GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language • Hacker News Board

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#161

Post by tsunamifury » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:21 AM UTC

ryanjshaw wrote: post #69

apatil wrote: post #38

It's looking increasingly possible that, at some point in the not-too-far future machines will be so good at creating software that humans won't be competitive in any way, and won't be in the loop at all. I happen to think that once machines reach this point humans won't be competitive in the labor market at all for long. It doesn't seem plausible that automatic driving would still be decades off, or that the trades…

This will almost certainly happen, and it will be a terrible mistake - at least in the story I'm working on :) My theory is that AI generated code will probably look and grow organically (the irony!). Humans will set out requirements, the AI will collate these into a series of tests, and it won't care how neat or understandable the code is, provided the tests pass. Basically an extremely diligent junior developer. Th…

The idea that the AI would attack us once it reached that level is like saying humans would attack ants. It would simply be entirely indifferent towards us and mow us over by accident at best.

We won’t live in a human centric universe because power will express itself in a new species.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#162

Post by HervalFreire » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:21 AM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #136

HervalFreire wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, this is a neural net model, that is what such models do and have done for decades already. I'm not sure why this is relevant. Do you argue that stable diffusion is intelligent since it has emergent structures? Or an image recognition system is intelligent since it has emergent structures? Those are the same things. No I am saying there are models for intelligence within the neural net that is explicitly differe…

The fact that it adapts it state to fit the data isn't interesting in itself. An image recognition system forms a lot of macro structures around shapes or different logical parts of the image. Similarly an LLM forms a lot of macro structures around different kinds of text structures or words, including chess game series or song compositions or programming language tutorials. It is exactly the same kind of structures,…

>Can such macro structures model intelligence in theory? Yes.

So you agree it's possible.

>Yes. But as we see in practice they aren't very logical. For example in this article we see that its markov chain didn't have enough programming language descriptions,

Well as humans we have many separate models for all different components an aspects of the world around us. Clearly LLMs form many models that in practice are not accurate. But that does not mean all the models are defective. The fact that it can write blog posts indicates that many of these models are remarkably accurate and that it understands the concept of a "blog post".

There is literal evidence of chatGPT answering questions as if it has an accurate underlying model of "understanding" as well as actual identified structures within the nerual net itself.

There is also evidence for your point of chatGPT clearly forming broken and inaccurate models by answering questions with wrong answers that don't make sense.

What gets me is that even when there is Clear and abundant evidence for both cases some people have to make the claim that chatGPT doesn't understand anything. The accurate answer is that LLMs understand some things and it doesn't understand other things.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#163

Post by krupan » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:23 AM UTC

marviel wrote: post #151

yowzadave wrote: post #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. 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 devel…

Ok, but take a step back and really look at the whole situation here. So you've created a machine that solves problems in kind of the same way humans do. Yay? What overall problem is a machine like this solving? How is this better than just having a human do the job? It seems to have most of the same drawbacks as humans, and then some on top of that

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#164

Post by avgcorrection » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:24 AM UTC

yowzadave wrote: post #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. Actual…

> 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.

More. We’re more suspectible.

We are the people who take the Turing Test as an objective test of GAI, after all, even though it only tests how we percieve supposed intelligence.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#165

Post by geraneum » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:25 AM UTC

marviel wrote: post #151

yowzadave wrote: post #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. 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 devel…

  > As I mention in the post -- creativity often involves remixing existing ideas

This is carrying the weight of your core argument. It’s not wrong but it’s not completely correct either.

Creativity involves remixing but is not all remixing. Is it? Not even all humans are at the same level in this. Number of attempts means nothing if you don’t add features that the LLM desperately needs to be grounded in the reality, or perform logical reasoning beyond RLHF.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#166

Post by vidarh » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:25 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #88

marviel wrote: 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 ideas I'm expressing have merit -- but are they wholly original? I think the difference is that your intention is to write sentences which you think and believe are correct and which can help other people understand the subject. Chatbot has no intentions of its own, it only imitates texts it has read from the internet. As far as it is concerned they might be totally wrong. You on the other hand have the ability…

We don't know enough about how the brain work to be able to say that our "intent" is any more than a combination of memory and an after the fact rationalisation of a stochastic process.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#167

Post by zarzavat » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:26 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #73

Where is the generated compiler and the semantic and syntactic specification for it? Those chatbot-comments feel more like a discussion of a fictional programming language, not a language it actually "created". What does it mean to create a programming language? I think it means you must specify its syntax, its semantics, and then create a compiler or interpreter for it which allows us to test that the compiler or in…

Writing a compiler or a detailed specification is the “easy” part - it’s just raw slog.

The hard part of making a programming language is coming up with novel ideas that fit together into coherent whole: inventing something new and useful.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#168

Post by HervalFreire » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:27 AM UTC

worrycue wrote: post #146

HervalFreire wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Right but can you make the claim that they don't understand anything at all? That they're stochastic parrots? Because that's the direction where your own logic is taking you.

I'll concede one thing, LLMs can't use vicious insults and subtle slights to cover up the lack of a good argument. That's a human specialty done by people who are too scared to admit that they're wrong.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#169

Post by mlboss » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:27 AM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #129

cryptozeus wrote: post #113

"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…

Absolutely. We've been great at building AI in software, but hardware is still absolutely lacking. Robots are nowhere near usable for even simple tasks, at least if they don't follow the same pattern each time. Just look at households, there's still no robot that can empty a dishwasher reliably (unless maybe you build a specialized one for just that task), while it's a task much simpler than what GPT-4 can perform on…

I read somewhere that two dishwashers are the solution. Put dirty dishes in one and pick clean from another one. Then switch roles. No robot needed

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#170

Post by xlii » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:28 AM UTC

yowzadave wrote: post #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. Actual…

Well put. I share the sentiment.

I used GPT-3/3.5/4 for multiple tasks and I never found it useful. It just feels… average.

It can “answer” many questions correctly but that’s only on the data set it’s been training on. I asked it to solve Elixir issues, write Elisp snippets, figure out why my Rust code was complaining about lifetimes and even went for easy mode and asked for JavaScript code.

Only JavaScript (very popular) responses were workable but they still had popular problems included in it (e.g. not clearing out timers or dealing with common edge cases). Elixir “hints” were very interesting since - when out of water - it would produce code assuming that it’s a OOP and that was a rabbit hole it declined to exit.

Too technical? Went for fun with family members who have exceptional cooking skills. We tried to figure out a dish variation of an apple pie. Suggestions were heavily criticized as non workable for many reasons (too sugary, consistency wouldn’t be too good, modification change the ingredients but GPT refuse to break of out theme etc.)

Colin Meloy made an experiment some time ago and created The Decemberists-like song with it and then actually recorded it. It worked but it was described as below average and bland. I share that vibe.

In the end I have this feeling that GPT is on a level of 7 year old with an access to vast library. It uses proper grammar it can copy parts of texts, but one needs to provide it with a great benefit of doubt and energy just so that it’s useful.

In contrast to 7 year old, GPT isn’t grateful for that sacrifice and is actually making money of you.