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GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

lukebechtel.com

151–160 of 338 posts

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#151

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…

I agree with your point about the dangers of chatbots being mistaken as sentient. And I also recognize the dangers of the self-improving systems like this in general -- that's why I'm not letting it run loose with a LangChainAI Agent script to self-execute a new language (though wouldn't that be fascinating?)

While the language it generated needs refinement, the design process is iterative, and it takes time to develop a programming language that is worth using.

I encourage you to consider how you would approach designing a programming language. Like you, I would likely start by incorporating my favorite features from languages I love and addressing problems I've encountered in the past, similar to the dialogue GPT and I have in the post.

As I mention in the post -- creativity often involves remixing existing ideas, and GPT-4's attempt at generating a programming language is no exception. Notably, it also called out explicitly the constructs it was borrowing from other languages when designing the language.

It's worth noting that this was GPT-4's initial attempt at something highly complex, and even if there are "plot holes" -- it's a noteworthy achievement in and of itself.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#152
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here -- I think it is a stochastic parrot, don't get me wrong. But my argument is that humans are also , at some level, sufficiently advanced stochastic parrots. At least, as it pertains to many creative endeavors. You're always building on the back of something that comes before. We're all just remixing ideas we've heard before. I mean even this comment -- none of the words I'm saying are new, and many of the…

The difference between humans and sophisticated stochastic parrots is reason . The most common kinds of mistakes that chatGPT currently makes are when it says things that are not simply wrong, but don't make sense. Perhaps it will be possible to emulate reason with enough data, training, parameters, etc, but without some representation of the ability to understand what you don't know, what you know, and what follows…

We have far too insufficient knowledge of how human reasoning work to claim to know we are more than stochastic parrots with vastly more context/memory. It's way too early to claim there's some qualitative difference.

(And humans are not very reliable; more than current models, sure, but still pretty bad)

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#153

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…

It seems only yesterday that we were marvelling at the capabilities of ChatGPT - it's ability to parse the sum knowledge of humankind and synthesise not trivial responses to questions we posed.

But look how far we've come since those heady and carefree days. We're already able to pour buckets of scorn on its capabilities, and brush them aside as if designing a language (albeit a derivative and uninspired one) is a trivial task that any human could achieve.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between humans and sophisticated stochastic parrots is reason . The most common kinds of mistakes that chatGPT currently makes are when it says things that are not simply wrong, but don't make sense. Perhaps it will be possible to emulate reason with enough data, training, parameters, etc, but without some representation of the ability to understand what you don't know, what you know, and what follows…

It's totally possible that humans don't do reason. It's possible that the parrot in our brain makes the decision, and then the "frontend" of our mind makes fake reasons that sound logical enough. But it's just a possibility, and I don't find it's particularly convincing.

No but that does happen a lot of the time. The difference is that we can choose to engage the deductive engine to verify what the parrot says. Sometimes it's easier to do so (what's 17×9?) and sometimes it's harder (a ball and a bat costs $1.1 and the bat costs $1 more than the ball, what does the ball cost?)

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't talking about nukes in using them, I'm talking about nukes in that once it was known to be possible/useful everyone with the means did it.

I agree with you - I edited my comment above - if defensive capabilities allow multiple AGIs to develop I have no clue what the outcome would be - we are talking about predicting superhuman intelligence here.

An interesting thing to consider is if an AGI would be able to run on small nerfed hardware like recent optimizations can, or if you need absurd tier hardware to also run it. If it's the latter even if it's really smart there's only on or N of them. And it's still limited by the speed of light in it's thinking speed. If it's the former, when it leaks, it'd be everywhere.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#156

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…

It seems only yesterday that we were marvelling at the capabilities of ChatGPT - it's ability to parse the sum knowledge of humankind and synthesise not trivial responses to questions we posed. But look how far we've come since those heady and carefree days. We're already able to pour buckets of scorn on its capabilities, and brush them aside as if designing a language (albeit a derivative and uninspired one) is a tr…

> We're already able to pour buckets of scorn on its capabilities

No we don't, we are just trying to put a damper on all the "the singularity is here!" style comments that seems to flood any discussion about GPT.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#158
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An email from OpenAI 2 days ago said that GPT4 is on the paid ChatGPT Plus plan, and "severely resource constrained" with a dynamically adjusted usage cap based on availability.

Seems like for today, if you're not sure if you're using GPT4, you're not.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#159

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…

It seems only yesterday that we were marvelling at the capabilities of ChatGPT - it's ability to parse the sum knowledge of humankind and synthesise not trivial responses to questions we posed. But look how far we've come since those heady and carefree days. We're already able to pour buckets of scorn on its capabilities, and brush them aside as if designing a language (albeit a derivative and uninspired one) is a tr…

Aren't all new languages a mishmash of older languages, even?

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#160

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…

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