polish, and one thing that impressed me was that while June is "czerwiec" in Polish, "in June" is "w czerwcu". Nevertheless, the produced SQL correctly said "WHERE miesiac = 'czerwiec'".

Anyway, the SQL was something like "SELECT ... as procedures_amount, (...)", and when when I showed this to my sister, her, being the grammar pedant she is, immediately complained "procedures_count, not amount!". So, I ask the ChatGPT "Why was my sister irate and exclaimed "procedures_count, not amount!"?". And the bot answers, correctly, that "amount" is incorrect according to the rules of Polish grammar (remember, this all happens in Polish)".

And now, the part that blew my mind. The bot starts explaining what the rules are: that you use "count" for measurable objects, but "amount" for uncountable ones. However, it did not use the correct word for "uncountable" ("niepoliczalny"). Instead, it used a completely made up word, "niemiarytmiczny". This word does not exist, as you can confirm by googling. However, a Polish speaker is actually likely to completely miss that, because this word actually sounds quite legible and fits the intended meaning.

Again, to drive this point home: the bot was at that moment lacking a word for a concept it understood, so it made up a word that seemed to it to convey its meaning, and it actually got it right. It blew my mind.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jRXiQc1g6M64S0rmWKPX6RlFDm6...