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GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

lukebechtel.com

171–180 of 338 posts

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#171
post #144

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…

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

So if a human fails at something it's proof that the human doesn't understand anything and that a human is a stochastic parrot?

I think your clock analogy doesn't fit. A car with a broken mirror still runs.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#172
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you get access to a singularity-level AGI, meaning you have the power to render the entire human economy completely irrelevant. Given any task, no matter how big, small, novel, complex, simple or mundane, it's vastly more cost-effective to have your AGI to do it than to pay humans. Do you really want to accumulate incomprehensible material wealth for yourself, whatever "wealth" means in this scenario where money…

That's basically the petting zoo outcome - you let others live because it makes you feel nice. But you still can't allow anyone access to the same level of tech because you can never be certain of their motivation. There's no nuclear deterrent between AGI only first movers advantage.

I don't disagree, but I think the framing is overly pejorative and makes the likelihood of this outcome seem more tenuous than it really is. We do lots of things to help others because they make us feel nice. "Mothers and Others" by Sarah Hrdy argues that this tendency isn't just a fluke or a game-theoretic equilibrium of some kind between fundamentally self-interested agents, it's an ancient and deeply ingrained aspect of human nature.

The thought of living in a constructed world that exists by the grace of a single human owner of a super-powerful AGI is distasteful, of course, especially if the human owner uses their power to impose some of their own opinions about how people should think and behave. Becoming dependent on AGI is probably inevitable at some point, but I don't see that as so different from the status quo. We're already dependent on systems created by other humans that are so complex and sophisticated that no individual can grok them all.

I guess I would like to think that we will move past any initial impulse that the owner of the AGI feels to control other humans. We will presumably change so much that old ideas about how we should think and behave will seem irrelevant and quaint. And the AGI, which presumably will have the social engineering superpower, will hopefully point out inconsistencies between the owner's desire to control human thought and behavior and their desire for humans to live their best lives. Hopefully.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#174
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't trying to be arrogant, I just wasn't aware of an existing implementation and thought it would be fun to try. :) Do you have links to other efforts? I'd love to know more about it, and would be happy to add references to other existing literature to the article if it improved its quality.

I’ve done it casually and I’m sure many many others have, but a very quick and lazy Google (it’s not dead yet) brought up this writeup from December: https://judehunter.dev/blog/chatgpt-helped-me-design-a-brand...

Added you to the article! Neat stuff, you were ahead :)

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#175

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.

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.

I just want its capabilities to be accurately advertised.

A lot of people are assigning it capabilities it doesn't really have.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#176
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> How is this better than just having a human do the job?

The cynical take is quite clearly: "Because sales people can sell it"

eg wrap some pretty UX around it, tell people it's "nearly human", then have your sales people try and get non-technical CxO types (or consultancies) to cut them a cheque

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#177
post #6

It says it has indentation syntax but it clearly uses braces TypeScript-like. I wonder why author describes it as a mix between Python and TypeScript.

So it is proof that GPT4 still makes mistakes. But just one reported mistake in a very long session. And it could fix itself if prompted.

There are more mistakes, as always with GPT. For example:

> Some programming languages like TypeScript and Swift use a colon for both variable type annotations and function return types. The choice of using -> in TenetLang [...]

Swift uses -> for function return types.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#178
post #79
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…

Nope, we parrot mostly, but not always. When we do not, we create something new, and then we started parroting again. Mostly. The question is, can ai do something new, understand context of the new thing, understand when and where it will be usable and when it make sense to apply it.

Is something new that isn't a synthesis of past things not just a stochastic process?

Human inventiveness seems to heavily follow a pattern of relatively minor iterations of what came before, extraordinarily rarely something that even seems to defy the past and be truly different and independent.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> claim that they don't understand anything at all?

They certainly don't understand enough to get things right without a few thousand examples already demonstrating the solution to a specific problem.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#180
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…

Sounds like an interesting story! I would love to see more sci-fi that really tackles AGI. I used to love sci-fi but most of it, even "hard" sci-fi, has become unwatchable or unreadable for me because the limited role of AGI is such an all-consuming plot hole.
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