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I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

maximumeffort.substack.com

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Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#81

Post by IanCal »

fullstackchris wrote: post #53

I see posts like this and don't understand how they are made. I asked chatGPT this morning if it "remembered" something I asked in the previous prompt, and it said something to the tune of "I am simply a NLP machine learning model, I provide a decent output for good inputs, I don't have a sense of context, memory, or time." That's why I really don't understand these contextualized multi step conversations. Especially…

There are quite a few safety checks you may be hitting when using chatgpt that are there to try and keep context of what it is (so it'll remind you it can't access the outside world). You can often get around them, but for example there's the work showing you can teach it to render svgs as valid markdown then ask for shapes and colours and get the output. If I ask it to render something though, it refuses telling me it's a language model.

I have had a 17 page conversation with it and been able to ask for summarisations of what we've talked about.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#82

Post by fnordpiglet »

PaulHoule wrote: post #75
mkmk3 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still super into this as it is, without considering real growth on the tech side. It's dumb but I think it's still useful. It'll be crazy when it replaces us but for the moment I've been using it to learn and explore (C, some linux tools, game dev in lisp) and the results are surprising - and we're looking at the newest tech demo, as you say what will it look like in a few years? Even just give some app devs some…

If "useful" means we don't need the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk anymore I am all for it.

(Secret: we never did)

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#83

Post by supermdguy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #74
fnordpiglet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amazing from the point of view that this is not a linguist or a grade schooler, but a general purpose computer program. Have you seen a computer program that can do these things, especially one that wasn’t written to do these things but can also turn itself into a plausible linux box, translate python to rust, and all sorts of other wacky party tricks? That’s the amazing thing - not that the feats themselve…

ChatGPT's superpower is hijacking the human desire for meaning into causing people to believe it is much better than it really is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach has dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise where they work out the limitations of various fantastic A.I. systems based on mathematical logic. Roughly, neural networks don't repeal the results of Gödel, Turing and Tarski. The shor…

Even if this ends up in a plateau, that doesn't discount the fact that it's a huge step forward from what we were capable of building 5 years ago. If the next generation of language models make us believe they're superintelligent but are actually at the level of an average college student, that would still be an amazing achievement.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#84

Post by ogogmad »

PaulHoule wrote: post #74
fnordpiglet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amazing from the point of view that this is not a linguist or a grade schooler, but a general purpose computer program. Have you seen a computer program that can do these things, especially one that wasn’t written to do these things but can also turn itself into a plausible linux box, translate python to rust, and all sorts of other wacky party tricks? That’s the amazing thing - not that the feats themselve…

ChatGPT's superpower is hijacking the human desire for meaning into causing people to believe it is much better than it really is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach has dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise where they work out the limitations of various fantastic A.I. systems based on mathematical logic. Roughly, neural networks don't repeal the results of Gödel, Turing and Tarski. The shor…

That wasn't Hofstadter's point. Hofstadter didn't try to "disprove" the possibility of having AI -- he only set out to show that certain approaches couldn't work. GPT's approach isn't one of those he argued against. You seem to be referring instead to Penrose and Lucas, but their arguments have convinced virtually no one.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#85

Post by dvt »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #62
ogogmad wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people don't really understand what's happening, and therefore why it's impressive that it's happening.

I dunno. The people who I talk to who do seem to understand what's happening seem even more impressed than the average layperson (mainly that such a fundamentally simple technique is paying off with such crazy dividends).

> mainly that such a fundamentally simple technique is paying off with such crazy dividends

I will concede that I am amazed by this. Even more generally, I'm even more amazed by Markov chains: an even simpler technique that can generate crazy dividends as well.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#86

Post by pmontra »

dvt wrote: post #37

I know everyone's (as usual) "amazed" by this, but here are a few stark observations: (1) a linguist could do this (come up with a toy language, conjugations, and sentence structure, probably the Python code too) in like 30 minutes, (2) it's disappointing that the AI constantly messes up very simple grammar rules (rules a grade-schooler could understand)—I'm actually very surprised it doesn't have hardcoded grammar r…

This is about the same argument we can do about Google Translate or text to speech.

Any professional translator can take a web page and give me a better translation than GT. However I get the GT translation in a few seconds and not in maybe hours, after I signed a contract with the translator.

And text to speech would allow me to post an audio version of this reply in a good English accent instead of my inconsistent foreign one. Or paying a professional speaker, after signing a contract.

Inventing a language is maybe useless but using ChatGPT as a tool to increase our speed is definitely useful.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#87

Post by pcthrowaway »

fullstackchris wrote: post #53

I see posts like this and don't understand how they are made. I asked chatGPT this morning if it "remembered" something I asked in the previous prompt, and it said something to the tune of "I am simply a NLP machine learning model, I provide a decent output for good inputs, I don't have a sense of context, memory, or time." That's why I really don't understand these contextualized multi step conversations. Especially…

Are you using chat.openai.com or beta.openai.com/playground ?

ChatGPT does remember context about things from the current session. If you refresh the page, it will start with a fully blank slate

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#88

Post by robmccoll »

PaulHoule wrote: post #74
fnordpiglet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amazing from the point of view that this is not a linguist or a grade schooler, but a general purpose computer program. Have you seen a computer program that can do these things, especially one that wasn’t written to do these things but can also turn itself into a plausible linux box, translate python to rust, and all sorts of other wacky party tricks? That’s the amazing thing - not that the feats themselve…

ChatGPT's superpower is hijacking the human desire for meaning into causing people to believe it is much better than it really is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach has dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise where they work out the limitations of various fantastic A.I. systems based on mathematical logic. Roughly, neural networks don't repeal the results of Gödel, Turing and Tarski. The shor…

I have some level of concern that we have the same superpower.

Re: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

#89

Post by fhd2 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #74
fnordpiglet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amazing from the point of view that this is not a linguist or a grade schooler, but a general purpose computer program. Have you seen a computer program that can do these things, especially one that wasn’t written to do these things but can also turn itself into a plausible linux box, translate python to rust, and all sorts of other wacky party tricks? That’s the amazing thing - not that the feats themselve…

ChatGPT's superpower is hijacking the human desire for meaning into causing people to believe it is much better than it really is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach has dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise where they work out the limitations of various fantastic A.I. systems based on mathematical logic. Roughly, neural networks don't repeal the results of Gödel, Turing and Tarski. The shor…

I had a weird effect with it: I played around with it for about an hour and was pretty impressed - I can't really wrap my head around how it can do some of the things it does. Then I started to see the patterns, and got repeatedly disappointed by having to adjust and refine my prompts. Then I got downright nonsense back from it and gave up. Either I made it to some kind of uncanny valley, and it would get better if I invest more time, or most people who get amazed don't make it that far.

At this point I'm mainly concerned about the unimaginable heap of garbage it will release on the world - good enough to impress decision makers at first glance, annoying to deal with if you actually have to work with it.

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