Live data from Hacker News

CheatGPT

blog.humphd.org

441–450 of 544 posts

Re: CheatGPT

#441

With all these ChatGPT academic apocalypse stories, I keep thinking - what the hell is wrong with students, that they don't want to actually learn the subjects they've enrolled in? If your goal is to fake-learn and have ChatGPT do your homework, just drop out already. You're paying big tuition for no educational benefit. Maybe your degree gets your foot in the door at some company, but it won't be too long before the…

I remember being a student. Never cheated because of ethics, not because I cared about learning (I did care). If I had a different ethics view I would’ve cheated as a means to an end and continued to try to learn as much as I could.

I guess my point is you can care about learning as well as care for your scores (by cheating) simultaneously.

Edit: not a CS grad but still took CS courses.

Re: CheatGPT

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What humans being to the table over ChatGPT is Statements like these are premature. ChatGPT is three months old! This is a rapidly advancing field. The capabilities of these models are very likely to be radically different five years from now. Any conclusions drawn now about what value is uniquely human and out of reach for AI may be proven wrong quickly.

Agreed! Anyone not answering with “IDK, but maybe…” is just wasting bandwidth. This Gen1 tech. Most of us are already shocked at how good it is, and it won’t get worse.

Isn't it like Gen3?

Re: CheatGPT

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is defined as human-level performance across wide variety of tasks. ChatGPT achieves that. It's somewhat stupid and limited (no vision, hearing, manipulation), but still, in principle, it's AGI.

I don't want to argue about the semantics or definition of AGI, since that is a rabbit hole that I don't believe contribute anything to the subjective danger that people are feeling. The only thing I want to say about ChatGPT and other LLM model is that they don't know what they are doing . Give me something that knows what its doing, and perhaps more importantly, what it wants to do. Then I'll acknowledge my persona…

Right now everything is in such a grey area that we could take this discussion in so many ways. Writing it off because it doesn't mean what it says misses the point, in my opinion, the point is that anyone who knows how to write the correct questions can work with ChatGPT to develop things things they couldn't before, improve their own writings, and potentially replace their need to consult others, for a quick list.

You are the one saying that belief behind the writing matters. What if the audience decides to upvote ChatGPT instead of you? Who says conviction is essential?

I would also contest you by suggesting that the fearful ones are the one's who find a need to downplay the threat, or we can rephrase it, advanced usefulness of current, let alone near-future versions.

And I realize ChatGPT could have written this post quicker than I did, including a version that contains my typo patterns, as well as a more concise and grammatically improved version...

Re: CheatGPT

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what an LLM is best at is fooling people into thinking it’s intelligent. It is really good at saying things in a natural sounding way, and statistically often getting it right, because certain strings of tokens are encoded. But it’s clear when you start poking that it just as easily tells you that 5/2=3, or that 2+2 != 4. it doesn’t model math or any sort of knowledge at all.

Something that I don't quite understand is why the tendency of ChatGPT to be inaccurate sometimes is a fundamental flaw rather than something that can be improved on iteratively if its just a matter of improving the statistical likelihood of accuracy. The question of whether its AGI or not is, to paraphrase the famous quote, a bit like the question of whether a submarine can swim.

I think a better analogy is asking if a water bottle can swim. It floats most of the time, and can move around if pushed.

The reason “can be inaccurate sometimes” is a fundamental flaw is because my assumption is that it will never not be inaccurate. I think it will always be inaccurate sometimes and never be accurate always.

This doesn’t mean it isn’t useful for a lot of applications. But I don’t think it is a holy grail technology, it’s not AGI, and it isn’t going to replace professions.

Re: CheatGPT

#445

I don't understand how most of the comments here seem to be along the lines of "these interview questions are useless now" or "we need to rethink education, it hasn't kept up". These all seem absurdly myopic to me. What we're seeing is the first instance, still very limited and imperfect, of AGI. This is not going to make some interview questions obsolete, or give students more tools to cheat with their homework. It…

>What we're seeing is the first instance, still very limited and imperfect, of AGI absolutely not. language-model text generation is actually about as non-general as it gets -- they are fundamentally incapable of understanding anything at all, ever. they can't do math, work through basic logic problems, or produce any output that isn't just an assumed logical continuation of the input.

What you're saying is outright false. If read llm papers you'll see that a lot of benchmarks used are related to math and logic.

GPT3 paper as an example https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

I recommend you read that paper as it answers a lot of misconceptions you may have about llms.

Re: CheatGPT

#446

So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

In my last round of interviews, by far my favorite session was "here is a real project with a real bug, debug it, then if you have time, describe how to fix it, then if you have time, write the fix". (At Stripe FWIW.) It was super representative of what my work is actually like, and what I'm good at, and ChatGPT would not have figured it out. yet

That sounds very fair. I’d prefer that over leetcode type of questions anytime

Re: CheatGPT

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what an LLM is best at is fooling people into thinking it’s intelligent. It is really good at saying things in a natural sounding way, and statistically often getting it right, because certain strings of tokens are encoded. But it’s clear when you start poking that it just as easily tells you that 5/2=3, or that 2+2 != 4. it doesn’t model math or any sort of knowledge at all.

I could say the same things about some of my coworkers...

Fair point, I think we would also call them frauds.

Re: CheatGPT

#448
post #327

the world has changed dramatically in only one year. these advancements in AI are talked about everywhere and by everyone. in 2018 i warned people i knew and i wrote many comments online warning people that huge changes were coming. almost every single person on HN insisted that GTP was just a parlor trick because it would ramble sometimes, get stuck in loops and overall did not demonstrate the insane level of lucidi…

I'm trying to work out whether or not the right thing to do is just to help work towards ushering in AGI by whatever contribution I can make, or whether to scream into the hurricane. Screaming into the hurricane feels pointless, and I generally agree that on balance AGI is likely to be net negative. Overall I just feel somewhat confused.

Re: CheatGPT

#449

When current and future students are out in the workforce they'll have access to tools like CoPilot and ChatGPT, not to mention plain Stack Overflow cut-n-paste, so if education is meant to be preparing kids for the workplace, then the logical thing to do is allow/teach them to use these tools. OTOH, they still do need to learn how to program and debug (more important than ever if you're using machine-generated code…

>if education is meant to be preparing kids for the workplace, then the logical thing to do is allow/teach them to use these tools

Can you imagine being a CS major who has just started your degree in 2023 and day after day you're sitting there watching the sheer speed of development of this new technology and you're unable to fathom at all what the industry you're supposed to be entering in a few years will even look like?

What a mind fuck.

Re: CheatGPT

#450
> Except that half the code was made-up. One of the API calls that it was using doesn't exist (I wish it did!)

I've also been using ChatGPT to generate code for a specific library, and had the exact same experience. It uses an API that should exist, but not the one that does exist.

Post reply on HN