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ChatGPT Cheat Sheet

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111–120 of 145 posts

Re: ChatGPT Cheat Sheet

#112
Another use - generate pop quizzes for teaching/review - saving me 30 minutes every workday.

ChatGPT will take previous context and create reasonable quizzes (open prompt or multiple choice with answer key).

Sure you do need to know the problem domain as ChatGPT will have the occassional howler.

I am sure there are some students who will try to answer my pop quizzes with chatGPT and that is fine as long as they follow the train of thought themselves.

Then again I just had someone submit a homework where the top comment was

  # Copilot comment the following code and explain how it works
... there were no comments besides that one

Re: ChatGPT Cheat Sheet

#114
post #49

Chatgpt certainly spits out answers and is often right or reasonably close to right. But it cant be trusted on complex tasks and I do not think it is a good AI, I have to repeat, this thing is supposed to be an AI,but it does the AI part very poorly. We all know it will trip over questions like what is the record for crossing the atlantic by car/foot and such. But I have realized there is no feedback loop, or a wrong…

Despite all the (legitimate) criticisms, I still don't understand how some people are not impressed by what has been achieved by OpenAI. I agree, it's far from perfect, but as a tool it's certainly usable and useful, with quite fascinating emergent behaviour.

I think it's quite amusing that despite being a "only" a language model that generates text by prediction, it's so good at it that it successfully tricks people into believing it's some kind of AGI that can figure out the "real" answer to anything and do any task and then when it inevitably "fails" a task, people say it's dumb.

But I do agree that for people who understand how it works, it's a bit weird not to be impressed that a language model has the ability to have such good understanding of things and such intriguing capabilities when it's fundamentally just predicting the next token.

Re: ChatGPT Cheat Sheet

#115
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been saying lately "if your job can be replaced by AI, it should". I know that sounds crass, but I'm a person who is always trying to replace my tasks with small shell scripts leaving only the real thinking to be the stuff that I do. I remember a long time ago Joel from Joel on Software made a post/comment (I can't find it, so it must have been a comment) about how the hard part of programming is interpreting…

> that just frees people up to bring value higher up the value chain. I think at some point this will stop being true. Obviously people displaced from jobs in the industrial revolution found other work, but at some point we can't expect the bottom 10% of a population (in terms of ability to perform non-menial jobs) to do "higher value" work. I don't say this in any disparaging way and I am not in any way demeaning th…

We can definitely expect the bottom 10% in your example to do "higher value" work, once their currently meager work is automated. For once they can become supervisors of robots doing the same work they do today, since they have experience and can provide guidance to the robots. Also, they can transition to work that benefits from the human interaction standpoint, such as elderly care. They will need some training, but not at the level that they can't absorb. As the population age, healthcare workers will be the single most growth segment, that robots cannot completely replace. Last but not least, many of the same "bottom 10%" are capable of getting higher education and get truly "higher value" jobs.

Bottom line is, AI and automation can cause short term pain, but the upside is enormous. Successful countries will be those that can manage that transition.

Re: ChatGPT Cheat Sheet

#116
post #98
post #20

The "Correct ChatGPT on Its Knowledge" section could be misinterpreted as suggesting that ChatGPT has a memory beyond the individual chat session. It does not. It resets to a completely clean state every time you start a new chat with it. I think it's important to help people understand that.

You know this, but a tiny nit: it resets to a clean state after every prompt and then replays recent chat history to catch up. The distinction is important in cases like asking it to play a guessing game ("think of a number/person and I'll guess"). The only way it could maintain memory of the secret being guessed between questions is by outputting it as part of a response, which would defeat the purpose of the game.

That's a really useful reminder, thanks. I admit I hadn't figured out that guessing game limitation before, but you're right, it logically follows from the whole "replay the last X,000 tokens" mechanism it uses.

Re: ChatGPT Cheat Sheet

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds awesome, care to share?

There's a difference between "worthy of publishing" and "ready for publishing"... the animations are in flip book form right, but here's a big dump to Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yq5ar9moacgilrqxqpjr1/h?dl=0&... Here's a quick .mov flip-book rendering of the animations in sequence: https://www.dropbox.com/home/DistantDesertHighway?preview=Di... The images are in png format and have the prompt and model us…

It's not letting me look at the links, I think they're formatted for you if you're logged in but don't allow someone else to view the files. You may have to share the files from within dropbox to get a public link.

Re: ChatGPT Cheat Sheet

#118
post #22

I'm trying to understand how big of a deal ChatGPT and the like is or isn't. Even people in AI don't seem to agree on whether it's going to change everything or it's overhyped and not a major advancement. Which is it? Or somewhere in the middle? "if you think AI chatter has reached an annoying level right now you're in for something else. it's going to be the only thing on anybody's mind starting shortly... i'm findi…

As a programmer, large language models let me solve an increasing range of problems that I couldn't have solved without them. So I think they are a very big deal. Just one example: parsing structured data out of a big pile of poorly formatted PDF documents. That used to be too difficult and expensive for me to tackle without a small army of data entry people to help do the work. Today I can point Textract OCR at it a…

I have a project I'm working on where I need to turn a bunch of bank statements into spreadsheets, is that an example what you're talking about? If so, I am extremely interested and would love to know how to implement it.

Re: ChatGPT Cheat Sheet

#119
post #104

The mental model I’ve found most useful in guessing how this will affect us is the migration from assembly to a more human readable C compiler Nowadays assembly is almost never used because it has been abstracted (yes I use it sometimes for DSP, SIMD and processor specific optimizations but it has largely been abstracted) ChatGPT will likely have a similar switch to new critical skill sets but it will take a while

Assembly -> C is not the same as C/Python/Java -> Natural Language. C is not a natural language, so there is no ambiguity in C code (undefined behavior does not really count). Compilers that can compile from one programming language to another exist today. I can imagine an LLM being used to speed up the building of this compiler, but even here, like in self-driving, the hard part is going to be ensuring 100% accuracy, which the LLM seems particularly ill-suited for.

Re: ChatGPT Cheat Sheet

#120
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: how sophisticated the code it generates is: I wrote up generating code in a language I'm very familiar with here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W3j5WaFhYZaqSt0ceRQj8j16... tl;dr: in some instances I had to coach it pretty directly to get what I wanted. In other instances it was flawless. And to your point, some of the code it generated was both clearer and faster than the code I would have written for the s…

Sure but this kinda proves my point. It can potentially generate good code for simple, atomic problems. It can't write me a REST service that hooks into an existing web backed spread over multiple repos of proprietary code. Any relationship not visible in the code seems to be outside its capabilities to understand for the moment. I'll be impressed when I can point it at a server cluster and the associated dozen repos…

So you're saying you won't be impressed until it can 100% replace you. Seems like you will have trouble adapting if you decide to wait that long.
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