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Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

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Re: Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be a lot of news articles these days. I'm not particularly excited by ChatGPT, but the mercenary in me is impressed at the investment from MS it generated. From a business perspective, it accomplished "and profit!". Whether it pays dividends or reaches a richer/more-sophisticated milestone is to be seen. Personally, I think it'll muddy and flood the "bullshit" & truthiness layer pervading news, social m…

It is a tool, like a knife. You can use it to reword your rough notes into an article, or to generate spam and fake news. It is a great idea fountain, but you need to filter everything with your own head to make anything useful of it.

I can do that for myself, but the power of tools like this.. when they bend every cultural outlet around you, changes the world.

To the original point I was responding: a lot of reporting and journalism is now adding 1000 words of context to 280 word tweets.

Reality context, bent.

Re: Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

#152
post #6

This is very much people seeing the Apple Lisa(and/or Mac) for the first time. It had all been done better in the labs at Xerox over a decade earlier. No one got to use it though.

To me it's childish, and I have no idea why Yann decided this needed to be shouted on Twitter. I've lost a lot of respect for him over this.

According to the article: "LeCun made his remarks about OpenAI in response to a question during the colloquium posed by New York Times journalist Cade Metz. Metz asked if Meta's AI team, FAIR, which LeCun built, will ever be identified in the public mind with breakthroughs the way that OpenAI is."

It seems to me "well actually, ChatGPT isn't really the breakthrough you think it is" is an appropriate response. He wasn't dismissive of ChatGPT and even praised it to some degree.

Re: Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most likely response is not necessarily an accurate response. It claims dogs do not give birth to babies. That is indeed the most likely response as babies are mostly, but not exclusively, associated with humans. However, a five year old child would understand me if I told them my dog had babies.

Have you used chatgpt much? I asked your prompt: Do dogs give birth to babies? > Dogs give birth to puppies. I had a long discussion about the expansion do space and the Hubble constant, and tried to trick it in a variety of ways. It was correct in everything even though it wasn’t able to go into proofs and likewise. I then tried to convince it that the universe began as a small potato and wasn’t able to do it withou…

Yes, I have tried ChatGPT, and it told me dogs do not give birth to babies. However, ChatGPT doesn't provide deterministic answers and improves responses over time. Many of the internet examples no longer work.

I asked, "If a woman gives birth to a baby in 9 months, how many months does a dog take to give birth to a baby."

It answered, "Dogs do not give birth to babies."

Currently, it answers, "On average, a dog's gestation period (the amount of time it takes for a dog to give birth to puppies) is approximately nine weeks or 63 days."

It still doesn't understand pregnancy is a concurrent event (women can be pregnant at the same time)

Q: If a woman takes nine months to give birth to a baby, how long does it take a billion women to give birth to one baby?

A: It would take approximately 2.7 million years for a billion women to give birth to one baby.

I do love ChatGPT to help me write certain documents. For example, for a performance review, you can give it bullet points and ask to write a review. After correcting it with Grammarly, it is usually better than what I would have written.

Re: Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had pretty complex discussions about Buddhism, physics, and other subjects and it was generally erudite and accurate. In its current unrefined form it’s more useful than google is at providing understanding on most subjects, especially because it will attempt to answer my direct questions rather than providing documents with terms in them. In fact I think it’s probably one of the most useful tools I’ve ever used…

Yes, I've been going back and forth between Google and ChatGPT quite a bit lately. Sort of using Google as the verification step, after getting deeper into a subject.

For the haters, it seems incredibly likely that an IR system like google will be augmenting LLM and semantic reasoning systems to form a solution to the problems folks point. The problems chatgpt suffer from are solved and are complementary.

Re: Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

#156
post #12

It's amazing how many researchers underestimate the importance of UX and design. Personally, seeing non-technical people using prompts for the first time -- and getting results that make sense -- is so incredible. Their eyes light up, they are surprised, and they want to keep playing with it. Amazing! A sizeable part of the population just got access to an incredibly complex AI model and can play with it. What a coll…

Indeed. This reminds me of the people who were unimpressed by the iPod because there were other MP3 players already on the market.

Sometimes "making the first X that doesn't suck" is a lot more important than "making the first X".

Re: Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it weren’t that remarkable, how come Siri, alexa, and whatever google calls it’s unused voice assistant are so useless? If it were not a substantial advance, why are chatbots so useless? The reality is, if Alexa had half the ability to “understand” as chatgpt it wouldn’t be nearly as frustrating. It’s not like Amazon, apple, and google haven’t dumped metric tons of investment into these things. Y’all simply have l…

It's more pragmatic than that. Google can afford to run a 300M weights model on every search or click, but can't afford a 175B generative model for the same thing. Generative models require a forward pass per token, all done serially, while embedding or classification models only need one pass no matter the length of the input. It's too expensive for Google.

Do you think this is also the reason, why Translate is still not as good as e.g. DeepL?

Re: Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

#158
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people don't understand that ChatGPT has no idea what they're talking about. I wonder why people keep saying this. Is it some type of psychological defense to future AI displacement?

It's because ChatGPT's knowledge doesn't come through interaction with the world. Words mean things to us because they point to world interactions. I saw a demo where ChatGPT could create a VM. It could be trained to interact directly with a VM, send commands to an interpreter. In this case, it would understand the response of the VM, although it wouldn't understand the design behind the VM, because humans did that b…

> It's because ChatGPT's knowledge doesn't come through interaction with the world.

We don't interact with the world directly, either. All we have are signals mediated through our nervous system.

Re: Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

#159
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because ChatGPT's knowledge doesn't come through interaction with the world. Words mean things to us because they point to world interactions. I saw a demo where ChatGPT could create a VM. It could be trained to interact directly with a VM, send commands to an interpreter. In this case, it would understand the response of the VM, although it wouldn't understand the design behind the VM, because humans did that b…

> It's because ChatGPT's knowledge doesn't come through interaction with the world. We don't interact with the world directly, either. All we have are signals mediated through our nervous system.

Sure, but what happens when you touch a hot stove?

Re: Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

#160

Full quote: "In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative," said Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, in a small gathering of press and executives on Zoom last week. "It's nothing revolutionary, although that's the way it's perceived in the public," said LeCun. "It's just that, you know, it's well put together, it's nicely done."

So one is a bit salty no?

It's not free from error but what it's able to put together is pretty great...

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