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GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

lukebechtel.com

181–190 of 338 posts

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#181

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…

ChatGPT is both impressive and scary. We know how things work: there is no way to slow down this train. However it is already having an impact on things like education. Teacher don't have good enough tools to detect cheaters, and students are going to suffer because of that. Honest ones will be wrongly accused. Cheaters will get good grades. The only solution I see is to ban any graded homework.

What will be the other impacts?

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#182
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The output of GPT is “random” in a sense that output from humans are not.

I can ask it logic puzzles and sometimes it’ll get the logic puzzle right by chance, and other times it won’t. I can’t use the times it gets the logic puzzle right, as evidence that it understood the puzzle.

All of these blog posts that are popping up suffer from survivor bias, nobody is sharing blog posts of GPTs failures

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#183

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…

This!! All the gushing over these GPTs doing what looks to me like, a bad job of talking smart without actually doing anything, make me feel like I'm going insane, or I'm the only sane person left.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#184
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

It's a hard question to be honest. If you look at the incentives involved, people are very incentivized to create these machines to reduce the amount of toil humans have to endure. I don't disagree about the risks at scale of something like this; as I mention in the post -- I don't get pure warm fuzzies about this at all. But I also don't know how to stop AI progress, because the incentives to keep it going are so real.

Government regulation has been brought up multiple times, most recently by Sama himself on twitter. I think it will have to come, but I don't know what flavor it should take.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#185

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…

  > designing a language (albeit a derivative and uninspired one) is a trivial task that any human could achieve.
It is, isn’t it? You just need to be able to read and write words and symbols that reassemble a programming language coherently and follow the pattern. This is what humans do after all; remixing. Anyone can do this.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#186

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…

The question is when does guessing become a moot point?

AlphaGo guessed it’s way to being the best.

Can something guess it’s way to evolving into a less guessy thing? I think so. Look at us?

I am aware of how it works and used to be ‘it’s ok, it won’t happen’ but now I am actually pretty concerned.

We think GAI as the thing but there maybe a reality that doesn’t require full GAI to completely unhinge us.

I mean, what is the point? It only plays to the negatives of our society. We don’t need it. It allows for ‘do more’ but what cost does that ‘do more’ come with?

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#187
post #98

The chances of a future Butlerian Jihad just went up a few points.

Indeed.

I often see in HN a self-defeating attitude which is:

- Step 1: we invent our machine overlords, because it's unavoidable, we are genetically and socially forced to do it. - Step 2: we perish.

Neither step 1 nor step 2 are guaranteed. People don't want to be replaced. People with power particularly don't want to be replaced. In a democracy, where by definition everybody is in power, the entire society has a strong incentive to--at the very least--keep the machines at bay. It could be as simple as making it illegal to give the machines a "you must survive and pass your genes, I mean, program" directive, or as comprehensive as a Butlerian Jihad :)

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#188

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.

[deleted]

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think we have free time all the time because we have automated 90% of agriculture? People will just find something else to do that automation is not very good at.

No It was a passing comment. I really think that LLM's will make certain aspects of work very nice, like a really good version of intellisense that writes you're whole api for you. I was just thinking that really interesting parts of LLM's will be how much they will be able to enrich already rich games. Imagine playing open world games where most of the character motivations and dialog is unique to the events that yo…

And there you have the basis for a variant of the Simulation Argument.

Re: GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

#190

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.

The Turing Test isn't meant to be an objective test of GAI. It's meant to replace a question that might be too vague or philosophically contentious to be answerable, "Can machines think?" with an answerable one, "Can a machine successfully fool a person into thinking it's a person?" So a robot bird that fools real birds arguably has passed the Avian Turing Test. (Also, arguably the Turing Test is by definition subjective.)
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