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GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

lukebechtel.com

141–150 of 338 posts

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#141
Last year, when Blake Lemoine was fired by Google for claiming his AI was sentient, a lot of people on this website sensibly noted that the danger of these chatbots was not that they were sentient, but that average people could easily be tricked into thinking that they were.

And now here we are: it seems we tech people are every bit as susceptible to this kind of thinking as the average joes we looked down on.

Actually look at this “language” that GPT-4 has written: it’s just a mishmash of features from the most commonly blogged-about existing programming languages. It has no conceptual insights, no original ideas, no taste that isn’t cribbed from one of the few languages it’s copying from.

There are cases where getting a short distillation of the mean opinion of The Internet is useful. But designing a new programming language is clearly not one of them, mostly because the chatbot is not “designing” a language—it is guessing the most likely response to a question about programming languages.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#142
post #47

So I asked it to design a programming language that combined the best elements of Scheme with the best elements of Python (leaving it to decide which elements are best). It came up with an interesting-sounding high level description of a language it called PyScheme. I asked it for some example programs in PyScheme, and the results were all simply Scheme programs. I asked it to write a tutorial on programming with PyS…

For clarity, was the "it" at hand ChatGPT or GPT-4?

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans don't post things that are incorrect or outright wrong. Are you using ChatGPT to write this comment? If not, I mean... are you okay?

What I meant was... humans don't deliberately post WRONG output from chatGPT on the internet. IF they use it to write some blog post or something they will curate the output from chatGPT such that the output fits the topic and is correct to the context. Then when that data gets scraped for training it will be "curated" so bad data generated by the LLM isn't visible. This is the scenario that occurs when the majority…

Let me introduce you to the concept of Informational Warfare.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing with AI (especially LLM) proponents is beginning to feel like arguing with a religious person ... it's almost easier to just let them believe in their god. Pointing out the failures of their favorite LLM to prove to them that it's not doing what they think it's doing just falls on deaf ears as they go digging for more "proof" that ChatGPT actually understands what it's saying.

>Pointing out the failures of their favorite LLM to prove to them that it's not doing what they think it's doing just falls on deaf ears It's not falling on deaf ears. It's because it's stupidity to think the "failures" are proof. Should I point out all the failures in human intelligence? Humans fuck up all the time. Humans make stupid mistakes, assumptions, biases, errors in reasoning and leaps in logic all the time…

Failures are proof, successes are not, a broken clock is right twice a day after all

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Edit: Also generating next state based on previous state is literally what the model does and is the definition of a Markov chain, Markov chains is a statistical concept and not just a word chain. There's research (as in actual scientific papers) that shows that in LLMs, while the markov chain is the low level representation of what's going on, at a higher macro level there are other structures at play here. Emergen…

> I can provide those papers if you so wish. I'd like to see them but I don't have a background in AI or theoretical computer science. Can you post a few of them?

- GPT style language models try to build a model of the world: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382

- GPT style language models end up internally implementing a mini "neural network training algorithm" (gradient descent fine-tuning for given examples): https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10559

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing with AI (especially LLM) proponents is beginning to feel like arguing with a religious person ... it's almost easier to just let them believe in their god. Pointing out the failures of their favorite LLM to prove to them that it's not doing what they think it's doing just falls on deaf ears as they go digging for more "proof" that ChatGPT actually understands what it's saying.

>Pointing out the failures of their favorite LLM to prove to them that it's not doing what they think it's doing just falls on deaf ears It's not falling on deaf ears. It's because it's stupidity to think the "failures" are proof. Should I point out all the failures in human intelligence? Humans fuck up all the time. Humans make stupid mistakes, assumptions, biases, errors in reasoning and leaps in logic all the time…

> According to your logic that's proof that humans don't understand anything.

Well, it's reasonable to conclude that the people who constantly making "stupid mistakes, assumptions, and biases leaps in logic" don't actually know what they are talking about.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#147

Last year, when Blake Lemoine was fired by Google for claiming his AI was sentient, a lot of people on this website sensibly noted that the danger of these chatbots was not that they were sentient, but that average people could easily be tricked into thinking that they were. And now here we are: it seems we tech people are every bit as susceptible to this kind of thinking as the average joes we looked down on. Actual…

Yeah, I find llms are really useful for taking premises you supply, and trying them out, or exploring inconsistencies in them. It's decent at the synthesis kind of creativity (mashups, remixes, etc) but it isn't smart enough yet to make really big inferential leaps that we would consider more original.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#148
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because some of the things it gets right can not be attributed to anything else other than the concept of "understanding". Or just large dataset. The new thing we got was parsing natural languages, then we did a markov chain based on that so that it outputs semantic correct follow-ups based on what people on the internet would likely do/say in similar situations, and you get this result. It is very easy to see that…

Arguing with AI (especially LLM) proponents is beginning to feel like arguing with a religious person ... it's almost easier to just let them believe in their god. Pointing out the failures of their favorite LLM to prove to them that it's not doing what they think it's doing just falls on deaf ears as they go digging for more "proof" that ChatGPT actually understands what it's saying.

It's funny becasue I feel exactly the same about the LLM denegrators.

It feels like you will only be happy if we are able to prove that the LLM has a soul.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#149

"But let’s talk about today’s “frontier” of jobs that haven’t been “automated away”. There’s one category that in many ways seems surprising to still be “with us”: jobs that involve lots of mechanical manipulation, like construction, fulfillment, food preparation, etc. But there’s a missing piece of technology here: there isn’t yet good general-purpose robotics (as there is general-purpose computing), and we humans s…

Two thoughts:

The AI will help us build the hardware faster

The collapse of the knowledge and service economy will cut into taxes faster than any other sector. This will incite governments to do something very fast.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#150
post #47

So I asked it to design a programming language that combined the best elements of Scheme with the best elements of Python (leaving it to decide which elements are best). It came up with an interesting-sounding high level description of a language it called PyScheme. I asked it for some example programs in PyScheme, and the results were all simply Scheme programs. I asked it to write a tutorial on programming with PyS…

For clarity, was the "it" at hand ChatGPT or GPT-4?

ChatGPT. I was under the impression ChatGPT was now running with GPT-4? But if not, then I stand mistaken.
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